Herbert Lust

Herbert Confield Lust (October 31, 1926 – May 12, 2026) was an American art collector known for assembling a private collection of twentieth-century modern and contemporary art. Lust was also an investment banker, former literature professor, writer and art scholar, known for his writings on the Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti, who he befriended while attending Sorbonne in Paris.

Early life and education Herbert Lust was born in Chicago on October 31, 1926, and was raised on a farm in Indiana. He earned a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1948.

Writing

Violence and Defiance Lust authored a novel titled Violence and Defiance, first published in 1983 by Station Hill Press. The novel is in part a work of autofiction, and is described by the publisher as "created by the use of an actual crisis inside and around the author's life as subplot to the fiction. The time span in the fiction is meshed to a contiguous time span of autobiographical time by a voice situated in the curious ethics of 'gut time'."

Art scholarship Lust has written about Hans Bellmer, Robert Indiana, Enrico Baj, and Carlotta Corpron. He authored Giacometti: The Complete Graphics and 15 Drawings, first published in 1970 and revised in 1991 as Giacometti: The Complete Graphics .

Personal life and death Lust's first two marriages, to Frances Hutchins and Jean Marianne McDonald, ended in divorce. In 1963, he married Virginia Wertheimer, with whom he ran the Virginia Lust Gallery in Manhattan in the 1980s and 1990s. She died in 2014. Herbert Lust died at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, on May 12, 2026.