June 2009
In a career spanning more than half a century, Milton Glaser has been responsible for some of the most memorable logos, labels, posters, and magazine illustrations of modern times. Some have become classics: the I love NY logo; the design of New York magazine—Glaser co-founded the publication in 1968 and was design director until 1977; the redesign of Paris Match; and the Bob Dylan poster with the silhouette and swirling brilliantly colored hair (the image was inspired by a Marcel Duchamp cut-out and Islamic painting). Nothing, it seems, has been beyond the reach of his protean graphic talents: he has designed restaurant, hotel and museum interiors, lamps, cutting boards, jewelry, and a time capsule, stationary, annual reports, signage for a shopping mall, a children’s park, and countless periodicals and newspapers stretching around the globe. His clients have run the gamut, from The Nation to the Grand Union (he redesigned all the supermarket chain’s packaging, interiors and architecture).
Born in the Bronx in 1929, Glaser attended the High School of Music and Art and Cooper Union. As a Fulbright scholar at the Academy of Arts in Bologna, he studied etching with a modernist master, the painter Giorgio Morandi. Upon his return to New York he co-founded Pushpin Studios, which revolutionized the world of graphic design. Fifty-five years later, Glaser shows no signs of slowing down. His recently published book, Drawing is Thinking, a compendium of his drawings and prints arranged in a loose sequence of themes, reflects his fascination with various styles and traditions of art, ranging from Chinese brush painting to the Renaissance to Matisse, his marvelous imagination, and his inimitable qualities as a draftsman. His works are currently being exhibited in Southhampton, Paris, Milan, and Slovenia. A movie, Milton Glaser: To Inform & Delight, is about to be released, and he has just completed the design for a movie house at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), where he has taught for over 50 years.
On a recent afternoon, HV Artworks met with Glaser in his Manhattan studio, which he has maintained since 1965 (he is also a weekend resident of Woodstock). We sat at a table in a sunny room with butternut walls. A paper model of the bar he designed as part of the SVA movie house was displayed on one shelf, while another was cluttered with bibelots and samples of his work, including bottles of Brooklyn Lager Beer (the logo is currently peppered all over the city). Tall and lanky, Glaser moves gracefully, like a cat, and his voice is eloquent, with just a trace of New Yorkese.
Your book is about drawing. Why do you consider drawing to be important?
We spend most of our time deflecting information that the world offers us, because it’s too complex to deal with. A censoring process occurs, which prevents us from understanding what we’re looking at. The conscious attempt to see is a form of thinking. Visually you have to make the decision to do it, and then the mind mysteriously shifts and you recognize what you’re looking at. Drawing is a form of meditation. The same absence of prejudice that occurs in meditation occurs when you draw. Art is about being put in a meditative state, so you can look without judgment.
The criteria for the use of drawing is based upon another moment in history, when you couldn’t represent things in any other way. What’s happened with the computer is that it shifts the attention from making to gathering. Technology just sweeps things aside. Whether you have an ethical, moral or any other basis for trying to cling to them, it’s over, and it’s over for so many parts of the visual world. There’s still no greater instrument for understanding form than drawing, but in the absence of that you can now find anything or photograph anything you want. But interestingly enough, it also comes back another way: the merit of drawing, in terms of the way you think as opposed to the way you execute or assemble, is becoming more apparent. More and more kids are studying drawing in school than they were before. It’s strange: just as it becomes least relevant in terms of professional practice, it has returned simply because of the recognition that your view of what you look at is different when you know how to draw.
Being in a mind state that you are not judging what you are looking at is a very important part of that. Meditation itself is an ancient practice. It enables us to understand something that is not attainable through any other thought process.
You’re an applied artist, yet your influences are from fine art. You seem to have crossed the divide between high and low art. Is there a difference?
The issue of high and low art is a complex issue. Art has a spiritual purpose, or it’s not art. So it ain’t between high and commercial art, it’s between not-art and art. So what is art? According to my field theory, art is a survival mechanism. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be around so long throughout every culture in history. The secret of art is attentiveness. It makes you able to see what is in front of you. Being able to see objectively what is real has some human benefit, as opposed to coming to everything with preconceptions. If [a work] helps you see what’s real, it’s art; if it doesn’t, it’s not. The real impurity of art you find is the marketplace, where some stupid painting is selling for $10 million because the dealers have been able to make people feel they’re important by having it hung in their living room. You see all these objects that are supposed to be art but I’m sorry, they’re not. So when people talk about commercial art or high art, it’s all one family. The only judgments you can make is whether it puts you in that place where you see what’s real. We are programmed to be susceptible to beauty, but that’s only the trick, that’s the bait that gets you to attentiveness.
Your work incorporates a wide range of styles and influences, which is a break from the orthodoxy of Modernism, which set parameters as to what was acceptable in art and what wasn’t. How did you make that break?
I was a child of Modernism. I was studying Cezanne when I was in high school.
What I realized when I went to Europe for the first time was how parochial I was. I thought I knew everything about art, but I realized that a Baroque church was infinitely more interesting and complex than a modernist factory. History is a great teacher, and I began to distrust style and its relationship to truth.
I began to very early why one had to elevate one idea or one style, or categorize types of art as having increasing virtue. It’s like eating three kinds of food. I like a roast beef sandwich, I like boiled cabbage and I like tofu. Why should I have preferences so narrow that they prevent me from experiencing the world? This idea that you don’t have to be fixed in any system is so appealing.
What are your biggest influences?
The two big influences on my life were Morandi and Picasso. Picasso, because he was willing to abandon every success he had. When he was asked, “what’s your style,” he said, “I have no style.” It didn’t matter if [the work] was naturalistic or from the blue period or cubist or surrealist. What’s the difference? It’s a big table.
Morandi was the opposite. You could say everything you wanted in one style. Picasso wanted everything in the world, every woman, all the money, all the reputation; Morandi wanted nothing. He would teach in the morning and paint all day, living with his three sisters. He was profoundly not ideological even though he was painting in a very narrow and extraordinarily powerful way. Between the two of them there’s a very nice position.
Has your reputation always been a benefit? I’d imagine it would free you to do whatever you like.
Too many people know too much about what I’ve done. The presumption is that I’m not interested in working or have lost my capacity to respond to something new or whatever else it is. Your reputation serves you up to a certain point, but then when you become very well known, as I’ve become, the presumption is you’re very expensive and disengaged. So that your reputation becomes a hindrance. I don’t think I’m either expensive or disengaged.
In many ways I’ve had a very easy career. When people talk about how hard things are in the design field, it’s not like digging a ditch.
What was new about the approach of Pushpin Studios?
There was a kind of transition between the famous artists’ schools and the kind of realistic imagery that drew from the tradition of American painting–Homer, Wyeth and so on. Because we were children of modernism, we started with a different assumption about what drawing was. Pushpin Studios had a reputation for doing a different kind of illustration. At a certain point, it got hot. We had a big show at the Louvres [Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris] and became well known. After 20 years I said, that’s the end of my illustration career. I was never an illustrator, but I loved the fact that I could draw and make images. I always worked in a way that integrated the idea of form-making with illustration and abstraction and photography. My theory was it’s all there.
How did you come up with the memorable I Love NY logo?
The phrase “I Love New York” already existed. [The deputy commissioner of the New York State Department of Commerce] said, “what we need is a visual equivalent.” I did something very simple, two lozenges, and they accepted it. The next day I was in a taxi and I thought, there’s a better way of doing that. I wrote, “I love [with the heart symbol] NY.” I called the assistant commissioner of commerce and I said, “I think I have something better.” He came up here, and he said, “you’re right.” He submitted it and they accepted it.
I depend on the stuff back there to come forward at its own pace, and it does, if you believe it. Partially [the logo’s success was] because it was a long campaign, and partially because it came out of New York, [which] has a terrific advantage over every place else on earth. And then, the “I” is a word, the heart is a symbol for a feeling, and “NY” are initials for a place. There are three modes of thought. There’s a shift. I always try to include something in any graphic solution that moves the mind, that makes you pay attention. The cheapest way to get that effect is to present the little puzzle. If it’s too difficult, it’s over. It has to be a beat. The next time you see it, it’s confirmed in the memory bank and the neurons go off and before you know it, it becomes memorable.
What’s your latest project?
I’m designing a movie house at the [School of Visual Arts], on 23rd Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues. It’s going to be great for the school as a promotional tool. It has two auditoriums, with 300 and 500 seats. The entire façade is a billboard about a subject that’s treated like a mural–the secret of art, which is a poster I did for the school. The whole thing has about 100 quotes about the secret of art that will change a couple times a year. On the roof of the marquis is a kinetic sculpture, 18 feet tall, that’s a variation of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. It has three cages that rotate every hour on the hour, [forming] a grid diagonally, vertically and horizontally in different colors. On the marquis appears the time. It says, “It’s one o’clock. Time to think about the meaning of your life.”
And then there’s a bar [I designed] that’s been installed. It’s bent metal with a pattern of dots, painted in brilliant automotive paint. It looks fabulous.
What about at the drawing table?
I’m making versions of [drawings] in black. They’re all computer-generated giclee prints. I had this idea that you go into this room with low light. You see nothing but black patterns, and then as you stand in front of it, [the object] begins to merge into your visual field and you suddenly can see it, because you’ve paying attention. I don’t have that many ideas, but this idea of perception and attentiveness is for me the most intriguing area I’ve worked in. I think that’s my fundamental lesson. In order to experience anything you have to be attentive. If you’re not attentive, you never see it.
You’ve taught for more than 50 years at SVA. What do you like about teaching?
You teach because you want to hand it on and you want to have others benefit from what you’ve learned. It’s just so much a part of my life that I can no longer ask myself why I teach, and it’s very complicated, and like most things, you don’t know in any case. But I like teaching. I like the experience of being in a classroom, and I’m good at it.
Everybody likes to generalize about [differences between generations of students] and it’s so often not true. You always get the same level of intelligence and commitment. You’ve got 10 percent cream, 10 percent sour milk and regular milk in the middle.
What’s the most important factor in deciding to take on a new project?
I’d like to do any number of things, but it’s never been what I was doing, in terms of categories of experience, it’s always what do you do with it, whether it’s a book jacket or a movie house. For me the thing has always been to work with people you like, so that the experience was pleasurable, and figure out a way to do something that isn’t fundamentally what everybody has already done–to see if there’s anything you can move forward about the subject.
The worse thing is to get a practitioner who says, just do anything you want. I want to have a boundary–otherwise, there’s chaos. You first have to understand the brief [a description of the objective] of any job. Very often you have to redefine it. I was asked to do a project for a big beer manufacturer, who wanted to figure out an event to improve morale. I said, “how do your workers get paid compared to other beer companies?” They said, “they make a little less.” I said, “Having an event is a waste of money, particularly if you could have given [your workers] a 3 percent [pay] increase.” Sometimes you have to say no, that’s not what you should be doing.
Is there a role for designers outside the art world?
It’s important for people in communications to be concerned about being a good citizen. You take a role, stand up for what you believe and use whatever skill you have. The difficulty is access to the world. How do you do something that [makes] people see and pay attention? And that’s complicated. I’ve done it any way I could–by doing posters and billboards. There’s one at [SVA] now about Iraqi refugees. After 9/11 I had a thing made [that said], I love NY More Than Ever. It was all around the city, because the kids from school posted it. You have to figure out the entry point. That becomes the real design problem.
When did you first come to Woodstock?
I guess it was in 1962. [My wife and I] came back from Europe in ‘58 or ’59 and we had friends in Woodstock. We used to sleep in their corncrib. After a couple of years, we thought maybe we should buy a place. We stumbled on this house and bought it and have been adding onto it ever since. It’s a wonderful house. We love the cranky, peculiar quality of Woodstock. We love the idea of the art colony and we have a couple of friends [here], so before you know it we were regulars.
For a long time we used to go up Thursday nights or Friday mornings, but less so recently. Some years ago [my wife] Shirley and I said, at one point we have to make up our minds where we live. Either we’re going to live in the city, or we’re going to live in Woodstock. I’ve become a danger on the road, so it became clear that it would be New York. But I still go up [to Woodstock] on weekends. It’s just glorious
You have done a whole series of drawings based on the art of Piero della Francesca. What do you find inspiring about his art?
I saw my first Piero when I was 18 at the Frick and I almost passed out, it was so astonishing. Every time I went to Italy I went on a pilgrimage to see every painting of Piero’s. [His work] has absolutely stuck in my mind because of his formal qualities and the exactness of the relationship of forms. He is the most modern of figurative artists, because of this reduction of form and the geometric relationships. He’s a classicist. Everything is resolved, everything is stable, everything is spaced where he wants it to be. He is just astonishing for an artist of his time and anticipated everything that was going to happen. I would say generally I have more affection for classicists than the romantic thing.
Did you have any childhood experiences that made you want to be an artist?
I grew up in the Bronx. My father was a tailor and I remember seeing him cutting a pattern. The idea of him picking up those pieces and putting them together to make a dress, something that provided warmth and display, [was] miraculous. The most glorious thing one can imagine is seeing something you thought of become real.
The brilliant experience of my childhood was being in bed [for a year with rheumatic fever] and having my mother bring me this board, which was about this long [stretches out his hands]. It had a big knothole in the middle and several lumps of clay. Every day I would start by making horses or houses or trees or something and create a little universe. And at the end I would pat it down and look forward to the fact that I could start all over the next day.
It’s been a great ride. I never lost sight of what I wanted, which was basically to do the best work I was capable of doing and to spend my life making things.
You grew up during the Depression. Any thoughts about that that era compared with the hardships people are experiencing in this downturn?
This is really a tough time. The only advantage I have is that I got through it once. I grew up during the years [of the Depression]. The best thing about it is, I know you survive, you get through it. That was my childhood, that struggle. I remember people used to come to the house. They’d knock at the door and they’d bring a big bowl of soup because they knew you might not have a meal that night. And it made you feel so well attended.
Curiously enough, during the Depression there was an explosion of art. It was extraordinarily. People had that recognition that [art] was one of the ways of surviving.