While we’re disappointed that Milton Glaser: Pop — a knockout coffee table book celebrating the often gorgeous, always compelling artwork of the graphic arts giant — contains not a single word about his mid-’70s turn as design director for the Village Voice, we’re going to review it anyway.
Enthusiastically.
Glaser (1929–2020) discovered his passion early, and this tome’s big layout spreads include a 1942 drawing of a circus train adorned with a fanciful, smiling face that he drew for a fellow middle schooler in the Bronx. Sketched in blue ink, the playful engine conveys Glaser’s blossoming confidence in his own artistic abilities.
In 1954, Glaser founded Push Pin Studio with another up-and-coming virtuoso, Seymour Chwast, and the two artists experimented with all manner of illustration — painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, as well as variously colored and textured sheets of an adhesive film called “Cello-tak” — and in the process helped define the look of the Pop generation and beyond. The supreme example might be Glaser’s portrait of Bob Dylan, a brooding profile silhouette of the folkie-turned-rocker sprouting psychedelically hued locks undulating like heat waves. Mass-produced as a poster insert for the album Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, in 1967, the image undoubtedly conjures memories for those who lived through the ’60s — maybe of a raucous concert hall or perhaps a lava-lamp-lit basement and a pair of bulky headphones. The effect is just as pronounced when turning the page to some similarly styled but unproduced posters Glaser proposed a year later for a smash Broadway show; upon seeing these full-color sketches anyone of a certain age will probably find themselves unconsciously humming, “Hair! / Long beautiful hair!”
Glaser’s best work hits the viscera as thrillingly as the eyes, which is not to say that Glaser didn’t have antecedents to build on. In fact, as authors Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber note, “some of his psychedelic pieces were seen as second-rate rip-offs, especially when compared to the master psychedelic poster artists, including Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelly, and Victor Moscoso. Interestingly, Moscoso admits to being inspired by Glaser, prior to and while working on his own classic vibrating concert posters and underground comix.”
Indeed, influences among great artists run in both directions. A poster celebrating Johann Sebastian Bach that Glaser created for Columbia Records in 1967 innovatively uses dark tones and elegant geometries to convey the gravitas of Bach’s intricate 18th-century compositions, even as Glaser’s own bright, flowing palette brings the music into the Swinging Sixties.
Glaser also reached back to such avant-garde printmakers as the Swiss-born Paris-based Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), whose influence, through his woodcuts, can be seen in the heavy black masses of Glaser’s cover for a 1969 issue of Opera News.
Glaser often worked with major clients — the designer’s drawings of a bulbous bird, a bubble-blowing elephant, a chubby cat, and other cute creatures imbue an undated promotional pamphlet for the U.S. Steel Corporation with a warm and fuzzy patina. In 1971, New York Telephone called and Glaser concocted a phone-directory cover that envisioned a fanciful Big Apple, featuring a horse and an imp in the trees and a street performer balancing all the things you might need — eyeglasses, a sturdy chair, your favorite cat — to “let your fingers do the walking” through the Yellow Pages.
From 1964 to 1968, Glaser used chunky silhouettes for a series of albums by the Knightsbridge Singing Strings, using, for example, a dark volcano decorated with a pineapple and topped with bright flames to set a “Hawaiian Mood” for one disc, and a stubby propeller plane sporting various insignia to create a “Nostalgic Swing Mood” for another. The book features a spread of these “Mood” albums that might well send you to the further reaches of the Internet to hear just what Casablanca’s “As Time Goes By” from the “Movie Mood” disc might sound like when done by the Singing Strings. The authors note that Glaser did a number of album covers, including many for classical composers. As with the Bach poster, “he was commissioned to soup up the album design by avoiding the graphic clichés associated with classical music. Across these twelve albums, ach [sic] composer was rendered in a different (sometimes counterintuitive) historical style — from fluid watercolor for Wagner to psychedelicized vibrating color patterns for Rachmaninoff. Sometimes he would mix contrasting period styles in order to engage his interest and inject surprising moments into the overall series.” For sure, Glaser worked unceasingly to find ways to make the past relevant for an audience in the midst of an ongoing cultural revolution.
Glaser’s best work hits the viscera as thrillingly as the eyes.
In Glaser’s world, words mattered only if they got in the way of a design, and as the authors point out, he crafted his typefaces “to do tricks.” In his “Hologram/Baby Curls” font, only the tiniest of curves differentiate the “O” from the “D,” yet in the book’s opening one reads the word “INTRODUCTION” with no problem. Glaser knew just how far he could push his forms and still keep them legible. Letters often become objects, such as the chunky characters that float along with bits of American detritus in his poster for Zabriskie Point, a 1970 film by Michelangelo Antonioni that concludes with a slow-motion ballet of exploding consumer items.
In 1977, Glaser famously created the “I ♥ NY” logo, in conjunction with a promotional campaign to attract tourists to New York State. “Iiiii love New York” is how the song in the commercials went, even though your mind, upon reading the slogan, might translate it as “I heart New York.” Which just shows how tuned in the designer was to how symbols work as pure communication, achieving a twofer of visceral reaction to his design. And egad — does that mean we have Glaser to blame, at least partially, for our own age’s onslaught of emojis?
Well, as the copy in a 1969 ad Glaser designed for Endo Laboratories’ oxycodone-containing Percobarb put it, “Warning: May be habit forming.” ❖
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