We’ve just received materials from the 2005 exhibition The Design of Dissent donated by designer Mirko Ilić, who, along with Milton Glaser, collected the materials and created a book on the project.

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Milton Glaser Collection Box 112 Folder 24. Push Pin Graphic No. 11, December 1957.

Milton Glaser tips his hat to French poet, playwright, and critic Guillaume Apollinaire.

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Milton Glaser is closely associated with a visual style emphasizing expressive illustrations and resonant cultural symbols, but revisiting different periods in his career one is reminded that he was constantly developing new approaches, and in the Glaser Collection one can find an astonishingly wide range of approaches to design problems.

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The most recent addition to the Chermayeff & Geismar Collection is twelve boxes of old and rare art books, ranging from annuals to architecture; Switzerland to Japan. As always, there were plenty of surprises: one was the catalog for an AGI exhibition from 1976, which featured, alongside reproductions of their work, dramatic photos of the designers.

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Milton Glaser Collection: Esquire’s Christmas Gift Catalog, n.d.

Push Pin’s nutty and sweet Christmas Gift Catalog for Esquire exemplifies the eclectic spirit of that studio.

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Milton Glaser Collection Box 108, Columbia Records: Jazz Odyssey Vol. II: The Sound of Chicago, 1964.

Milton Glaser’s early album covers express his understanding of the ineffable qualities of music.

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Milton Glaser Collection: The Art of Seeing announcement, 1962.

A symposium of “provocative visual material” inspired Milton Glaser to come up with some of his own.

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School of Visual Arts Collection: Passion cover, 1970.

Milton Glaser and Henry Wolf’s magazine workshop pays tribute to the landmark erotic publication Eros.

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Milton Glaser Collection: Milton Glaser for Container Corporation of America.

Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable. – Samuel Johnson

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Milton Glaser Collection, Box 93 Folder 27: Colorvision for Phoenix Clothes and Hanover Hall, 1963.

In what essentially looks like a lost issue of the Push Pin Graphic, Colorvision (“an entirely new concept of color in clothing!”) describes the magic of a Blendescent.

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Milton Glaser Collection: Box 68 Folder 14. Visual Arts Gallery Announcement: The Private Press, 1966.

A retrospective of Milton’s Glaser’s design work for SVA opens today at SVA’s Visual Arts Gallery (601 W. 26th Street, NYC).

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SVA Collection RG 15: Exhibitions, 1966

We just stumbled across a long-lost poster for the seminal conceptual art exhibit, Working drawings and other visible things on paper not necessarily meant to be viewed as art (Visual Arts Gallery, December 2 – December 23, 1966). Initially asked by gallery director Shirley Glaser to organize a Christmas show of drawings, Mel Bochner collected notes, sketches, and diagrams from artist friends (as well as mathematicians, biologists, choreographers, and engineers). He ultimately photocopied the working drawings (using SVA’s brand new Xerox machine), placed them into four identical binders, and mounted them on pedestals in the gallery.

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SVA Collection, RG 15 Exhibitions

Milton Glaser designed this poster for an exhibition at the Visual Arts Gallery in late 1965. Twen, a West German magazine for “people in their twenties: from 15 to 30,” was wildly influential in design circles worldwide—with a grid system composed of twelve small modules combined in an internally regular but widely varying page layouts, and liberal full-bleed spreads photographed by Art Kane, Will McBride, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and others (and illustrations by Heinz Edelmann). It introduced many design students to Willy Fleckhaus, the magazine’s art director and sometime editor, who became famous for his virtuosic combination of close-set typography and tightly-cropped images. The rigid geometry of this poster, though not usually associated with Glaser, was a mode he employed often for SVA exhibition posters (more can be seen here and here). Though the graphic austerity is a contrast to his earlier work, the underlying expression of concepts through tactile visual representation is, I think, unmistakable Glaser.

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Milton Glaser Collection: Box 3, Folder 12

One of the main attractions of the archive as a research tool is as a document of artistic process. (The effect of the overwriting of drafts by computers is a subject I have written about elsewhere.) There were several stages to Milton Glaser’s development of a poster for the Visual Arts Gallery exhibition “Inside the Big Apple” (1968) — the above shows his collage of different versions of the figuration, which arrangement ended up contributing the composition that he used in the final version (other versions and the final poster follow).

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Milton Glaser Collection: Drawer 20, Folders 10-12.

In 1970, Milton Glaser did a series of three posters for RCA’s Computer Division entitled Memory Unbound. They express the abstract promise of technology that was at least a decade away for most people.

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In a graphic for the May 2008 issue of Vanity Fair, Andrew Nimmo and Beth Bartholomew tabulated the topics of Bob Dylan’s XM Radio Show, Theme Time Radio Hour. (And they gracefully reference the source of their riff, the famous poster by Milton Glaser.)

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Milton Glaser Collection: Box 112, Folder 24, Push Pin Graphic (undated)

Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984) was best known as an experimental filmmaker but he was also a gifted painter and sculptor. This undated issue of the Push Pin Graphic features photographs of VanDerBeek’s whimsical creations.

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Milton Glaser Collection: Box 48, Folder 13

Milton Glaser worked on many book jackets for Philip Roth (both with Penguin and Houghton Mifflin), including the original Zuckerman trilogy; American Pastoral; Goodbye, Columbus; and others. Above is the sketch for his cover to Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). I really like the figuration of hands, and the Goreyesque flowing coat, gently bulbous in high early-Milton style. Though I think it may be a bit literal as jacket covers go, it does directly engage the controlling principle of the book, as listed on the first page (as if an imaginary a psychology encyclopedia entry) —

Portnoy’s Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.

Flying after apparently-unoccupied parachute-like skirts at full sprint is a kind of perversion I guess.

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Milton Glaser Collection: Box 77, Folder 9: Opera News, March 22, 1969 — Turandot.

In the category of personal favorites go these beautiful Opera News covers, done by Milton Glaser between 1966 and 1970, while he was at Push Pin.

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Milton Glaser Collection, Series 2: Box 106, Folder 9

Milton Glaser designed this irregularly-shaped, cut-out menu in 1973 for Galeonen Bar, at the Plaza Hamburg hotel. Their vintage cocktail menu follows.

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Milton Glaser Collection: Drawer 11, Folder 26.

XTC’s Andy Partridge readily admits to using Milton Glaser’s 1964 poster for radio station WOR as the inspiration for the cover art for XTC’s 1989 album Oranges and Lemons (viewable here). He has also professed his love of the work of Yellow Submarine art director and designer Heinz Edelmann, who is also a new addition to the archives — sneak peek to come!

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