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Milton Glaser didn’t want to be the voice of a generation. He was anyway

Glaser’s designs are synonymous with the ’60s and ’70s. A new book shows just how influential his style really was.

Milton Glaser didn’t want to be the voice of a generation. He was anyway

[All Images: ©Estate of Milton Glaser/courtesy Monacelli]

BY Zachary Petit5 minute read

As one of the most well-known graphic designers of the past century, Milton Glaser and his work have long been ubiquitous in culture. If you assumed you’d seen it all, you’d be in good company.

“I thought I had laid eyes on most everything Milton designed,” says Beth Kleber, the founding archivist of the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. “I was wrong.”

[Cover Image: courtesy Monacelli]

In Milton Glaser: Pop, authors Kleber, Steven Heller (disclosure: whose blog this author edits), and Mirko Ilić resurrect hundreds of works from Glaser’s pop period (roughly 1963 to 1975) that have remained filed away since their initial publication. In kaleidoscopic color and Glaser’s signature line and wit, the works—1,100 of which are collected in the book—fueled a graphic revolution that existed beyond stuffy galleries and away from mid-century realism. As the authors detail, “pop” essentially translates to popular appeal, and its practitioners, such as Glaser, “redefined the graphic mode of the ’60s and ’70s by inventing a new visual grammar of editorial and advertising art and typography.”

From left: Skin Types – Combination: Seventeen magazine illustration, September 1967; The Wiz album cover, 1975, Atlantic Records; Broadway show poster composite for Hair, 1968, never produced—pen ink, colored inks, cello-tak, 19″ x 12″ [Image: ©Estate of Milton Glaser/courtesy Monacelli]

Despite the works’ legacy, Kleber and Heller admit this is a book that would not exist today if Glaser, who died in 2020, were alive. Kleber says Glaser considered these designs “crude and reductive” and wanted to move on from the style, though visual themes from these formative years (more on that in a moment) would continually find their way back into his work in reimagined ways.

Book cover: The Poetry of the Blues by Samuel Charters, 1970, Avon [Image: ©Estate of Milton Glaser/courtesy Monacelli]

“He was at best ambivalent and at worst dismissive of a lot of his work from this period,” she says. “[But] with the benefit of having seen, firsthand, so many students and designers interact with his originals, I can say this body of work really resonates with them in a unique way. It’s joyful, curious, and alive.”

Time magazine: California issue, 1969 [Image: ©Estate of Milton Glaser/courtesy Monacelli]

Heller describes Glaser and fellow Push Pin Studios founder, Seymour Chwast, as design’s McCartney and Lennon. For his part, Glaser took the classical foundations he absorbed studying under Giorgio Morandi at L’Accademia di Belle Arti in Italy and fused it with the cartoon teachings he’d picked up at the High School of Music & Art in New York City. The combination of high and low subsequently found its way into Glaser and Chwast’s alchemy of black outline filled with flat color.

From Left: Untitled magazine cover, Idea, no. 43, 1968; book cover: The Man Who Called Himself Poe edited by Sam Moskowitz, 1969, Doubleday; book cover: Something Soft by Roland Starke, 1969, Doubleday [[Image: ©Estate of Milton Glaser/courtesy Monacelli]

As Heller writes in the book, “This method, derived in part from comic books and animation (as kids, they both fantasized about working for Walt Disney), heightened the chromatic intensity of the image, which could be at once abstract and representational.”

Untitled wall display (n.d.), 62″ x 129″, Thom McAn [Image: ©Estate of Milton Glaser/courtesy Monacelli]

Given our familiarity with the work today, it’s difficult to imagine what it would have been like to see it emerge whole cloth in the mainstream at the time—an era dominated by realistic, sentimental illustrations and the trappings of The Saturday Evening Post. “Milton and Seymour opened the window and let the light shine in,” Heller says.

Ansul Corporation annual report illustration, 1966 [Image: ©Estate of Milton Glaser/courtesy Monacelli]

Some of the pieces in Pop cleanly fit into the realm of psychedelia—the cover of the book is Glaser’s jacket for Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Psychedelic art pioneer Victor Moscoso has cited Glaser as being highly influential on the movement, but Heller says that in Glaser’s mind, he was just making images that spoke to the times. As the authors note, “Psychedelia was, in fact, a mélange of vintage and passé historical references mashed up, puréed, and recombined into the present, which is how Glaser would explain much of his work from this period.”

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Manhattan Yellow Pages phone book cover, 1971, New York Telephone [Image: ©Estate of Milton Glaser/courtesy Monacelli]

Kleber adds that she wouldn’t call the aesthetic a business strategy—but the flat-color technique was easy to produce quickly with the aid of assistants. It was indeed a style that would go on to permeate the times, as Heinz Edelmann’s work on The Beatles’ animated Yellow Submarine movie shows. (Per Heller, Glaser was miffed when people thought he had created the work.)

While Push Pin’s achievements are often viewed collectively, each partner had a distinct approach and personality that influenced their colleagues’ output, and Heller’s goal with the book was to explore Glaser’s voice in the era. Glaser: Pop does so by eschewing a traditional chronological approach, and instead focusing on recurring motifs in his work, which serve as chapters: Portraits and Faces; Silhouettes and Shadows; Rays and Rainbows; Outlines and Strokes; Frames and Geometries; Types and Symbols; and Die-cuts and Collages. The end result is a survey that manages to surprise and delight across the vast array of media Glaser worked in, from woodcuts to watercolors.

Hermann Hesse portrait from 1975 Hermann Hesse Calendar, Illustrated by Milton Glaser, Farrar, Straus and Giroux [Image: ©Estate of Milton Glaser/courtesy Monacelli]

For Kleber, the work also serves as the raw materials for Glaser’s later output, and the experimental grounds where Glaser began to develop and refine the ideas and techniques that would culminate in his essential run of posters.

Zabriskie Point poster, 1970, 28″ x 21 1⁄2″, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [Image: ©Estate of Milton Glaser/courtesy Monacelli]

“By sharing the full array of early influences of his heroes from art history, the finely rendered pen-and-ink drawings, the blotchy figures, the 3D illusions, it’s possible to understand where the Dylan poster came from, and where it took him,” she says.

One wonders: Given that Glaser is today regarded as a legend of graphic design, how did people view him during the Push Pin days?

Heller says that he’s beginning to hate the words “legend,” “icon,” “mythic.”

“Myths and legends are mostly exaggerations,” Heller says. “Milton was real.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Zachary Petit is a contributing writer for Fast Company and an independent journalist who covers design, the arts and travel. His words have appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic, Eye on Design, McSweeney’s, Mental_Floss and PRINT, where he served as editor-in-chief of the National Magazine Award–winning publication More