Milton Glaser In Memoriam

By Gaetano Kazuo Maida, executive director

Our dear friend and design director, Milton Glaser, died on his 91st birthday, June 26, 2020. A giant in the design field, he was a generous and kind man, keenly observant, with a great sense of humor. He played an outsized role as leader and guide, always with love. He was, in a word, a mensch (which is Yiddish for bodhisattva).

Logos and posters for Buddhist Film Foundation and our International Buddhist Film Festival were among his many gifts to us. Images arrived via a slow printing fax one day a few weeks after I had asked him for his help. I had told him simply, “you know, Buddhism and movies,” and what emerged was perfect: a stylized Buddha head with a “projection” triangle emerging from the “mind” of the Buddha. In Buddhist philosophy, everything can be understood as a projection of mind, so film has a double meaning of projection. The version for the film festival was an elaboration, with colors drawn from the Tibetan tradition (Milton had been a collector of Buddhist art for many years). The original 2003 poster image of that colored logo on a field of tiny Buddha images was a clear reference to Tibetan thangka paintings, a suggestion that the film festival was grounded in a long-standing tradition of Buddhist art.

Though he became well-known as the designer of the now-ubiquitous “I [heart] NY” logo, and the psychedelic Bob Dylan poster, the range of his work was vast, and included everything from illustration and graphic art to restaurant design, film titles, magazines, supermarkets and products, carpets, culinary tools, amusement parks, museums, universities, typefaces, toys, clocks and watches, and more. He and his wife Shirley (they married in 1957) also produced a number of children’s books together.

“I believe that art is a form of meditation for both maker and witness,
and that art, like meditation, makes us attentive…
produces quiet in the mind so that it can discard pre-existing ideas
to see what is real.” – Milton Glaser

Every Wednesday night (plus a week-long summer intensive) for over fifty years, he taught a class at the School of Visual Arts, where he eventually served as chairman. There’s very little of the visual environment we all share today that hasn’t been touched and transformed by his work and inspiration.

Milton Glaser video by Hillman Curtis for Adobe.

Milton was famous for his willingness to support a cause with his work, supplying images, posters, buttons, and catchphrases to movements for women’s rights, civil rights, human rights, peace, global warming, etc.

He said, “social commentary is always part of the practice (of graphic design). There’s a responsibility of being a good citizen, and also recognizing that you have the ability of transferring ideas, and those should be ideas that cause no harm. You want to do things that have some relationship to your community, your city, your country, to the world.”

His last project was, like his I [heart] NY, simple, just the word “Together.” In perhaps his last interview, a little over a month ago, he said, “‘We’re all in this together’ has been reiterated a thousand times, but you can create the symbolic equivalent of that phrase by just using the word ‘together,’ and then making those letters [look] as though they are all different, but all related. So if you want to use the word ‘together’ it evokes the entire phrase and the idea that we have something in common.”

A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

Milton was a New Yorker, born in 1929 and raised in the Bronx, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. He grew up in the famous Allerton Avenue Coops, originally organized by Jewish socialists as one of the very first cooperative apartment complexes in America. He attended public schools, graduated from the High School of Music and Art (now known as Fiorello H. La Guardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts), and then attended Cooper Union. After graduation, a Fulbright Scholarship took him to Bologna, Italy, to study with the legendary artist Giorgio Morandi. His lifetime commitment to drawing as his primary medium, a source of pleasure since childhood, was firmly established there.

Upon his return from Europe in 1954, he and a few friends from Cooper Union established Push Pin Studios, a design practice that became a leader of a new and influential style of graphic design. In 1968, he and editor Clay Felker started New York Magazine, the first of what became the wave of city periodicals we know today around the country. They went on to start New West and own Village Voice and Esquire. At New York, he and a designer friend, Jerome Snyder, began a weekly column called “The Underground Gourmet,” among the very first sustained efforts to chronicle for a wide audience the burgeoning arena of ethnic restaurants (their rule in the early days was “no meal over $2”), now widely pursued by major newspapers, blogs, television, and film.

He left Push Pin and started Milton Glaser, Inc. in 1974. While we haven’t listed all of his many projects and clients here (visit miltonglaser.com), some highlights include the original Windows on the World restaurant (and all the restaurants at the World Trade Center at its opening), Rubin Museum, SUNY Stony Brook, Grand Union, Rainbow Room, Brooklyn Brewery, School of Visual Arts, The Band’s Big Pink album, every cloth edition of Philip Roth’s novels, movie titles for Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, logos for The Year of Tibet (1991), 84000, Nonesuch, Elektra, Asylum, Tomato, Barron’s, Angels in America…the list goes on. With a partner, Walter Bernard, their WBMG firm designed or redesigned over fifty magazines and newspapers around the world, including Time, Fortune, The Atlantic, Paris Match, Washington Post, L’Express, and The Nation.

In 1975, Milton gathered together the best minds of the New York culinary world, and in partnership with James Beard and Burton Wolf, produced The Cooks’ Catalogue, a nearly 600 page tested and annotated guide to the best kitchen gear available, plus recipes. Edited by Barbara Kafka, this was “The Whole Earth Catalog for foodies,” and like its inspiration, was widely seen to be a leader, the authoritative reference for a generation of enthusiasts, helping initiate a now flourishing field of DIY food media.

His own books include Milton Glaser: Graphic Design, Art Is Work, Drawing Is Thinking, Milton Glaser Posters, In Search of the Miraculous or One Thing Leads to Another, The Milton Glaser Poster Book, and Sketch and Finish: The Journey from Here to There; with Walter Bernard, Mag Men; and with Mirko Illic (with an introduction by Tony Kushner), Design of Dissent. Milton and Shirley collaborated on If Apples Had Teeth, The Alphazeds, and The Big Race.

In addition to numerous honors and awards, he was the first graphic designer to receive the National Medal of Arts, awarded to him by President Barack Obama in 2009. He had one-man exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (after which a reception was held at the then-new The Galleria on East 57th Street, with dancing to the full Duke Ellington Orchestra).

“I’m still astonished, things still amaze me.
And I think that’s the great benefit of being in the arts,
where the possibility for learning never disappears…
In my own experience, anything I’ve discovered has come through the act of work,
of making things, that the act itself is the path to discovery.” – Milton Glaser

miltonglaser.com
The New York Times obituary
The New York Times “Together” article
New York Magazine obituary
The New Yorker obituary
The Guardian obituary
Los Angeles Times article
Los Angeles Times obituary
Quartz at Work article
Wright auction July 14, 2020
Big Think interview
CBC Radio interview
Conversation with Chip Kidd 2010
Conversation with Steve Heller in 2014
Conversation with Steve Heller in 2017
short films
To Inform and Delight (documentary)
I [heart] NY
From Old Jews Telling Jokes:
“I Want to Have a Monkey”
“Two Garmentos”
“Am I Thirsty”

“Together” logo copyright Milton Glaser.
Photographs of Milton Glaser copyright Gaetano Kazuo Maida.