Blog Page 13 of 5 | SVA Archives

August 12, 2013

Concrete Poetry

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

August 06, 2013

Serial production

For large patches of his later career Heinz Edelmann focused on quickly producing posters for arts events and series productions: these typically made use of a fairly regularized typographic template for information, and wild, allusive but enigmatic illustrations. For one season in the mid-1980s, he worked with the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus theater, playing off the plays’ angsty plotlines with evocatively deformed bodies.

August 04, 2013

Champion Papers

The Glaser Archives is chock full of gorgeous promotional pieces for paper companies, dating from a time when they provided a steady stream of work and creative freedom to the designers and illustrators who were also their customers.

August 04, 2013

Archives 101

What exactly do we do here at the Glaser Archives? I’m so glad you asked!

August 04, 2013

Produce as land mass

We recently received a wonderful donation from James McMullan, and while I was looking for a few things to feature in a sneak peek, I came across this illustration he did for Push Pin of Long Island as a potato.

July 30, 2013

Allan Kaprow’s Words

Another lovely artifact appeared in the Archive unexpectedly last week: Allan Kaprow’s Words, from 1962.

July 29, 2013

Tea for two

Milton Glaser for the Russian Tea Room.

July 28, 2013

Presenting… The James McMullan Collection

We recently finished organizing and describing the James McMullan Collection, which was donated by the acclaimed illustrator and designer last year.

Presenting… The James McMullan Collection

July 23, 2013

Saying good-bye to Heinz Edelmann

Enjoy a few of the acclaimed posters he produced for Germany’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk radio station after the jump. And click here for a characteristically witty and illuminating interview with Edelmann in Graphis.

July 22, 2013

Layer cake

One of the central features of the Push Pin generation of designers — mainly Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser — was a continued inspiration from, and reliance upon, physically layered compositions (using e.g., cello-tak) and photographic compositing.

July 20, 2013

Hot potato

Milton Glaser plays with fire for Poppy Records.

July 20, 2013

Inside the Big Apple

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).

July 16, 2013

Milton Glaser’s geometries

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.

July 15, 2013

Blue moon promotion

Lou Dorfsman’s epic promotional piece for CBS’s coverage of the Apollo 11 mission.

July 15, 2013

SVA Continuing Education courses in the ’60s

During the 1960s, SVA published a series of course announcements advertising the practical aspects of its evening classes. The text was often dry but the graphics were playful and eye-catching. Here, having some fun with type, are Ivan Chermayeff and Tony Palladino. Chermayeff and Bob Gill are after the jump.

SVA Continuing Education courses in the ’60s

July 12, 2013

Man in the shadows

He wanted to live in a world in which one could find “Gershwin playing all night in penthouses, while George Kaufman fired one-liners into the guests and Harpo scrambled eggs in their hats.” Milton Glaser’s cover, with its punchy color combined with austere but evocative line, seems neatly suited to such a world.

July 07, 2013

Twombly at SVA

Cy Twombly was the subject of two solo exhibitions at SVA, in 1973 and 1977, just before his idiosyncratic work found new favor with the rising generation of neo-Expressionists.

July 07, 2013

Glaser for RCA Computers

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.