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January 25, 2014
Milton Glaser’s menus for the World Trade Center
One curious feature about the Glaser collection is its organizational style, which was based on the way the materials were donated by the designer. Subseries G of his Printed Materials contains many of the menus he did for businesses at the World Trade Center.
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January 08, 2014
Justine & Balthazar
While McMullan’s work from the early 1960s is close in spirit to the evocative illustration of his colleagues Robert Weaver and Jerome Martin, Glaser’s late 1960s take shows a pop/psych style then at its height. The art is very much in keeping with other work that Glaser was doing at the time, with its flowing curvilinear lines and high contrast colors, which also, intentional or not, indicate some churning emotional content.
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December 13, 2013
Life Underground
Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder ate their way through NYC so you didn’t have to.
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November 20, 2013
Working drawings
Milton Glaser’s sketch for the Working drawings and other visible things on paper not necessarily meant to be viewed as art poster became a part of the artwork.
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October 28, 2013
A brief tour of Milton Glaser’s typography
Glaser’s typefaces combine Push Pin-era Deco motifs with conventions adapted from hand-painted signs, but share a tendency to imbue generic letterforms with geometric dimension.
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October 21, 2013
Colorvision!
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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October 15, 2013
Exploding coffee table
While we’re on the subject of the Memphis Group, better take cover; that table’s gonna blow.
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October 06, 2013
A Grand Union
In the mid-1970s, Milton Glaser was approached by Sir James Goldsmith to take on a dramatic redesign of the supermarket chain Grand Union.
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August 31, 2013
Milton Glaser’s SVA: A Legacy of Graphic Design
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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August 24, 2013
Department of the newly uncovered
We just uncovered 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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August 12, 2013
Concrete Poetry
Milton Glaser tips his hat to French poet, playwright, and critic Guillaume Apollinaire.
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July 29, 2013
Tea for two
Milton Glaser for the Russian Tea Room.
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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.
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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).
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July 20, 2013
Hot potato
Milton Glaser plays with fire for Poppy Records.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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June 25, 2013
Candy men
Fanciful candy packaging for Audience magazine.
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May 14, 2013
107 graphic designers
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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