On June 26, the day of his birth, Milton Glaser, international superstar of graphic design, artist, gourmet, educator extraordinaire, and Woodstocker for more than 60 years, died of a stroke. He was 91. His wife and constant companion Shirley was at his side. Milton died in New York City, where he was born.
Magazines and newspapers, in print and on-line, have listed Glaser’s awards, prizes, and noted his most well-known achievements. These were indeed important, but not as important as Glaser’s own humility in light of such honors. “After a certain point, we were accepted,” he told an interviewer in 1989, referring to a Museum of Modern Art show of designs by his first company. “Once that happens, everything becomes less interesting.”
Milton had by then achieved financial independence. That status provided him greater emotional independence. As he explained in a 1985 interview with Woodstock Times journalist Liam Nelson, Glaser said, “My work is for others. And it is always in response to a problem .… What I do for myself is in a sense less representative [of myself] than what I do for the world.”
Nelson asked how Glaser went about solving a particular problem, “When you make yourself available,” he replied, “the ideas will come to you when you need them.”
Part of the maelstrom of New York City public life, Glaser required sanctuary as well as spotlight. Barney Hoskyns’ interview of him for “Small Town Talk” explained how Glaser chose Woodstock as his getaway. “In those days the artist colony was a glamorous thing, but only at a distance. As you got up close, it was just like any other poor town in the Catskills. We started going there in the mid to late Fifties because it was a cheap place to go, but it hadn’t coalesced into anything discernible.”
Woodstock was an accessible and inexpensive location of great beauty, populated by some who set up an easel to bear witness to it in a village where folks for the most part went about their own business.
Local songwriter Tim Moore drove Milton and Shirley to and from Woodstock to New York weekly from 2014 to 2016. Moore recalls the effortless fluidity of Milton’s conversation until “every time we came over a rise on the Thruway he’d see the blue of the distant Catskills and enthuse, ‘Look at that blue!’ ”
Who would take inspiration from Dutch legends about bobcats that populated the region to imagine a giant cat nestled in that iconic outline of mountains breathtakingly visible to northbound Thruway travelers? Why, Milton Glaser, of course. He created a collection of such images to create posters in support of New York State tourism. They became a widely accepted symbol of regional pride. Locals tried to assemble the whole set.
Glaser once explained how Manhattan and Woodstock were intertwined:
“Thinking and making things, mostly I do in the country. Assembling and refining I do here [in the city.] One is solitary, the other is a collective effort.”
Milton was an educator of exceptional clarity. “I explain to students … that the creation of a puzzle is one of the tools we have to make people understand something …. When they activate the mind to figure something out, the likelihood is that they will remember and respond to it more than if they’re told something directly.”
Conversely: “Fatigue occurs when people see too much of the same thing too often.”
Work that was on the street
Born in the Bronx neighborhood “Little Russia” to Jewish Hungarian parents in 1929, Milton saw his father disappear into his dry cleaner/tailor shop six days a week and not emerge until twelve hours later. Even with that immigrant work ethic fully transferred, Milton’s boyhood realization that he could “create life with a pencil” decided his choice of career.
He studied drawing as a teen with the famous Soyer brothers. Graduating from “Music and Art,” the great public high school in New York, provided Milton with “a lot of options about what I should be doing.”
As he stated in the documentary film To Inform and Delight, “I was introduced to the idea of what was then called commercial art, which was making things to sell for money. “I never could get the idea through my head that I could make a living making paintings that somebody would buy and put in their house. It just seemed so … inappropriate for me. I wanted to do public work, work that was on the street …. At that point I had already internalized this idea that it didn’t matter whether I was called an artist or a designer or an illustrator .… [Instead,] it was the transformation of an idea that you hold in your mind that becomes real or material that to me still is the glory of any creative activity.”
After failing Pratt University’s acceptance tests twice, Glaser gained admission to an even better school: Cooper Union, where apprenticeship to a renowned master awaited. Collectively inspired by their education, Milton and three other undergrads participated in what Glaser calls one of his “ten crucial elements” for success: early failure. The four Cooper Unionites early attempt at a brain-trust called “Design Plus” produced a single cork-board for Wanamaker’s department store.
Graduating in 1951, Milton worked in promotion for Vogue, before winning a Fulbright scholarship to the Academy in Fine Arts in Bologna, Italy. Here Milton’s eyes opened. He recovered from his mother’s terrible cooking. He realized, “History is not the enemy.” His inner Italian emerged, never to abandon him.
Upon his return to America, those other three Cooper Union grads (including another masterful designer and future Woodstocker, Seymour Chwast) elected Milton president of Pushpin Design in 1954.
Pushpin’s strategy was to over-whelm the conservative advertising culture of the American 1950s with bold colors, intriguing visual puns and juxtapositions of intelligence and wit flagrantly borrowed from “anything in the visual history of humankind.” The aim was specifically not to establish a specific style, but instead mount a guerilla war of eclecticism upon a hopelessly flat-footed status quo.
A generation later Peter Max would steal a certain schtick from Pushpin’s seemingly limitless repertoire to create what came to be called “Yellow Submarine art” in honor of the Beatles’ animated classic. Pushpin Design, by then two dozen strong, rolled their collective eyes.
Enter Albert Grossman
In 1957 Milton married Shirley Girton, who’d replaced him at his very first design job. The next 63 years would prove: “He who marries his replacement becomes irreplaceable.” The couple augmented their spontaneous combustion of personal chemistry with occasional collaboration on children’s books: “If Apples Had Teeth” (1960), “The Alphazeds” (2003) and “The Big Race” (2005).
When Pushpin redesigned Esquire in 1959 (and Paris-Match the same year), conventional advertising began a fighting retreat back to base camp at The New Yorker. The 1960s were moments away.
Her shopping cart full at the Woodstock Grand Union (today CVS) one day, Shirley Glaser overheard a check-out girl going on about Fritzi Striebel putting her grand old stone house on the market for $50,000! One of the few people with that kind of money that Milton and Shirley knew was a freshly self-made millionaire named Albert Grossman, who’d put together a Greenwich Village folk power trio called Peter, Paul, and Mary. Peter Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers.
“Albert selected Milt Glaser as the art director,” said Stookey, “which was a real coup because in one deft swoop of his hand, Milt created a font for Peter, Paul and Mary that became identified with the group for the next 20 years, and probably still is. At the same time, Milt handled all of the album chores for the first decade. His design work was just amazing.”
The cover photo of the Peter, Paul and Mary album depicted the group posing onstage before the brick wall at the Bitter End Café. The words “Peter, Paul and Mary” appeared in a striking, multi-colored script on the upper left.
“We hired a very young art director named Milt Glaser,” remembered Mary Travers, “who was a student of the famous Henry Wolf, who was the graphic designer of that period. He was the guy who designed Show magazine, and Milt was his disciple. Of course, Milt is now hanging in the Museum of Modern Art. Milt invented that original typeface that we used, and he did all the graphics for the group, not just the album covers, but everything from Christmas cards to stationary, and became a wonderful friend and has remained a wonderful friend all of these years.”
Albert bought the house. Albert liked the Bearsville neighborhood and ended up buying a lot of it, including much of the commercially zoned property. Later, he would drive down Striebel Road to the Bear Café almost daily in Janis Joplin’s bright little car.
On another day, Shirley Glaser heard that a well-known old Woodstock house, Ben Webster’s place in the monied East Riding section of Byrdcliffe, Woodstock’s original art colony, was for sale. Albert Grossman was most appreciative of the tip, and secured the secluded domicile for his newest star, the self-invented “Bob Dylan,” who’d evolved — under Albert’s proud eye — from a skillful impersonator of Woody Guthrie into the highly original and exceedingly prolific young poet laureate of this post-beatnik age. In 1967, Milton’s poster depicting Dylan in profile with a wild, multi-colored birds-nest-head-of-hair, would sell six million copies, becoming nearly as famous as its messianic model.
Although not for free, Glaser lavished arduous attention Albert Grossman’s growing Bearsville empire: creating Bearsville Records’ logo and menus for Albert’s Bearsville restaurants. He designed Bearsville stationary, innumerable record cover designs, He even helped Albert pick out chairs! Another lasting contribution remains the unique color combinations (just re-applied by new owner Lizzie Vann) of Halloween orange, hunter green and cranberry red unifying and uplifting the entire compound.
Partnering with Clay Felker
In years to come Milton partnered up with a series of Gotham theatrical power-brokers. The first of these boardroom volcanoes was Esquire veteran, Clay Felker, who, backed by the sage wisdom and insightful instincts of Milton Glaser, managed in 1967 to return from the dead a repeatedly doomed Sunday magazine insert which had graced the New York-Herald Tribune. It was called New York Magazine. And it brought forth a blood bath. In the end, Felker borrowed six grand to purchase the brand, and called the bluff of The New Yorker (which threatened suit for infringement of copyright). Glaser designed the casually elegant font which “New York” retains today.
Felker and Glaser (called “The Twin Towers” behind their backs) became the odd couple of magazine publishing. Felker stormed, Glaser pacified. Felker wooed away the best writers at Esquire. Glaser’s irrepressible visual inventiveness finessed the rest, including scooping up Jimmy Breslin, himself. The magazine survived hand-to-mouth from the fourth floor of the Pushpin Studio on East 32nd Street. On the top floor 40 people were stuffed into a small walk-up with one toilet.
Said one survivor of Milton’s first year, “If he and Felker didn’t have a cover 24 hours before going to press, Glaser would just sit down and draw one.” Milton’s response to such creative chaos? “Turn up the heat.”
Within two months of opening, the fighting-brave weekly announced a new feature attractive to American culture: making cheap food fashionable to the middle class. Penned by Glaser and Scientific American alumnus Jerome Snyder, it was called The Underground Gourmet. No magazine had ever reviewed cheap restaurants before because they didn’t advertise. All that changed. And Anthony Bourdain became a foregone conclusion.
Peter Mayer follows
In 1974 Milton opened his own firm, Milton Glaser, Inc., but didn’t leave Pushpin until the following year. Also in 1974 Felker and Glaser bought The Village Voice. Three years earlier they helped launch Gloria Steinem’s feminist Ms. Magazine.
Other pursuits Milton and Shirley shared in their mini-villa atop Lewis Hollow, with Overlook Mountain above them and the Woodstock hamlet beneath them, often involved a less meditative whirlwind of creative energy by the name of Peter Mayer, whom Milton had — as early as 1959 — assisted in finding a job “involving words.” By 1975, the dashing if hopelessly self-involved 29-year-old was editor-in-chief and president of Avon Books, rescued from obscurity single-handedly by Mayer with such finds as “Call It Sleep.”
They seemed more like nephew and uncle. Mayer’s Byronic personality calmed in the company of “Rabbi” Milton; their shared multi-university educations, Jewish roots, and profound loyalties to art and literature (not to mention food and wine), combined fortuitously. Though Mayer claimed himself innocent of stalking the Glasers, he always ended up a neighbor. Including that ridge atop Lewis Hollow.
When Peter also opened a second company, all his own, he named it “The Overlook Press,” Milton created its logo: a flying elephant. Glaser (who created over a thousand book and album covers, including the completed set of Signet’s plays of Shakespeare) produced innumerable covers for Overlook, including, a freebie cover for “Spiritual Cannibalism,” the teachings of a local Big Indian guru, Rudrananda (Rudi), whose philosophy interested Milton and Shirley.
Among Overlook’s best-sellers soon was found an outsize compendium of Glaser’s most famous work entitled, “Graphic Design,” which is likely going into its twentieth printing, two years after Peter’s death and four days after Milton’s. Overlook published two more titles by Glaser, “Art is Work,” and “Drawing is Thinking.”
“A few years ago, Milton and I decided to spend our eternity in Woodstock,” wrote Shirley Glaser after the funeral ceremony for Peter Mayer at the Woodstock Artists’ Cemetery. “We inquired about a plot or two. We were shown an available space which pleased us. Somehow Peter Mayer heard about it, went to see the lovely woman who showed us our perfect plot space, and changed it for room for him and his parents and his friend Judith Thurman and her son and who knows how many others — without our permission, of course.
“One of the burdens of being Peter’s long-time friend is the real-estate one. When we lived on St Mark’s Place (Eighth Street in NYC) Peter moved to Seventh Street or Sixth Street. Then we moved to West 67th Street, Peter did also. We bought a house on Lewis Hollow Road, as did Peter some time later.
“So the idea of being buried next to Peter was a familiar one. If you were at the graveyard in the Artist’s Cemetery for Peter’s funeral (I assume you were) the pile of fresh dirt next to the hole for the casket was Milton and my plot, which we share as we plan to be cremated …. Remember that death and graveyards are just another subject of interest.”
The art of compromise
Milton’s generosity seemed its own reward. But the giver sometimes got something back in return.. The most famous example may be the logo and ad campaign Glaser designed for an early microbrewery, soon talked out of using one brand name and talked into using another. The partners were strapped for cash and so, although doubtful of ever receiving a dime, Milton agreed to accept a percentage of future profits in lieu of fee. The Brooklyn Brewery became a billion-dollar business.
In Woodstock Milton did free posters for the Maverick Concert’s summer offerings, provided the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum a free lecture series (resulting in a parking lot stuffed with cars from out of state), and donated an entire series of his own “Monet on the Bridge” for impressively lucrative auction sales.
Milton Glaser taught his students to look toward the future. “Nothing is more exciting than to see somebody change from a condition of inertness into a mind that begins to inquire about meaning,” he said in a lecture at trhe School for Visual Arts. “If you don’t do something to project into the future that way the possibility for total self-absorption and narcissism becomes much greater.”
Solving any problem is more important than being right, he taught. ”Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad – the client, the audience and you. Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable.”
Milton had an instinct for the successful compromise. First scribbled on the back of an envelope, “I ‘heart’ NY” came to him during the mid-Seventies in a speeding city taxi cab, following an initially unfruitful meeting with governmental elders. Making a gift of the uniquely popular collection of “four marks,” Glaser helped revitalize New York’s sense of itself.
We need one another
More recently, he devised what turned out to be his last form of artistic expression, the single word “Together” consisting of large black letters with stripes of various thickness and colors pointed in different directions. This Monday The New York Times displayed it on the front page of its arts section.
At this time of unprecedented uncertainty, what was it intended to express?
“I have no faith in my own prediction,” he responded. “I don’t think there’s any way of telling what’s going to happen. I know this [pandemic] is a cosmic change, and that nothing will ever be the same again. But I do know that if there’s a collective consciousness, if we realize we are all related and we need one another, that would be the best thing that could happen.”
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