Wright Auction

The Zanders Paper Company has a long tradition of producing impressive annual calendars to demonstrate the quality of its product. They approached me with the idea of a calendar on the theme of color (perhaps because their paper is particularly good for color printing). A dream assignment. I proposed a series of portraits of artists whose were notable for their color. I attempted to execute each portrait in a manner that would reflect some aspect of their work. There is also a thematic frame around each portrait to create an additional narrative. I might have been inspired by a show of Seurat paintings in which he frequently continued paintings onto the frame.

Milton Glaser

That duration between seeing and understanding is always what you play with in communicating ideas.

Milton Glaser

In 1974, Glaser left Push Pin to establish his own studio; in 1977, he would design what is possibly the most recognizable and imitated graphic in the world — the I ♥ NY logo, expressing, in no uncertain terms, his love for the city. Even though he is most known for the sublime simplicity of I ♥ NY, Glaser’s wide scope of work embraces ambiguity, a joyful “lack of coherence” (as he calls it) and, above all, the assertion that art is work. Glaser has designed over 400 posters, identities for cultural institutions, newspapers, restaurants and grocery stores, he co-founded New York magazine in 1968, and has taught at the lauded School of Visual Arts for over fifty years. But at the center of all this work, this copious outpouring of visual forms, riddles and jubilations, is Glaser’s insistence that design is a fundamentally humanistic act that should do no harm, and express “the commonality and continuity of all human experience”. Glaser personally selected this collection to reflect and celebrate his momentous career on the occasion of his 91st birthday.

The deepest role of art is creating an alternative reality, something the world needs desperately at this time. Art is the most benign and fundamental way of creating community that our species has discovered. Mozart and Matisse — children of Eros — make us more human and more generous to one another.

Milton Glaser