To Inform and Delight

The Collection of Milton Glaser

For over sixty years, Milton Glaser, one of America’s foremost and influential graphic designers, has made it his business to look at the world closely. From this devotional act of looking has sprung a distinctly American vernacular of design — one that is both reverent of and transgressive toward the historical, celebrates pastiche and intuition over immediate coherence, and is as proudly intellectual as it is raffish. The present collection of over two hundred works, from Glaser's own personal collection, is a visual testament to his limitless range, compassionate curiosity and belief that the field of design is a “philosophical inquiry into the nature of truth, beauty, and reality”.

199 MILTON GLASER
*original art for Dante's Purgatorio*

136 MILTON GLASER
*Juilliard (Wing), original art for The Juilliard School poster*

120 MILTON GLASER
*Illumination and Bricks, original art for Volunteers in Service of America poster*

113 MILTON GLASER
*original art for I Love New York: Spring Flower Festival poster*

Glaser considers his career as a graphic designer a “preordained condition”. In 1954, at just twenty-five-years-old, Glaser, along with Seymour Chwast, Reynold Ruffins and Edward Sorel founded Push Pin Studios — a graphic design firm that Glaser said was run “like a bunch of art students trying to change history”. Through their eclectic, boisterous approach to designing album covers, posters, publications and logos, Push Pin inspired a seismic shift away from the exacting and severe “Swiss Precisionism” that had swayed graphic design since the 1930s. The studio was regarded as a beacon for the new modern era of graphic design, so much so that in 1970 they were the first American studio to have an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Several early works by Glaser from this era are featured in the auction, including works for the studio’s equally influential monthly magazine, Push Pin Graphic.

129 MILTON GLASER
*Follies Girl, original art for Push Pin Graphics magazine*

135 MILTON GLASER
*Flower in Room, original art for Fish in the Sky*

147 MILTON GLASER
*New York is About New York, original art for New York magazine*

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.

110 MILTON GLASER
*original art for Jean-Philippe Rameau's Les Indes Galantes album cover, Columbia Records*

123 MILTON GLASER
*Night of the Snow Leopard, original art for New York Zoological Society.*

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

Milton Glaser 1929–2020

Milton Glaser was born in 1929 to Hungarian Jewish émigrés living in the South Bronx. From a young age, he sketched and recalls that his “earliest commissions were in grade school, where [he] drew naked women for older boys for a penny a piece”. At twelve-years-old, he began taking formal drawing lessons with the Russian American social realist painter Moses Soyer. Glaser was exposed to social consciousness (an ethos that would come to shape his practice as a designer) from a young age, growing up in communist-leaning cooperative housing in the Bronx and steeped in a progressive, Jewish “attitude toward life, food, music, and intellectual pursuit”.

Glaser attended LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and went on to study at Cooper Union. After graduating in 1951, Glaser received a Fulbright to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where he worked under the renowned modernist Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, who proved to be hugely influential to the young designer. Of Morandi’s work, Glaser says that it “slows the eye, asking it to give up its inattention, its restless scanning, and to give full weight to something small…[it] provides a lesson in seeing.”

While at Cooper Union, Glaser met his future collaborators Edward Sorel and Seymour Chwast; after Glaser returned from Bologna, they went on to form (along with Reynold Ruffins) the influential Push Pin Studios in 1954, a graphic design firm that re-introduced playfulness, historical motifs and a youthful energy to the staid styles that had reigned in graphic design since the early 20th century. The studio also began publishing the monthly experimental, freeform magazine Push Pin Graphic in 1957, which covered everything from the writings of Franz Kafka, the anxiety of nuclear war, and fishing. Push Pin Studio’s irreverence and eclecticism reflected the changing American culture and set a precedence for what contemporary graphic design would become in the latter half of the century.

In 1968, Glaser, along with Clay Felker, founded New York magazine; similar to Push Pin Graphic, New York celebrated the highs and lows of American culture (with equal aplomb), appealed to young, restless intellectuals and was visually audacious. Glaser served as the art director until 1977 and was known for his regular column, “Underground Gourmet”, which covered all the cheap eats to be found in New York.

Glaser left Push Pin in 1974 to establish Milton Glaser, Inc.; he wasted no time further establishing himself as a leading figure in the design community. In 1977, he designed the iconic I ♥️ NY logo and, for the five decades that followed, brought his cerebral approachability to corporate identities, restaurant interiors, public spaces, exhibition design, publications (under his firm WBMG with Walter Bernard), posters, cultural institutions and even children’s books with his wife Shirley. Glaser’s impact in shaping the language and landscape of American design cannot be overstated; his now-famous mantra art is work is reflected in the generosity of his output and embodies the uniquely American attitude that leads you to further the equation to: art is work is life; Glaser made a life out of making things for the benefit of humanity to look at, meditate upon, and incorporate into our collective selfhood.

Glaser’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1975) and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1977) and is held in prestigious collections throughout the world, including the Smithsonian Institution, D.C., the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Cooper Hewitt in 2004 and was the first designer to be awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2009. Glaser passed away in June of 2020, on his 91st birthday.

Auction Results Milton Glaser