Milton Glaser, a graphic de-
signer who changed the vocabu-
lary of American visual culture in
the 1960s and ’70s with his
brightly colored, extroverted
posters, magazines, book covers
and record sleeves, notably his
1967 poster of Bob Dylan with psy-
chedelic hair and his “I NY”
logo, died on Friday, his 91st birth-
day, in Manhattan.
His wife and only immediate
survivor, Shirley Glaser, said the
cause was a stroke. He also had re-
nal failure.
Mr. Glaser brought wit, whimsy,
narrative and skilled drawing to
commercial art at a time when ad-
vertising was dominated by the
severe strictures of modernism on
one hand and the cozy realism of
magazines like The Saturday
Evening Post on the other.
At Push Pin Studios, which he
and several former Cooper Union
classmates formed in 1954, he
opened up design to myriad influ-
ences and styles that began to
grab the attention of magazines
and advertising agencies, largely
through the studio’s influential
promotional publication, the Push
Pin Almanack (later renamed
Push Pin Monthly Graphic).
“We were excited by the very
idea that we could use anything in
the visual history of humankind
as influence,” Mr. Glaser, who de-
signed more than 400 posters over
the course of his career, said in an
interview for the book “The Push
Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century
of Innovative Design and Illustra-
tion” (2004).
“Art Nouveau, Chinese wash
drawing, German woodcuts,
American primitive paintings, the
Viennese secession and cartoons
of the ’30s were an endless source
of inspiration,” he added. “All the
things that the doctrine of ortho-
dox modernism seemed to have
contempt for — ornamentation,
narrative illustration, visual am-
biguity — attracted us.”
Mr. Glaser delighted in combin-
ing visual elements and stylistic
motifs from far-flung sources. For
a 1968 ad for Olivetti, he modified
a 15th-century painting by Piero
di Cosimo showing a mourning
dog and inserted the Italian com-
pany’s latest portable typewriter
at the feet of the dead nymph in
the original artwork.
For the Dylan poster, a promo-
tional piece included in the 1967 al-
bum “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits,”
he created a simple outline of the
singer’s head, based on a black-
and-white self-portrait silhouette
by Marcel Duchamp, and added
thick, wavy bands of color for the
hair, forms he imported from Is-
lamic art.
Nearly six million posters made
their way into homes across the
world. Endlessly reproduced, the
image became one of the visual
signatures of the era.
“I NY,” his logo for a 1977 cam-
paign to promote tourism in New
York State, achieved even wider
currency. Sketched on the back of
an envelope with red crayon dur-
ing a taxi ride, it was printed in
black letters in a chubby typeface,
with a cherry-red heart standing
in for the word “love.” Almost im-
mediately, the logo became an in-
stantly recognized symbol of New
York City, as recognizable as the
Empire State Building or the Stat-
ue of Liberty.
“I’m flabbergasted by what
happened to this little, simple
nothing of an idea,” Mr. Glaser told
The Village Voice in 2011.
After the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, T-shirts embla-
zoned with the logo sold in the
thousands, as visitors to the city
seized on it as a way of expressing
solidarity. Mr. Glaser designed a
modified version — “I NY More
Than Ever,” with a dark bruise on
the heart — which was distributed
as a poster throughout the city
and reproduced on the front and
back pages of The Daily News on
Sept. 19.
Milton Glaser was born on June
26, 1929, in the Bronx, to Eugene
and Eleanor (Bergman) Glaser,
immigrants from Hungary. His fa-
ther owned a dry-cleaning and tai-
loring shop; his mother was a
homemaker.
When Milton was a young boy,
an older cousin drew a bird on the
side of a paper bag to amuse him.
“Suddenly, I almost fainted with
the realization that you could cre-
ate life with a pencil,” he told Inc.
magazine in 2014. “And at that mo-
ment, I decided that’s how I was
going to spend my life.”
He took drawing classes with
Raphael and Moses Soyer, the so-
cial realist artists, before enrolling
in the High School of Music & Art
in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H.
LaGuardia High School of Music
& Art and Performing Arts). After
twice failing the entrance exam
for Pratt Institute, he worked at a
package-design company before
being accepted by the Cooper Un-
ion for the Advancement of Sci-
ence and Art.
While at the Cooper Union, he
and three classmates — Seymour
Chwast, Edward Sorel and
Reynold Ruffins — rented part of
a loft in Greenwich Village and
created a company, Design Plus.
They completed one project: cork
place mats with a silk-screened
design, which they sold to Wana-
maker’s department store.
After graduating from the Coo-
per Union in 1951 and working in
the promotion department at
Vogue magazine, Mr. Glaser won
a Fulbright scholarship to the
Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna,
Italy, where he studied etching
with the still-life painter Giorgio
Morandi and, in the time-honored
way, drew from plaster casts. The
experience left him a fervent be-
liever in the discipline of drawing
and an enemy of found images
and collage in design work.
“A designer who must rely on
cutouts and rearranging to create
effects, who cannot achieve the
specific image or idea he wants by
drawing, is in trouble,” he told the
magazine Graphis in 1960.
Returning to New York, Mr. Gla-
ser resumed his partnership withhis former classmates, who had
created the Push Pin Almanack to
advertise their work and allow
them to experiment. When they
founded Push Pin Studios in 1954,
Mr. Glaser was named its presi-
dent. The studio quickly became
recognized for its bright colors,
surreal juxtapositions and exag-
gerated, flattened forms, seen in
book jackets (Mr. Glaser designed
all the covers for the Signet Clas-
sic Shakespeare series), maga-
zine illustrations, record covers,
television commercials and ty-
pography.
He married Shirley Girton, his
replacement at the package-de-
sign company that first hired him,
in 1957. The couple collaborated
on the children’s books “If Apples
Had Teeth” (1960), “The Alp-hazeds” (2003) and “The Big
Race” (2005). They lived in Man-
hattan and Woodstock, N.Y.
Mr. Glaser, whom Newsweek
once called “one of the few gen-
iuses in the image-making trade,”
was widely credited with creating
the pudgy, cartoony style known
as “Yellow Submarine” art, popu-
larized by the 1968 animated Beat-
les film but practiced at Push Pin
since the late 1950s.
Mr. Glaser joined forces with
the editor Clay Felker in 1968 to
found New York magazine, where
he was president and design di-
rector until 1977, imposing a visual
format that still largely survives.
With his friend Jerome Snyder, the
art director of Scientific Ameri-
can, he wrote a budget-dining col-
umn, “The UndergroundGourmet,” for The New York Her-
ald Tribune and, later, New York
magazine. The column spawned a
guidebook of the same name in
1966 and “The Underground
Gourmet Cookbook” in 1975.
Mr. Glaser started his own de-
sign firm, Milton Glaser Inc., in- A year later he left Push Pin,
just as he was being given his own
show at the Museum of Modern
Art.
“At a certain point we were ac-
cepted, and once that happens, ev-
erything becomes less interest-
ing,” he said in an interview for
“Graphic Design in America: A
Visual Language History,” an ex-
hibition at the Walker Art Center
in Minneapolis in 1989.
He was hired by the British ty-
coon James Goldsmith in 1978 to
redesign the interiors, exteriors
and packaging of the Grand Union
chain of supermarkets, which Mr.
Goldsmith had just acquired. Mr.
Glaser designed several projects
for the restaurateur Joe Baum,
most memorably the Big Kitchen
food court on the ground-floor
concourse of the World Trade Cen-
ter, the 1990s redesign of Windows
on the World there and the Rain-
bow Room in Rockefeller Center.
In 1983, with Walter Bernard,
Mr. Glaser formed WBMG, a pub-
lication design firm that re-
vamped dozens of newspapers
and magazines in the United
States and abroad, including The
Washington Post and O Globo in
Brazil. He and Mr. Bernard later
collaborated on a history of their
design work, “Mag Men: 50 Years
of Making Magazines,” which was
published in December.
He managed to stay current. In
the late 1980s he designed the
AIDS logo for the World Health
Organization and the logo and
packaging for Brooklyn Brewery,
using a capital B inspired by the
old Brooklyn Dodgers. He de-
signed a logo for “Angels in Amer-
ica,” Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning play, and posters
for Vespa’s 50th anniversary in
1996 and for the final season of the
television series “Mad Men” in
2014.
Mr. Glaser, whose other books
include “The Milton Glaser Poster
Book” (1977), “Art Is Work”
(2000) and “Drawing Is Thinking”
(2008), taught for many years at
the School of Visual Arts in Man-
hattan. He was the subject of the
2008 documentary film “Milton
Glaser: To Inform and Delight.”
In 2004 he received a lifetime
achievement award from the Coo-
per-Hewitt National Design Mu-
seum (now the Cooper Hewitt,
Smithsonian Design Museum),
and in 2009 he became the first
graphic designer to receive the
National Medal of Arts.
“I’m a person who deals with
visual material whatever it is —
architecture, an object, a set of
plates, wallpaper — right now I’m
doing T-shirts,” he told Aileen
Kwun and Bryn Smith for their
book “Twenty Over Eighty: Con-
versations on a Lifetime in Archi-
tecture and Design” (2016). “I
know a lot about the way things
look, and as a consequence, I try
to see how much of that world I
can embrace.”Milton Glaser, 91, Designer Who Brightened the World, Dies
By WILLIAM GRIMESMr. Glaser in his Manhattan studio in 2012. He brought wit, whimsy and skilled drawing to commercial art.ROBERT WRIGHT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES‘At a certain point we were accepted, and once that happens,
everything becomes less interesting.’
Milton GlaserMilton Glaser’s creations included, clockwise from top left: the Bob Dylan poster that sold nearly six million copies; a logo for the Pulitzer Prize-winning
“Angels in America”; a design for a Mahalia Jackson performance; the “I NY” logo with a bruised heart after 9/11; and a New York Film Festival design.Jenny Gross contributed reporting.
30 0 N THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESSUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2020