Glaser

The Art of Milton Glaser (Interview) by Brad Holland

As one of the founders of Pushpin Studios in 1954, Milton Glaser helped revive illustration in the 1960’s when photography was thought to have swept the field. After studying at the High School of Music & Art, then Cooper Union in New York, Glaser studied etching in Bologna, Italy, with painter Giorgio Morandi. In a speech in 1998, he cited two opposites—Morandi and Pablo Picasso—as his "artistic models." Artists who are driven by opposing passions often come to grief. But those who succeed in harnessing them often give off light. More often celebrated for his design, Milton’s drawings have become increasingly personal and spiritual. The integrity he brings to his work has made him a touchstone for many artists, including me. Holland: You’ve previously mentioned Morandi and Picasso as your two models. I think anyone could understand Picasso's influence on you. His work is so protean, as yours is. But the influence of Morandi is less obvious. What does he mean to you? Glaser: For me, Picasso and Morandi represent a full range of human artistic possibilities. Morandi seems parochial and narrow. He went to Paris once, didn’t like it, and never went again. He lived modestly. He was an academic bureaucrat. He taught at the academy three times a week. He never married. He didn’t seem to be interested in money, fame, or women. He painted a few portraits of people. The rest are landscapes or still lifes. He would make the slightest change, like moving a passage of gray a quarter of an inch. If you wanted to buy a painting, he would write your name and address on the back of the canvas and then years later, after he had finished the painting, he would turn it over, see who it belonged to and send it. Morandi was selling paintings then for $200. Picasso, on the other hand, seems to have been one of the most egocentric, narcissistic men in human history. For him, there was no world except Picasso. Others were just instruments to be used, like subjects of a painting. He wanted all the money, all the fame, all the accomplishment. He sucked all the air out of a room. I can’t imagine two more opposite manifestations of human potential, and I think I am equally affected by both: Morandi’s modesty, his dedication, his simplicity, his desire for nothing except the work; and this raging lunatic who wanted to devour the world. Holland: You studied with Morandi. Do you believe you’d have been as influenced by his work if you had not met him? Glaser: I knew his etchings before I went to study with him. He taught hard ground etching, where you draw with a needle and make a very precise line. There is no tonality or anything else to confuse the issue. You draw it right or you go elsewhere. But I became more interested in what he did, as I got better acquainted with his drawings and paintings, which are very different than the etchings. Holland: Morandi’s work is so ascetic. It lacks all of the things normally used to make a picture interesting. There’s something almost monastic about that kind of renunciation. Glaser: He had that quality in his personality as well as his work. He was very austere, very reserved, very proper in every way. You couldn’t imagine him getting excited. He was self-contained with a profound, almost innocent decency. When I say that I’m kind of between Picasso and Morandi, the thing that I love about Morandi is his clarity of vision: the fact that everything is so rational and unencumbered by emotionalism, although you, as a viewer, have an emotional response to the work. The paintings are small, undramatic, with no narrative. There are no virtuoso effects. So you have to ask the fundamental question of what makes these works meaningful. All the attributes you might use to dramatize a painting are not there. There’s a sense of modesty that becomes monumental and you can’t figure out why. Holland: Modesty is not a quality one normally identifies with Picasso. He was the poster-boy for self-expression. The original gangster with genius. Frankly, I always thought he was less original than Matisse, who in some ways he pursued as if he were Captain Ahab trying to catch Moby Dick. Glaser: Picasso was constantly referring back to Matisse. He considered Matisse his great adversary, but he had tremendous admiration for him. When Matisse died, Picasso, with his usual self-admiration, said, "Now I will have to paint for both of us." What I like about Picasso—and you could say this about Matisse as well—was his willingness to take chances. He abandoned one thing after another: surrealism, analytical cubism, synthetic cubism. He was always willing to give it up. Artistic courage is usually overdramatized, but it’s the ability to leave something behind and try something else when you don’t know where you’re going. That is admirable and I love that quality. You never lose the fear that you’re going to fuck up and your reputation will be ruined. He was fearless about what he did. There have been very few figures like him in history, willing to abandon success in favor of discovering other possibilities. Holland: Do you know The Hedgehog & The Fox by Isaiah Berlin? Glaser: I do. I’ve quoted its premise often. Holland: His theme is that everybody can be classified as either a fox or a hedgehog: a fox with many ideas, a hedgehog with one big idea. You’ve always seemed like a fox to me, with influences coming from everywhere. How much of a hedgehog are you? Glaser: I’m interested in most of the things that have happened in the visual world. And probably like you, my influences are more outside the profession than inside it. I haven’t used the profession as a guide for what I aspire to. I’ve always believed that one can do many things in professional life. Not that this is necessarily desirable. If you’re a fox, you don’t want to act like a hedgehog and vice versa. There’s no ultimate value in doing many things or doing one thing. These seeming contradictions are really part of the same universe. People want to think of them as opposites, but either path is equally valued. Holland: I’ve always thought that people who draw tend to be rational, and painters emotional. Of course, great artists tend to be both. And since opposites attract, a lot of the best artists seem to come from families where one parent was very rational and the other very emotional. Were your parents opposites? Glaser: They were very different. My mother was very courageous, a sort of outgoing woman who didn’t care about the opinion of the world. She was enormously supportive without qualification and she convinced me I could do anything. My father was modest and had a more conformist personality. He was resistant. My secret realization was that I could use my mother to overthrow my father. But I realized not long ago what I had not been willing to admit in my life, and that was the presence of my father in myself. It’s a complicated issue when your identification with your mother is so complete. On the other hand, my mother’s courage and my father’s modesty might echo the relationship between Picasso and Morandi we spoke about. Holland: When you realized you wanted to be an artist, did you think of being a painter? Glaser: When you start, you don’t know the distinction. All you know is that you like to make things. I realized early that a painter’s life was not for me. I couldn’t imagine painting pictures, selling them in a g

 in a gallery, and having people put them on a wall in their house. It didn’t make sense. I wanted to do something more visible. At first, it was comic strips. When I was attending the High School of Music & Art, I realized there were alternatives. When I got to Cooper Union, I was pretty well on my path to the applied arts. I liked the idea of being public and useful and solving problems, and of course, I liked telling stories.

Holland: How conscious were you of all this when you started Pushpin? Or was it a couple of guys sitting around in a bar saying, "Let’s rent space together?"

Glaser: I think it was the latter. We were all studying design and we wanted to continue the feeling of being in school. We had no idea what the consequences would be. We had never worked professionally. I had worked in a package design studio between high school and college, but outside of that, we didn’t know what a studio was or how you ran one. We started after I came back from Italy in 1954, so I was very interested in the difference between modernism and the history of the Renaissance and the Baroque. I realized there was another way of thinking about art and imagery. Also, I never felt part of the history of illustration. I felt no attachment to the Saturday Evening Post and the Westport School. That kind of illustration seemed to have lost its passion, its ability to look fresh. At Pushpin, we took advantage of a change in attitude going on with artists such as Tom Allen, Robert Weaver, Tom Ungerer, and Robert Andrew Parker, among others.

Holland: Yet you brought a unique sensibility to illustration. Your model was more Reubens running a studio than, say, Van Gogh. And that was at a time when Van Gogh and the whole melodrama of his life had become a dysfunctional model for 20th century artists.

Glaser: Yes, and unfortunately it’s a very self-centered model. It says, "Do your work and you will convince the world to love you, pay you a lot of money, and make you famous. All you’ve got to do is stick to it and wait to be discovered." This is a total delusion about what really happens in the world. Unfortunately, this idea of the primacy of self-expres




what really happens in the world. Unfortunately, this idea of the primacy of self-expression has infected the schools, which continue this myth. It’s such a total, miserable lie. Perhaps it’s perpetuated by frustrated academics who encourage the innocent to think it’s true so they have the strength to go on themselves. But all it produces is a generation of bitter people who can’t figure out why they can’t make a living. There is something fundamentally wrong about this way of creating expectations. At Pushpin, all we were trying to do was make a living and do the best work we could. We started the studio. We looked for work. We got jobs. We inspired each other. Then, at a certain point, we realized our work had some cultural significance

Holland: Did you ever think that you’d get out of commercial art and do something else?

Glaser: No, I had no other ambitions. But I never fully understood the distinction between being a painter and an applied artist. Admittedly, you more often have to deal with criteria that make it hard to create work of emotional or aesthetic significance. But once in a while, you do a book jacket, an album cover, an illustration that isn’t compromised by its purpose. Some people use commercial considerations as an excuse not to do good work. They say, "Well, we’re not really free." But as you know, meaningful work happens as you press through, regardless of the constraints. In fact, for many people, constraints make good work possible.
work had some cultural significance

Holland: Did you ever think that you’d get out of commercial art and do something else?

Glaser: No, I had no other ambitions. But I never fully understood the distinction between being a painter and an applied artist. Admittedly, you more often have to deal with criteria that make it hard to create work of emotional or aesthetic significance. But once in a while, you do a book jacket, an album cover, an illustration that isn’t compromised by its purpose. Some people use commercial considerations as an excuse not to do good work. They say, "Well, we’re not really free." But as you know, meaningful work happens as you press through, regardless of the constraints. In fact, for many people, constraints make good work possible.


Holland: Were you influenced by figures like William Morris?

Glaser: Yes. I was very influenced by him and the Arts and Crafts movement and by other social movements that linked aesthetics and society through the idea that a well-made object is beneficial to the user. In recent years, I’ve been interested in African sculpture, where the intent is totally unrelated to what we call art. The intent is to produce an effect, to change people. Even though the purpose of a vase is to hold water, now we are convinced that certain vases are works of art. Do your work at the highest level and let other people worry about whether it’s art or not.


Holland: I mentioned earlier that I tend to think of people who draw as logical and rational. Your work is basically drawing.

Glaser: Yes. I’m certainly a graphic artist in that sense. In recent years, I’ve moved from pen and ink and watercolor to crayons and softer materials. I think that’s moved me away from the linear a little, but I still think in terms of form and edges. I guess that’s the difference: painters see tonality. My strength has always been in shapes—forms, edges and line.

Holland: Those wizard drawings of Clarence Barron for Barron's magazine seem to embody the essence of your style. They’re similar to the linear style I first saw you do in the ‘60s, but the style is cleaner now. It describes more with less.

Glaser: I must say, I like those drawings. My early drawings were more decorative, more about pattern than drawing. I was learning on the job. These seem more relaxed and more certain to me.

Holland: They distill all the elements of your past work.

Glaser: Somehow the work has become clearer as I’ve grown older. It wasn’t so much the intent to distill things as it was to make things clearer.

Holland: There seems to be a similar ascetic quality to many of your recent pictures. In The Flowers of Evil drawings and in the Purgatory prints, it seems as if you’ve sacrificed style for directness.

Glaser: In illustration, you are always trying to persuade people to respond in a certain way. The work has to be assertive to establish its place. You have to make a strong statement in a short time. This is unlike painting, where you can look at a picture over 10 years and still find it unfolding. Perhaps because great books are re-read, the opportunity for the illustrations to emerge slowly reduces the need for immediate understanding.

Holland: How did the Purgatory pictures come about? Were you commissioned to do a book?

Glaser: Yes. I have a gallery dealer in Italy, who gave me Purgatory to do. I thought it was a great opportunity to move toward a deeper work. I decided to do prints. In monotype, you can’t control the work—it depends on how much moisture there is in the air, how damp the paper is, the viscosity of the ink. So when you do a print, you don’t know what the results are going to be. For me, that was good. When you develop a lot of skill, you end up rendering an idea. That’s different from letting the picture push you. So I was forced to accommodate the process of making the prints, and it pushed me elsewhere. I had to be more resourceful and react to what I was producing.

Holland: In the Purgatory prints, it seems as if you’ve renounced everything but style. There are no descriptive elements, but they encompass a whole range of emotions.

Glaser: It is interesting that you say that. There were two things happening. One was that they weren’t drawn, they were cut out. So, whatever facility I have at drawing had to be transformed into physically cutting something out, and I cut about as well as an average person. Then, as we noted, there’s the fact that the work itself was not predictable or controllable. I had to respond to whatever was occurring and get out of the way. I guess, to some degree, it’s a way of avoiding premeditated style because the work comes from yielding to the circumstances. That is a very different idea than imposing your will on your work. The best drawings come when you look at something with reverence and yield to its uniqueness.

Holland: We live in a terribly prosaic age, and most poetry has become self-conscious and cliché and melodramatic. But there’s poetry in your work and that’s not necessarily what you would expect to find in a business-minded designer.

Glaser: Thank you. Attaining a poetic quality is certainly an aspiration. I never believed that work is simply functional. Whatever it is that makes art worth looking at doesn’t come out of your intention, but from what you are.

This conversation was recorded December 11, 2001. It was first published in Step-By-Step Graphics (now published as STEPinside design). Thanks to editor Emily Potts for suggesting it.

© Brad Holland & Milton Glaser