Poster power
A new book celebrates the iconic artworks of graphic designer Milton Glaser
The work for which New York artist, illustrator and graphic designer Milton Glaser is second-best known is a poster that was included with Bob Dylan’s 1967 greatest hits album, one of the 450-plus posters he has designed since 1965. (His best known? The “I Heart NY” logo, designed in 1976 in the back of a taxicab.)
The image shows a black silhouette of Dylan in profile, his curls swirling into psychedelic rainbows, but, as Glaser reveals in a new book, Milton Glaser Posters, it was in turn heavily inspired by a 1957 self-portrait by Marcel Duchamp: “the difference between influence and plagiarism is not always clear,” he writes.
It’s this kind of mildly sardonic, self-deprecating commentary that makes Milton Glaser Posters an enjoyable read, though, of course, we’re here for the pictures, which range from posters for Stevie Wonder and Mahalia Jackson concerts and the Newport Jazz Festival to an advert for dog food.
Glaser, who co-founded New York magazine in 1968 and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama in 2009, is now 88, still at work and, as the poster he designed in the wake of 9/11 shows, very much at the top of his game.
— Milton Glaser Posters (Abrams) is published on 27 March