Vehicle of the Visual: An Interview with Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser is the designer behind one of the most iconic and enduring images in the world, the “I Love New York” logo, along with the famous psychedelic Bob Dylan poster and other well-known images like the Brooklyn Brewery logo. His thousands of creations are sprawled across our physical and digital worlds. In 1954, he co-founded Pushpin Studios, keeping illustration alive as photography was starting to take over. He studied in Italy with painter Giorgio Morandi as a Fulbright scholar. In 1968, he started New York Magazine.

On display now at the Binghamton University Art Museum are two collections displayed in conjunction: in Milton Glaser: Modulated Patterns, we find a series of prints of landscapes and images influenced by the work of Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Klimt. Then there is The Piero Project, a collection of watercolors exploring the work of Italian Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca. Carousel recently had the opportunity to speak with the lauded designer, illustrator, and artist.

TRIPLE CITIES CAROUSEL: Where do you start when approaching a piece of artwork as opposed to a piece of design, and when do these processes overlap?

MILTON GLASER: Nobody knows what the distinction between art and design is, including students of design, and art, and instructors who teach design and art. They are two different intentions and they require two different states of mind. What is art is really determined by history, not by people who claim to be artists. So you don't know if you're doing art or not until maybe 100 years after you're dead. Design has a purpose - that purpose is to go from an existing condition to a preferred one. That goes from when you're designing a handle for a broom or an automobile. There's something about it that intrinsically can be improved functionally. Art has a very different role in life - it has to do with the transformation of the mind into the way of seeing reality differently - so you can see, when you use the words interchangeably, you create mischief.

TCC: Some of your designs, like the Bob Dylan poster and the “I Love New York” logo - these are iconic. What do you think made them stick?

MG: That's one of the great questions, a question I've been asking myself over my life, and it's a question of preference, right? Why do people prefer one thing over another? Why do some people say I can't endure red, or I love blue-green, or that picture looks fabulous, or… what I'm saying is that these objective analyses are useless. The question is preference. Why people prefer one thing or another, questions of why do you prefer pizza to a hamburger, try to answer that question and you find most of it exists very early in the brain development; we become accustomed to certain experiences. Familiarity is certainly one of the things that determines preference, right? If you grow up having rye bread with every meal, you will always prefer rye bread over white bread. Or - that's a clumsy analysis, but it has to do with familiarity and preconception. What I always say is that a big problem in life to see clearly is to eliminate preconception, and that's virtually impossible to do, whether it's about whether you like a person because of their personality or whether you prefer one food or another, what you have been given, which is inaccessible to you. You don't know what the meaning is of having been held by your mother in terms of every other decision you make in your life.

TCC: As a designer, you’re constantly in conversation with this invisible audience that you are trying to reach. What has creating work for that audience taught you about people?

MG: What happens is, after you produce thousands of pieces of work, you discover that people like certain of them more than others of them and then very often you're at odds to consider what things are that made people choose those. For instance, the “I Love NY;” why did that become so incredibly dismal and popular in the world, all over the world? I have no idea.

But I don't look at my work entirely as a marketing issue. People in the marketing world and advertising view everything this way. They'll tell you what is preference - what people like better than other things - they'll say, “well, yellow and blue is a more popular combination than purple and orange.” And then what that is used for - and this is the devil in marketing - is that is used as a reference for future work. So marketing starts by observing the past and seeing what you can learn from that in terms of repeating your success. The repetition of success is disastrous to personal growth and to artistry.

TCC: You have been involved with the work Piero della Francesca for a long time. What do you find so captivating about his work?

MG: Well I can only give you the part that is not essential. The not essential part is first the exquisite sense of proportion and scale, a luminous sense of color, and above all - which is impossible to describe - is a sense of integrity, wholeness, and understanding of the universe. Everything is in the right relationship to everything else and there is a benign spirit that you experience when you look at Piero. The thing that you know about art, the thing that is knowable, is that it changes your experience and that you feel differently about the world. When I'm looking at Piero, I feel sublimely happy, for one thing, and the anxiety of the world and neuroses of the world and the rage of the world disappear. Why do they disappear? I have no idea. All I know is it occurs and it is palpable, and I am never as calm or as happy as when I'm looking at a Piero della Franceso.

TCC: When you reinterpret the work of some like Piero della Francesca, what are you looking to find?

MG: The old way to learn how to paint was to copy old masters; that's the traditional way of learning how to paint, from Renaissance art. But what you do is begin to understand something without raising it to consciousness. Something about form and color and shape and illusion by copying what someone else has observed - you can't end there, you have to go on for what you've learned by copying - and when I did the Piero series where I travelled about Italy and drew from Piero, my idea was to treat Piero as nature, like you're looking out a window and you paint the landscape. When I looked at Piero, I looked at him as though he were nature; I paint details of his observation in a series that deviated from what he did but used his visualization as the starting point.

TCC: You have lived as an artist for a long time and millions of people see your work every day. Do you feel that you are somehow on display with that work, or has time created distance between you and it?

MG: First of all, I don't know if I'm an artist or not. You see, most people self-designate the fact that they're an artist. And I always say, you know, there's no entry exam for this. It's self-anointing. All you have to do to be an artist is to claim it: you just say, “I'm an artist,” and there's no way of telling if that's true or not. Certainly you look at the work that people produce as they come out of school, as they pursue their career, and you discover that that's not necessarily true. Only history makes that determination because people, enough people finally find this quality in the work, this quality of understanding what is real through art. So I have always considered myself someone who communicates through the vehicle of visual material. Every once in a while I hope that the work that I've done fulfills this other possibility, the possibility of seeing what is real and entering into the world of art, but whether that occurs or whether I have the capacity to do it is all an illusion. It will be determined many hundred years after I'm gone, and I feel that way of everything we see.

What's nice about being in a practice like design or illustration or the arts in general, is that you have a record of your existence - that you see the way you developed and changed if you do, and you see your own history in visualization. I thought that what was interesting in the show was the fact that I have work that I did 25, 30 years ago and I have work that I've done two years ago, and it's interesting to see where they have changed and where they have remained the same or similar. I have really made an effort through my life to keep it moving, to not follow Picasso's example that once you've learned something you can give it up.

Milton Glaser: Modulated Patterns and The Piero Project will run through May 20, 2017 at the Binghamton University Art Museum. Admission is free. More info on Glaser and a vast collection of his work can be found at miltonglaser.com.