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Milton Glaser : POP

Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, Beth Kleber

Monacelli Press , New York 2023, 288 pages, 25x30cm, ISBN 9781580936132

euro 55,00

email if you want to buy [email protected]

An overview of the work of illustrator and designer Milton Glaser during the 1960s and 70s

From 1954, when he co-founded the legendary Push Pin Studios, to the late ’70s, Milton Glaser was one of the most celebrated graphic designers of his day, whose work graced countless book and album covers, posters, magazine covers, and advertisements, both famous and little-known. Glaser largely defined the international visual style for illustration, advertising, and typeface design and interest in his legacy continues unabated, with modern creatives acknowledging his influence; for example, in 2014 Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner enlisted Glaser to design the ad campaign and branding for the show’s final season.

His renowned work garnered solo exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Creator of the iconic 'I ♥ NY' logo and cofounder of New York magazine, Glaser received numerous accolades and lifetime achievement awards. Across thousands of works across all print media, he invented a graphic language of bright, flat color, drawing and collage, imbued with wit. This collection of work from Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of his design that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.

29/10/23

#Milton Glaser #Steven Heller #Push Pin Studios #graphic designer #Zabriskie Point #Bob Dylan #Mahalia Jackson #Simon & Garfunkel #Hair #Herman Hesse #Aretha Franklin #graphic design books #designbooksmilano #fashionbooksmilano

"Bad Trip" Illustration by Haruo Miyauchi accompanying “The CIA’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” by Tad Szulc, Psychology Today, November 1977 "Artist's portrayal of the suicide of biochemist Frank Olson, who jumped from a New York hotel room at 2:30 A.M. on November 28, 1953, nine days after the CIA gave him LSD. Foreground, Dr. Robert Lashbrook, the CIA scientist who brought Olson to New York to seek treatment."

#haruo miyauchi #push pin studios #psychology today #illustration #cia #frank olson #mkultra #tad szulc #lsd #magazines

Seymour Chwast: End Bad Breath, 1967

#seymour chwast #end bad breath #1967 #push pin studios #graphic design #pop culture #illustration

Sayonara Amerika Sayonara Nippon: The Global Roots of Tadanori Yokoo’s Visual Language

Just a quick note before we get going: I can not speak or read Japanese. While Tadanori Yokoo was infamous and influential in 60s and 70s art and design circles, very little has been written about him in English. Much of my research consists of googling the kanji spelling of his name, 横尾忠則, combing through Japanese internet archives, and translating as best I can. There are a few online translation tools I use. For a no frills Japanese-english dictionary, I use Weblio. To translate sentences and phrases, I use JIsho.org. And to translate the text within Yokoo’s work itself, I use Google Translate’s “word lens” feature on my phone. When I point my camera at Japanese text, the app translates it as best it can. None of these methods are perfect, but with a proper fact checking, they do offer a glimpse into Yokoo’s work I wouldn’t otherwise have.

For the sake of context, I’d like to discuss Yokoo’s background, his early influences, and his nondescript career as a graphic designer before he took the contemporary art world by storm in the mid 1960s.

Tadanori Yokoo was born in 1936 and grew up in Nishiwaki, Hyōgo Profecture, a modest working class town in south central Japan. As an infant, he was adopted by relatives, an elderly, working class couple who owned and operated a kimono silk wholesaler.

Yokoo began drawing almost immediately, first copying illustrations from children’s books, similar to the ones below:

Growing up in, as Yokoo remembered later, “premodern” Nishiwaki, a place of simple, old world, “nativist” values, had a profound effect on his pop-art aesthetic. Similar to Lichtenstein's comic strips, and Warhol’s soup cans, Yokoo found endless inspiration from the everyday images of his Showa-era youth.

Yokoo loved kitsch, and specifically remembered the labels his parents attached to the wholesale silk they sold. The charming designs on these labels blended traditional Japanese design, with Western themes and motifs. Yokoo’s work would do much the same, elevating the quaint and benevolent to the outer reaches of the avant garde.

Another influence from Yokoo’s childhood were Menko cards. Menko was a children’s game where cards made of thick paper or wood were slapped down to flip over an opponent’s card. Menko cards featured famous samurai, sports heros, and movie stars, and also display a growing western influence on Japanese culture post WWII.

Yokoo had no formal artistic training. Yet, needing money to support himself after high school, he landed work as a graphic designer. He learned design principles and printmaking techniques on the job, first working for a printing company, then a newspaper, and finally an advertising firm.

During these years, Yokoo absorbed the aeshetics of modern design. He gravitated towards the bold, playful, and innovative work churned out NYC’s Push Pin studios. Yokoo was especially influenced by the work of Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser.

Here’s a Selection of Seymour Chwast’s work in the late 50s and early 60s:

And a election of Milton Glaser’s designs from the same period, pre-1965:

Later, when his prints were displayed in America, Yokoo in turn inspired the designers at Push Pin, as seen in Push Pin’s 1969 anti-war ad.

Regional success in graphic design led Yokoo to move to Tokyo in 1960, where he was hired by the premier design firm in Japan, Nippon Design Company, or NDC. Tokyo at the time was experiencing a youth revolution in politics, arts, and music, similar to the hippie counterculture in the United States. The forward thinking ideas Yokoo encountered in Tokyo would inspire him to rebel against the forms of modern design and empower his transformation from respected graphic designer to ground breaking contemporary artist.

But before his emergence as a singular artistic voice following his first gallery showing in 1965, Yokoo capped his pre-fame graphic design career at NDC with his work on a design campaign for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Yokoo was one of nearly a dozen of Japan’s top designers to work on the seminal graphics for the games, which was a seen at the time as symbolizing Japan’s resurgence and modernization following WWII. The graphics were quirky, and sleek, and hugely influential around the world. Most notably, the design campaign was the first time simple male and female pictograms were used designate gendered bathrooms. These graphics were soon adopted by the British Rail in the UK as part of a major modernization program and corporate re-branding, which soon became universal symbols

“Facilities label” as part of Tokyo Olympics design campaign: