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Art Is Work: Graphic Design, Interiors, Objects, and Illustrations
By Milton Glaser
Overlook Press, Woodstock, NY, U.S.A., 2000.
272 pp., cloth.
ISBN 1-58567-069-3.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, 2022 X Avenue, Dysart , IA 52224-9767, U.S.A. E-mail: ballast@netins.net
Arguably, no living graphic designer has been more influential than Milton Glaser. Born in New York in 1929, he attended Cooper Union, studied in Italy with Giorgio Morandi, then joined with two friends in 1954 to establish an innovative design firm called Push Pin Studio. It is evidence of his influence that American illustration in the 1960s is often referred to as the "Push Pin era." His reputation as an extraordinary illustrator, designer and teacher (at the School of Visual Arts) was accelerated by his design of a now-famous poster of the singer Bobby Dylan (1967); his role as co-founder and designer of New York Magazine (1968); and publication of the book Milton Glaser: Graphic Design (1972), an introspective guided tour of his own creative process, which became the longest selling design book in publishing history. Now, at age 62, he will almost assuredly double the range of his influence on young and middle-aged designers by this large-sized, lengthy, lavish book that is filled to capacity with hundreds of full-color illustrations (sometimes 9 or 10 per spread) and, as in his earlier volume, with brilliant, amusing and eloquent thoughts about how and why he looks at life (and design) in the way that he does. The book's title, as explained in an opening dialog, is derived from his growing concern about art being dissociated from other aspects of everyday life, and its widespread definition as "an activity driven entirely by the needs of self-expression." It would be far, far better, concludes Glaser, to simply think of art as work.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review 16, No. 2, Winter 2000-2001.)
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