Here is Milton Glaser, on a day thick with the torrid New York summer. He is at a conference table on the second floor of the building on East 32d Street where he has spent decades changing the way we see. As he speaks, Glaser’s tall frame hunches forward in the chair, and he seems to be reduced to eyes and hands.

The eyes are penetrating. The long fingers of his hands are making subtle movements: curling, spreading, extending, as if eyes and hands are easing into precise coordination and the moment when a hand will hold a pencil and make marks on paper.

I first saw Glaser in 1968, a few months after he and Clay Felker founded New York magazine. Felker was then the greatest magazine editor of the day, full of energy, bursting with ideas. I’d often find myself in the cubicle next to Felker’s office, parked behind a typewriter, watching both men in action. Felker would arrive each morning, brimming with ideas he had absorbed the evening before while doing his rounds ofcocktail parties, openings., dinner parties. Over coffee, he would unload his notions to an audience of one: Milton Glaser. “What we should do is…” Felker would begin, and ideas for articles would pour from him in an, excited rush. Glaser, from his totally focused silence, would fix him with those penetrating eyes and say: “That’s fine, Clay, but what’s the headline?” Or “I think I know what you mean, Clay, but how to I illustrate that concept?” And I realized that although Felker edited the magazine, Glaser edited Felker.

Today, Milton Glaser is 70 years old, but the work retains the freshness of his own youth. Born in New York on June 26, 1929, he graduated from the High School of Music and Art in 1947, and then won a scholarship to the Cooper Union Art School. That was a wonderful time in New York. The end of the war (and the Depression that preceded it) produced a great surge of optimism, a feeling that young people could now do anything, pursue any career, chase any shining star. After a dismal time, they could make everything new.

At Cooper Union, Glaser and his friends were trying to find their own way to the new. Most rejected the prevailing styles of fine or applied art. Abstract expressionism was already hardening into its own easily stencilled version of the academic, with hard rules laid down by imperious critics. In design, the example of the Swiss was inspiring a kind of icy formalism among its imitators. In their different ways, Glaser and his friends began to shape an art that was distinct, varied, eclectic in the best sense, and above all, urban.

Glaser’s own work was permanently altered by a sojourn in Italy on a Fulbright scholarship (1952-53). As a student in the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where he worked with Giorgio Morandi, he found himself in a country that had forever enriched by the visions of artists and their patrons. When he returned in 1954, Glaser, Seymour Chwast and their friends
founded Pushpin Studios. For the next 20 years, their work exerted immense influence on designers and illustrators in the United States and the rest of the world; it continues to do so today..

Once the plural visions of Pushpin had begun to triumph, Glaser did not stand still. His art was confident, restless, always moving forward. He discovered that he had a talent for the creation of business structures within which his work could flourish. At New York magazine, he was president and design director from its founding in 1968 until its sale to Rupert Murdoch in 1977. Even while working at New York, establishing the concept of the city magazine that was to spawn so many imitators, he continued producing posters, book jackets, and other design projects for a variety of clients. After the disbanding of Pushpin in 1974, he founded Milton Glaser Inc., which was to allow even greater expansion of his visions. In 1983, he teamed up with Walter Bernard to create WBMG, which specializes in the graphic renovation of a wide range of publications, from the Washington Post to La Vanguardia in Spain.

The sheer abundance of his work, and it endless fecundity, make it difficult to define a Glaser style. Glaser has not repeated himself enough to have established what is usually thought of as a “style.”

What does exist is a unique Glaser approach to solving problems, a personal vision of graphic and architectural possibilities. The enemies are the usual suspects: the conventional, the predictable, the lazy. I’ve watched him in a classroom, facing the skeptical (or awed) young, and seen his eyes penetrate some of them, forcing them to draw upon the deeper wells of their talents. As a teacher, he has little interest in producing a string of little Milton Glasers. But he clearly feels both a need and a responsibility to provoke the young into unleashing their own visions. To make that task possible, he has been an educator almost from the beginning of his mature career, on the staff (and the board) of the School of Visual Arts since 1961, a member of the Board of Directors at Cooper Union, an active member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Like a Renaissance master, he has tried to pass on what he has learned. Not a manner. A method.

Today, Glaser remains a powerful force in American visual art. His curriculum vitae is plump with honors: awards, degrees, medals, the records of his museum and gallery shows.. And yet he does not rest. In comes a client with a problem. Glaser listens, gazes at the client with those penetrating eyes, while his hands move towards pencil, pen and paper. By the time that process ends, we know that something marvelous will soon come our way.