Blog Page 13 of 5 | SVA Archives

August 28, 2013

Atomic-age publication design

Comment was a promotional periodical produced by consortium of printers in the early sixties. Issue 200 included contributions from Saul Bass, Will Burtin, and Henry Wolf.

August 24, 2013

Department of the newly uncovered

We just uncovered a long-lost poster for the seminal conceptual art exhibit, Working drawings and other visible things on paper not necessarily meant to be viewed as art (Visual Arts Gallery, December 2 – December 23, 1966). Initially asked by gallery director Shirley Glaser to organize a Christmas show of drawings, Mel Bochner collected notes, sketches, and diagrams from artist friends (as well as mathematicians, biologists, choreographers, and engineers). He ultimately photocopied the working drawings (using SVA’s brand new Xerox machine), placed them into four identical binders, and mounted them on pedestals in the gallery.

August 21, 2013

His back pages

Another riff on Milton Glaser’s indefatigable Dylan poster, here for a book by Roots drummer Questlove. It’s interesting the jacket designer also uses a Baby Teeth-esque typeface (though it looks a little wonky?). Anyway, some amusing stories have been bubbling up from this particular volume, including (on Slate) The Time I Went Roller Skating With Prince. Some of earlier, amusingly candid versions of these stories can also be found at the website Questlove’s Celebrity Stories.

August 20, 2013

High-caliber promotions

Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar designed this elaborate promo system for a Knoll modular filing system. Some details from the project follow.

August 14, 2013

Emphasis on graphics

Henry Wolf’s photograph for a student architectural drawing competition.

August 12, 2013

Desk set

Chermayeff & Geismar’s promotional work for General Fireproofing’s steel office furniture neatly represents how they adapted their dominant styles to suit the needs of their corporate clients.

August 12, 2013

Concrete Poetry

Milton Glaser tips his hat to French poet, playwright, and critic Guillaume Apollinaire.

August 06, 2013

Serial production

For large patches of his later career Heinz Edelmann focused on quickly producing posters for arts events and series productions: these typically made use of a fairly regularized typographic template for information, and wild, allusive but enigmatic illustrations. For one season in the mid-1980s, he worked with the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus theater, playing off the plays’ angsty plotlines with evocatively deformed bodies.

August 04, 2013

Champion Papers

The Glaser Archives is chock full of gorgeous promotional pieces for paper companies, dating from a time when they provided a steady stream of work and creative freedom to the designers and illustrators who were also their customers.

August 04, 2013

Archives 101

What exactly do we do here at the Glaser Archives? I’m so glad you asked!

August 04, 2013

Produce as land mass

We recently received a wonderful donation from James McMullan, and while I was looking for a few things to feature in a sneak peek, I came across this illustration he did for Push Pin of Long Island as a potato.

July 30, 2013

Allan Kaprow’s Words

Another lovely artifact appeared in the Archive unexpectedly last week: Allan Kaprow’s Words, from 1962.

July 29, 2013

Tea for two

Milton Glaser for the Russian Tea Room.

July 28, 2013

Presenting… The James McMullan Collection

We recently finished organizing and describing the James McMullan Collection, which was donated by the acclaimed illustrator and designer last year.

Presenting… The James McMullan Collection

July 23, 2013

Saying good-bye to Heinz Edelmann

Enjoy a few of the acclaimed posters he produced for Germany’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk radio station after the jump. And click here for a characteristically witty and illuminating interview with Edelmann in Graphis.

July 22, 2013

Layer cake

One of the central features of the Push Pin generation of designers — mainly Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser — was a continued inspiration from, and reliance upon, physically layered compositions (using e.g., cello-tak) and photographic compositing.

July 20, 2013

Hot potato

Milton Glaser plays with fire for Poppy Records.

July 20, 2013

Inside the Big Apple

One of the main attractions of the archive as a research tool is as a document of artistic process. (The effect of the overwriting of drafts by computers is a subject I have written about elsewhere.) There were several stages to Milton Glaser’s development of a poster for the Visual Arts Gallery exhibition “Inside the Big Apple” (1968) — the above shows his collage of different versions of the figuration, which arrangement ended up contributing the composition that he used in the final version (other versions and the final poster follow).

July 16, 2013

Milton Glaser’s geometries

Milton Glaser is closely associated with a visual style emphasizing expressive illustrations and resonant cultural symbols, but revisiting different periods in his career one is reminded that he was constantly developing new approaches, and in the Glaser Collection one can find an astonishingly wide range of approaches to design problems.