Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Patricia Kiš, Jutarnji list
“I have donated a portion of my posters to the Museum of Contemporary Art because my good friend Mirko Ilić said that they are interested in a donation,” Milton Glaser, whose collection of posters is at this Zagreb institution since recently, said for Jutarnji List. When asked how he selected the works for the collection, he said he simply chose “those works that I thought the audience will appreciate.”
Milton Glaser is a world renowned US designer, and Glaser’s biography was probably best summarized by his colleague Chip Kidd: “If graphic design has a grand master, then Milton Glaser is Michelangelo. The Dylan poster. The oh-so-ripped-off ‘I ‘Heart’ NY’ logo. The image for Angels in America. New York magazine. Everything else.” The most famous is certainly the “I ‘Heart’ NY” logo – black letters INY and the red heart – which was created in 1977 to promote New York tourism. Designer made the logo in a very short period of time, and he did it pro bono, but it made him famous, and today they are icons of pop culture – both the logo and its maker.
New York
Glaser made a second version of the logo after the fall of twin towers in New York in 2001. The poster read “I ‘Heart’ NY More Than Ever”, with a black dot on the heart as a symbol of tragedy. This poster is actually one of the 28 works he donated to the Museum.
Among the works he donated, along with “I ‘Heart’ NY”, the most famous is certainly “The Dylan Poster” from 1966. Musician’s hair, whose music Glaser greatly appreciates, is made of psychedelic colors, and his face is shown in profile as a dark silhouette. The poster was inspired both by Mexican street art, but also one very unusual self-portrait of the father of modern art, Marcel Duchamp. Among the 28 donated posters there’s also the one for the Sarajevo Olympic Games 1984; then the poster “Great Illustrators of Our Time” from 1982; a poster from 2009 that warns: “Looking is not Seeing”; then the one created for centenary the death of Van Gogh which interprets Magritte’s almost monochrome famous drawing of a pipe, below which it said “This is not a pipe“, which is in Glaser’s interpretation full of strong, Van-Gogh-like colors and below it says “This is not Vincent.” All this with Glaser’s distinct handwriting.
A year after the Dylan poster, in 1967 came Glaser’s Life magazine cover. Title of the work is “Mad Man” and is also part of the donation to the MSU. Although many covers of this magazine are considered groundbreaking, this was one of the most important. It was created along with the story “The Return of the Red Man”, which testified about the bad treatment of Native Americans in America: the work is, in visual terms, a combination of aesthetics of art deco with psychedelic colors of the sixties. Matthew Weiner, creator of the series “Mad Men”, while the series was at the height of popularity recalled that this poster was in the room of his parents. Believing that Glaser was the guru of that period, he invited him to collaborate, and the designer worked on the visuals for the final, seventh season. Although Glaser, according to reports, initially had reservations about the engagement, or rather the kind of return to the past with his work (“the basic question was whether I could convincingly draw as back then”), he liked the very realistic way in which the show presented this turbulent period in the advertising world, or, as he said in an interview: “I could have walked in the door of the company Sterling, Cooper & Partners. I knew those people.” Silhouette of Don Draper, who from the couch watches an advert with psychedelic colors, with recognizable figure of a woman in profile and a glass of red wine, was a recognizable mark of the designer.
State of alertness
Glaser began with designing book covers, then he dealt with the design for corporations, magazines, albums, restaurants, advertisements … His father, a tailor, initially didn’t want his son to be engaged in design.
Milton Glaser is well known to our audience, primarily thanks to Mirko Ilić. He had several exhibitions, and his works could be seen until recently in Zagreb’s Lauba, at Zgraf, the international exhibition of visual design, where he presented socially engaged works, and where he was certainly the most famous exhibitor. He also exhibited at the Salon Izidor Kršnjavi in 2015, in mediation of Mirko Ilić, with an exhibition called “Drawing is Thinking”. In an interview which we had back then he explained to me the name of the exhibition: “Art is a survival mechanism that was invented by humankind. Whether we are creating art or experiencing it, our consciousness is changing. A metaphysician or a Buddhist calls this condition ‘state of attention’. When you draw a face of an individual for the first time, only then you truly understand what they look like. The gap that exists between art and reality provokes us, in fact, to understand what is truly real. And to understand is really perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the human mind.”
Back then he also told me that he never got tired of the “I ‘Heart’ NY” sign: “People who are engaged in design want to make an impact on their time, and this sign confirms my existence, at least part of my existence.”
Glaser and Mirko Ilić have collaborated time and time again, and as a result came the book The Design of Dissent: Socially and Politically Driven Graphics, with a foreword written by Tony Kushner. Mirko Ilić noted several times that Glaser is one of his role models: “In 1974, a friend showed me a book by Milton Glaser. When I saw his work, I thought: I could be a designer and an illustrator at the same time. After that, I found my passion.”
Unexpected donation
Everyone at the MSU is very excited about the donation, Department of graphics, drawings and posters is led by senior curator Kristina Bonjeković Stojković. We also asked Snježana Pintarić, director of the Museum, for an opinion on the donation: “Milton Glaser exhibited in our museum in 1979, but back then we couldn’t collect his works for the collection. Thanks to Mr. Mirko Ilic it happened many years later, and quite unexpectedly. In short, I can say that without the engagement of Mirko Ilić the museum would certainly not be able to gather such valuable works. Mirko Ilić also mediated in the donation of Mr. Penavić, who also gave us equally valuable and interesting works of American artists Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Lindner.” To recall, Krešimir Penavić is a businessman who lives in New York, a friend of Mirko Ilić, and last year he also donated to the New York MoMA works by Mihajlo Arsovski, among other things, and he donated Ilić’s works to the Zagreb National and University Library. MoMA also bought some of the works of Mirko Ilić.