“To Inform & Delight: The World of Milton Glaser” may leave you with the impression that the spirit of modern New York was conjured out of thin air by its subject, the celebrated graphic designer who is about to turn 80. It was Mr. Glaser who came up with the “I ♥ NY” logo in the 1970s when the city, then on the verge of bankruptcy, was widely perceived as a crime-infested danger zone. As the center of a campaign to revive New York, the logo helped reverse the decline and boost morale.
Mr. Glaser’s signature is everywhere: not just in logos but in magazines (he founded New York magazine with Clay Felker in 1968), on posters (his silhouette of Bob Dylan with psychedelic hair is one of his most famous) and in restaurants and supermarkets. The hallmarks of his work are its simplicity, wit and elegance; it may be commercial art, but with a capital A. One of his strategies, he says, is to appeal to the problem-solving part of the brain by creating simple visual puzzles.
Instead of a detailed biography, this small, heartening documentary, produced and directed by Wendy Keys, concentrates on his work, with analysis by many commentators, of whom the most articulate is Mr. Glaser himself. The film takes its title from a quotation of Horace — “the purpose of art is to inform and delight” — that encapsulates Mr. Glaser’s humanist aesthetic.
As a child, Mr. Glaser recalls, he grew up in a crowded three-room apartment in the Bronx and attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and Cooper Union. He discovered the wonders of great art after winning a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, Italy, under the painter Giorgio Morandi. It was there, he recalls, that he realized “history was not the enemy” and he rejected strict modernism. We meet Mr. Glaser’s wife, Shirley, with whom he has collaborated on children’s books, and are shown the couple’s remarkable collection of African art.
Mr. Glaser, who speaks with the measured phrases of a born teacher, emerges as an articulate and humane philosopher of communication through art. “Everything is related to its opposite,” he observes. If you have light, there has to be darkness; truth requires lies; the world we live in is a kind of purgatory.
He is also a passionate connoisseur of good food, a pleasure he first discovered in Italy, and takes special pride in the Underground Gourmet columns he wrote with Jerome Snyder for New York magazine, because they showed middle-class New Yorkers the joys of the city’s ethnic restaurants.
His wry recollection of his mother’s frightening pasta recipe — boil a package of spaghetti for an hour, douse it with Velveeta and ketchup, bake it into a mound shaped like the dome of St. Peter’s, fry it in chicken fat, then slice it — explains a lot.
MILTON GLASER
To Inform & Delight
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Directed and produced by Wendy Keys; director of photography, David W. Leitner; edited by Tom Piper; music by Hayes Greenfield; released by Art House Films. At the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes. This film is not rated.
