Van Gogh Poster Analysis

INTRODUCTION:
Milton Glaser is an American graphic designer who was born on 26th June, 1929. Glaser completed his graduation from Cooper Union, New York City in 1951. After this, he studied printmaking in Italy with Georgio Morandi from 1952-1953. In 1954, Glaser co-founded the Push Pin Studios with Seymour Chwast, Reynold Ruffins and Edward Sorel, all of them were Cooper Union graduates. Then in 1968, Miton founded New York magazine with Clay Felker. Milton also established Milton Glaser inc. in 1974. In 1983, Glaser teamed up with Walter Bernard and formed the designing firm named WBMG. His firm did a lot of work and designed more than 50 newspapers and magazines around the world.
In his career, Milton designed and illustrated more than 300

Glaser’s “Van Gogh” poster has resemblance with the similar work of art by Belgian artist Rene Margitte’s work. The pipe in the center of the poster and the message in the bottom in Glaser’s poster is same as Margitte’s poster. Glaser’s poster display different elements and principles of desiging. The pipe is made of many curvy lines and filled with many different colors. Pipe is filled with the vibrant colors and in contrast golden color is filled in the background. The text on the poster is place in the bottom in thin style, black color and the text on the top corners is in bold black color. Glaser didn’t use anything to distract from the image. The message in the poster “Ceci n’est pas la pipe de Vicent” is dedicated to “Van Gogh” so it differs from the Rene Margitte’s work. The poster is based on negative and positive spacing. The pipe is in the positive space and the golden color on the background is in the negative space.
As the message of the poster is to recall the century of a famous artist “Van Gogh”, and also, Glaser wants to portray that artist’s work is not an object. Although the poster also cross references a work of Margitte that he portrayed pipe in his art work as a normal object. The typography in Milton’s poster cannot be seen much because he didn’t use any object or material that distract from the image. Stylization maybe is not conventional as pipe consist many colors.