Sign of the Times: Bob Dylan

Milton Glaser's 1966 poster of a folk-rock icon captured the psychadelic dazzle of the flower-power era

  • By Owen Edwards
  • Smithsonian magazine, June 2010, Subscribe
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Dylan poster
Milton Glaser's Dylan poster was inspired by Marcel Duchamp's 1957 self-portrait. "The history of visual things in the world," says Glaser, "is my playpen." (Milton Glaser / Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, SI)

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Owen Edwards is a freelance writer and author of the book Elegant Solutions.


In the art world, posters occupy a middle ground between paintings and advertisements in magazines and on billboards. But when well-known artists, including France’s Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and Italy’s Leonetto Cappiello (1875-1942), were commissioned to create promotional posters for everything from Paris’ legendary Moulin Rouge music hall to men’s hats, they trans-formed the poster into a sought-after collectible.

The high renaissance for the form came in the 1920s in Europe, where the fusion of graphic design and illustrative art brightened the streets of Paris, London and Milan. Aside from billboards and movie posters, advertising posters were never quite as important, or as ubiquitous, in the United States. The rise of rock ’n’ roll in the 1960s, however, generated a particular genre of poster art in this country. Many of these flower-power-era artifacts today reside within the collections of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City. Among the most iconic—“a key item in any poster collection,” according to Gail Davidson, head of the museum’s department of drawings, prints and graphic design—is Milton Glaser’s 1966 image of singer Bob Dylan.

Glaser, who received a National Medal of Arts at a White House ceremony this past February, was just beginning his extraordinary career as an artist and graphic designer when he undertook the Dylan project. (A couple of years later, he and editor Clay Felker would found New York magazine.) John Berg, then art director at Columbia Records, asked Glaser to create a poster to be folded and packaged into Dylan’s “Greatest Hits” LP. Glaser, today one of this country’s most prolific poster artists, with more than 400 to his credit, was new to the form. “This was probably my third or fourth poster,” he recalls. It would become one of the most widely circulated of all time; six million or more were distributed with the enormously popular album.

Depicting Dylan with kaleidoscopic hair, the Glaser poster has been described as “psychedelic” and is often associated with rock posters produced in San Francisco at the same time. But Glaser, who had studied in Italy on a Fulbright scholarship in the early 1950s, is a formalist with a broad awareness of artists and art movements, and he took his inspiration for the Dylan profile from a 1957 self-portrait by Marcel Duchamp. Though Glaser used a similar composition, the transformation of Dylan’s curly mane into a tangled rainbow was his own invention.

Glaser says he also tapped into an earlier art movement. “I was interested in Art Nouveau at the time,” he recalls. “That was an influence for the colors and shapes in the picture.” The contrast of vivid colors with the dark silhouetted profile reflects Glaser’s response to the Modernist “Less is more” dictum: “Just enough is more.” For the single word, “Dylan,” Glaser invented a typeface, one that he would use again on a poster for a Mahalia Jackson concert at Lincoln Center.

Despite the millions of distributed copies, the Dylan poster has become a hot collectible that sells for hundreds of dollars. (It has been reissued twice, but originals bear the telltale folds.) Luck played a role in the Cooper-Hewitt’s acquisition, according to Davidson. One of her museum colleagues was teaching a graphic-design course when a student came to class with a poster that she wanted to donate, Davidson recalls. “It was the Dylan poster, in good condition—with folds—and it had been willed to her boyfriend by his father.”

How does Glaser feel today about his most famous piece? “I would have redone the hair,” he says today. “It’s a little clumsy.”

Glaser has yet to share his opinion with his subject. On the day that the artist received his White House honors, another recipient was otherwise engaged: Bob Dylan.

Owen Edwards is a freelance writer and author of the book Elegant Solutions.


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Comments (9)

You misspelled "psychedelic".

Posted by Ron Alcorn on October 17,2012 | 04:10 PM

hello,

i d like to know what kind of print and paper is used for this Bob Dylan poster, Sign of the time, before i order one.

thank you for your answer.

F.SUEUR

Posted by sueur on November 3,2011 | 02:30 AM

No one has mentioned the Elvis coiffure! Did Mr Glaser intentionally style the psychedelic homage to the king in Dylan's locks? A subtle salute to musical roots of youth challenging and changing the times, perhaps? Has anyone ever asked him?

Posted by Gary V Parker on June 25,2010 | 11:14 AM

One word: Cool.

Posted by Lizbeth on June 7,2010 | 12:52 AM

Enjoyed your article on M. Glaser's 1966 Bob Dylan Poster and found it quite timely. I bought that Greatest Hits album back in the day and amazingly held on to the original post. I had it framed 2 years ago and it hangs in our home.So when the Antiques Road Show came to town (I live in England) last month I decided to take the poster along with a full set of Woodstock tickets...WOW, they where quite the hit with their Rock'in Roll Memorobelia expert Hillary Kay and they filmed the show (to be shown in the UK in September of this year). It was such fun to find soeone else who was as excited by the poster as I still am.

Posted by Deborah deRocher-Barron on June 7,2010 | 05:38 PM

OMG! I read your article and went through my Dylan albums and found the Greatest Hits album and, sure enough, folded inside was the poster. Probably hasn't been out of the album jacket for 40 years! It is truly a beautiful work of art.

Posted by Marilyn on June 1,2010 | 11:02 AM

It was quite interesting to learn that Milton Glaser's famous Dylan poster was inspired by by the Duchamp profile. I can see the connection clearly, now. Yet I feel that some thought should be given to the album cover itself as the source of Glaser's inspiration. The cover photograph of Dylan is also a silhouette, and in his hair a blue backlight makes the Dylan curls into a riotous halo.

And it was the cover, not the poster, that won the Grammy Award, after all. I, along with John Berg, was honored by National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for Best Album Cover, 1968. I made the image at a 1965 concert in Washington DC. When I brought the slides (there were only four or five of them) to Columbia, John looked at the first slide and said: "That's the next cover." It was John's dramatic enlargement and cropping that gave the cover its powerful visual thrust. The Glaser poster was tucked inside, a lovely Easter Egg in an extraordinarily successful package.

NOTE: I'd like to send Smithsonian a JPEG of the album to show the amazing similarity

Rowland

Posted by Rowland Scherman on May 26,2010 | 01:40 AM

milton glaser. bob dylan. they don't make 'em like this no more. Pity!

Posted by a hirsch on May 23,2010 | 06:58 PM

Mr. Glaser's poster of Bob Dylan is one of the iconic images of the 1960's. It became more appreciated in the 1970's and later, as Mr. Glaser's reputation became known to a wider audience outside the graphic arts & art school communities. The fact that Dylan released few records or visual material between 1966 & 1973 helped make this record & poster a "must have" among Dylan devotees. It remains an enduring work, and it is nice to walk into Major Museums & see it on the wall. How many original posters can an "average" person own that is considered "museum quality?"
Bravo.

Posted by Robert LeMin on May 20,2010 | 07:17 PM



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