Bob Dylan Lithograph

Milton Glaser may be best known for a 1977 doodle that became his hometown’s unofficial slogan: I ♥️ NY. But the Bronx-born graphic designer had many other successes during his nearly 70-year career, including iconic posters and prints and cofounding the groundbreaking design firm Push Pin Studios.

In the 1950s, American graphics tended toward a Swiss-influenced precision. Glaser, however, pulled from the whole of art history for his designs, inspired by his studies with the painter Giorgio Morandi while on a Fulbright scholarship in 1952. His famous Bob Dylan poster, a landmark of the psychedelic age, was inspired by a Marcel Duchamp self-portrait and the jewel-like colors of Islamic art.

A cofounder of New York magazine, Glaser went on to design for scores of other publications, and in 2009 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

In an instance of life imitating art, Glaser was asked to create the promotional posters for the final season of Mad Men, which aired in 2014 and 2015. “I could have walked in the door of that firm,” the designer told the New York Times of the fictional Sterling Cooper Partners. “I knew those people.”

“There are three responses to a piece of design — yes, no and wow!” he said. “Wow is the one to aim for.” Glaser rarely, if ever, missed the mark. He died of a stroke in 2020.

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Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

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