Design exhibition of Seymour Chwast

Chwast's art was post-Modern before such a term was coined to describe what his imitators were doing. And what makes the very best of his art so striking - indeed identifiable - are the ideas that serve as the foundation for his smallest spot or largest poster. Long ago Chwast mastered the artists greatest conceptual tool, the visual pun, which enables him to almost effortlessly manipulate pictorial concepts like a sculptor shapes soft clay.
He reinterprets the commonplace into uncommon conceptions. His visual lexicon is one of the largest in the world. But if he repeats himself, as every artist does, he at least attempts to transform the metaphor or symbol into something transcendent.

However, concept alone does not make a "Chwast". He frames his ideas with a variety of styles, each different but all decidedly his own. His skill at drawing underpins everything he touches - and he is among the finest renderers in the field. His finished work is not tied to one method, instead it ranges from rough sketches to precise schematics, from childlike scrawls to sophisticated paintings. He also plays with media, including monoprint, collage, and montage. He is a virtuoso with pencil and brush, burin and scissor. Few artists are so versitile yet so consistent. And even fewer are such masters of the medium as message.

Some illustrators and designers continue to work only as long as their styles are popular but Chwast does not suffer the vicisitudes of the marketplace and continues to produce work at a prodigeous rate. Chwast was never a mere stylist. When his monograph, Seymour Chwast: The Left Handed Designer was published it might have marked the pinacle of any other artist's career. But in the years since its publication, Chwast can not only fill another volume with new work, it would contain an equal number of icons as the first. For five decades, he has produced images that define his epoch. His End Bad Breath poster was as vivid a symbol of the politicized Sixties as his Nicholas Nickelby poster was of the cultural Eighties, and the list goes on.

To call Chwast a consumate artist is somewhat trite. But the fact is, he is totally consumed by art. He is what he makes. His fingers are perpetually covered with ink; his clothes are stained with paint; his hair is speckled with pigment. He is content when he's wearing his smock, hunched over his drawing board or sitting in front of his easel. There isn't a day when he doesn't create art. Not suprisingly, his collected work would fill a good sized warehouse. As a posterist his output is certainly equal to his great predecesers (and mentors), Bernhard, Hohlwein, and Cassandre. His editorial illustrations number in the thousands. He has designed and illustrated over thirty children's books. And after all this he still generates smart, witty, beautiful, and important work. In the pantheon of American illustration Chwast stands along with Wyeth, Lyendecker, and Rockwell. And he's not through yet.

Steven Heller

Seymour Chwast studied illustration and graphic design at The Cooper Union. Together with Milton Glazer and Edward Sorel he co-founded the celebrated Push Pin Studios in 1954, and became its director in 1985 when the studio changed its name into The Pushpin Group. Chwast's design and illustrations have been used in advertising, animated films, corporate and environmental graphics, books, packagings and record covers. His posters are in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, The Library of Congress, The Gutenberg Museum and the Israeli Museum. He was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and is the American Institut of Graphic Arts 1985 Gold Medalist.