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| Seymour Chwast signing a copy of his new graphic novel, Dante's Divine Comedy, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design. |
The sun was going down in an unusually hot September evening when a somewhat nervous Maria Habib appeared on stage to introduce Seymour Chwast to a crowded auditorium. The audience included Bob Capps and Pat Taylor, former advisory board members for the communication design program. Habib, director of design at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design, referred to Chwast as one of her idols, "a revolutionary, a designer, an illustrator, an entrepreneur, and a cultural icon."
Chwast, 79, husband of "star designer" Paula Scher from Pentagram and one of the founders of the renowned Push Pin Studios with fellow "star designer" Milton Glaser, was in Washington, DC to present his latest book, Dante's Divine Comedy, a graphic novel adaptation of Dante Alighieri's famous poem. The event took place at the Corcoran Gallery of Art on Wednesday, September 22, 2010 and was sponsored by the AIGA.
"When I go to design talks, I see that many designers show their baby pictures so here's mine," Chwast broke the ice as a B&W photograph of a toddler sitting on a chair was projected on the screen behind him. The subtle humor that pervades his illustration and design characterized his lecture, which consisted of a slideshow of his work arranged so he could walk the audience through his life and career in a chronological order. The baby picture was soon followed by other pictures showing him in the 1960s and 70s with Milton Glaser, and by some of his self-caricatures: a poster for a retrospective that he had in 1986 at the Cooper Union ("the printer was worried because the writing was backwards, but I reassured him that it was OK"); the cover for The Obsessive Images of Seymour Chwast where the smoke coming out of his pipe metamorphoses into his name ("[at that time] I had actually stopped smoking the pipe, but I had to put back in there") ; and a poster titled Famous Texans featuring him below George Bush ("even if I'm from the Bronx").
Coming from an illustrator, the choice to illustrate his life through his artwork wasn't surprising. Each piece offered him an opportunity to talk about a particular time in his life, such as his childhood in the Bronx, represented by Baseball, a poster announcing an art exhibit: " I was born in the Bronx and, like everybody else there, I'm a fan of the Yankees. Baseball was the entertainment of my youth." Or his passion for illustration at a very early age: "Someone told my parents that I could go out and work for Disney and make $25 a week. Animation was a possibility for me. This is a poster that I did for an animator."
But instead of heading to California to work for Disney and pursue a career in animation, Chwast stayed in New York, had "a great high school teacher who taught his students to work on poster design", graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Cooper Union and started Push Pin Studios. The studio soon came up with a self-published magazine called The Push Pin Graphic where the designers unchained the creativity they couldn't express in their client work, experimented with typography and layout, and often commented on social issues. In the 1960s, they dedicated an entire issue subtitled The South to the civil rights movement: a die cut of a bullet pierces through the heads of murdered civil rights leaders all throughout the 16 pages of the publication. Eventually, The Push Pin Graphic came to an end and Milton Glaser left the studio to start a new company under his name, but Chwast kept the Push Pin name and in the 1990s he continued his publishing tradition with The Nose, a 24-page magazine entirely illustrated and designed by him that is periodically sent to clients, colleagues and friends as well as sold on the Push Pin website. Like The Push Pin Graphic, The Nose draws attention to relevant social issues such as intolerance and hatred, capital punishment, war, crime, etc. Inventive illustrations, die cuts and hand-rendered typography deal with the F-word, the N-word, and "all the things we call each other, all the dirty names we have for each other, even in the most civilized countries. It's part of the human nature," commented Chwast. Or with public executions ("Rather than in the electric chair, I was interested in how people can be looking at people being executed"). Or with fear ("After 9/11 there was an incident in New York that closed off the subway stations and people were running everywhere, but it turned out to be a project by a student at the School of Visual Arts. 9/11 was a bigger deal in the rest of the country than in New York. One week after the buildings came down, there were signs looking for missing people and signs saying 'peace'. There was no spirit of revenge. But it was a problem for the rest of the country [and now] everybody is afraid of Muslims"). Or, again, with truth and lies ("with George Bush, we got confused as to what was true and what was lies").
Chwast, who claimed his inspiration comes from "the fear of having nothing to eat", also showed work that he did for several New York publications, such as Carta di Pasta, an illustration that he did for New York Magazine inspired by Arcimboldo, an Italian 16th-century painter who used vegetables and fruits to represent people's features (in Chwast's work, the human features are made of different types of pasta), witty diagrams of Dante's Divine Comedy and an amusing Kama Sutra of Reading ("another useful chart") that he created for The New York Times Book Review. Chwast, who also works internationally and gets most of his assignments by email, shared with the audience some spreads from Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin (a supplement to a daily paper in Frankfurt, Germany) about the Automobile Museum with, among others, a Jackson Pollock car where Pollock's characteristic paint spatters become the exhaust gas, and a Year of the Monkey calendar he designed for a client in Japan ("I have a true obsession with cars and monkeys").
After going through what he defined as "the erotic portion of the evening" that included an illustration with a German devil decoupage in lieu of a woman's pubic hair, a parody of the personal ads in the back section of The Village Voice ("they have like 100 pages for little ads for female - you know, things - and they mostly show the back of the women, so I was more interested in showing the women's front and their faces") and a "Bra Fashions" booklet featuring a "candela-bra", a "bra-beque", a "ze-bra", a "polar bra", and an "alpha-bra" among others, Chwast gave the audience a valuable art lesson, showing how a right triangle with a square at the top can turn into a dog, two circles into a bird's head, and an inclined rectangle into a horse's head, adding, "You, too, can be an artist."
He then introduced his latest graphic novel, Dante's Divine Comedy, explaining the difference between cartoonist and illustrator. "As an illustrator you always use other people's material. As a cartoonist you make up the material. I didn't make up the material here, but I was competing with Gustave Doré, and, you know, all these wonderful engravings he did for The Divine Comedy, so I made a book of cartoons so there was no actual competition with him," he joked. Everything was drawn by hand on translucent paper and then scanned into the computer. Chwast claimed he never uses the computer to draw. He feels the computer has "trivialized our art in some ways" and especially typography. He's currently producing a graphic novel adaptation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which is scheduled to be published in 2011. He admittedly enjoys working on graphic novels because they '"use all elements of design, color, scale, etc". Other favorite projects of his are posters ("because of the size" and "sometimes museums buy them, so you end up in their design collections") and books, both for adults and children ("For a designer children's books are a possibility of doing something outside of common understanding. There's a lot of fantasy and play, which is what design is about").
As for the illustration business, Chwast stated that "it's going down". This makes him furious. "There are so many great illustrators coming out of schools, but so few places! Magazines now tend to use more stock illustration and stock photography". He suggested today's illustrators explore animation—an actual possibility for them. His advice to design students? "New York is a good place"—most big publications and advertising agencies are there. "Never freelance without getting to know the business first." However, "while design requires several meetings with the client during the process, illustration can be done from anywhere in the world".
Chwast also shared some of his paintings, mostly of tanks and bombers smashing into each other in the sky and creating "a nice wallpaper, but if you look attentively at it, you'll see that these are planes that will never make it back to the base"—being born in 1931 and having lived through it, he's obsessed with WWII. He also presented some of his typography, arranged in designs that mimic "the way typefaces used to be shown in specimen books" and completely hand rendered ("Years ago, when computers came out, I thought anything done by hand would become very popular").
The audience, of course, was greatly impressed with his wonderful, eclectic, conceptually brilliant and masterfully executed work. But when the slideshow came to an end, Chwast unassumingly dismissed it with a "That's it. Please ask me some questions."
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