posted on 16 Dec 2018

Seymour Chwast: The Left-Handed Designer edited by Steven Heller

Born in 1931, Seymour Chwast is now acknowledged as one of the most influential graphic designers in the second half of the twentieth century. This book, The Left-Handed Designer, was published in 1985 and was the first monograph of his work – although there have now been a couple of others that bring a slightly different emphasis and perspective to his output. This one though is, I think, both fascinating for its insights into the design aesthetic of the Sixties and Seventies in particular and as an example of how beautifully a life’s work can be collated and presented.

Chwast is probably most famous within the graphic design community for being a founder member of the collective known as Push Pin, alongside the equally legendary Milton Glaser and names such as Edward Sorel and Reynold Ruffins. For the wider public, they will almost certainly recognise Chwast’s work without necessarily knowing who was responsible for it.

Chwast’s interests and client-base covered a huge range – book design and cover art, advertising, magazines, theatre – the list just goes on and on. The Push Pin archive describes Chwast’s contributions in this way:

“Developing and refining his innovative approach to design over the course of six decades, Chwast’s clients include the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and Print, as well as leading corporations, advertising agencies, and publishers both in the United States and abroad. His designs and illustrations have graced posters, packaging, record covers, advertisements, and animated films, as well as corporate and environmental graphics. He has created backgrounds for productions of Candide at New York’s Lincoln Center, and for The Magic Flute, performed by the Philadelphia Opera Company. Chwast is the author of over 30 children’s books, four graphic novels, and several typefaces. Pushpin Editions, the studio’s publishing arm, produces books on the arts and graphic design.”

It won’t surprise you to know that my abiding interest in Chwast’s work centres on his book design and cover artwork which I think is wonderful. To get a sense of his imagination and his capacity to come at things from a completely lateral position, I’d suggest you take a look at his illustration for Thomas Keneally’s book Passenger  which is a novel narrated by an eccentric English foetus. Chwast has the narrator in situ in the womb, clothed in pin-stripe suit, bowler hat and spectacles – you simply couldn’t make him more ‘English’ !

But the book is also full of stuff I’ve not seen before – including examples of his children’s stories and their illustrations. I think an example like ‘The Pancake King’ which is included here gives us some indisputable clues about Chwast’s own influences and I suspect that Maurice Sendak is somewhere very close to the top of the list.

For many years I owned a box-set of vinyl recordings of Kurt Weil’s Die Dreigroschenoper  (‘A Threepenny Opera’)  produced and part performed by Lotte Lenya which had a striking and memorable box design and for all those years I failed to notice the signature of Chwast on the illustration. So I was delighted to come across this and to discover he’d done a similar job with other classical collections – most notably the Juilliard Quartet recordings of Mozart’s Last Four String Quartets.

The book is a treasure-trove from beginning to end and it will offer you hours of browsing pleasure with Chwast annotating and explaining his design decisions and his thinking in accompanying text that never gets in the way of the illustrations but does add an extra dimension.

The book has long been out-of-print I think and so you’ll have to find one on the second-hand market but they are out there as long as you’re prepared to pay a little over £20 – which is a lot less than similar contemporary art monographs might cost you.

 

Terry Potter

December 2018

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