Seeing Seymour Draw

Posted by Amanda Huber on June 17 at 4:49 AM

If you are not familiar with Seymour's work, you will get an idea of it if you imagine Saul Steinberg on a hallucinogenic drug. The result is fabulously colorful, expressive, witty, and at times raunchy. As a cofounder of the cutting edge Push Pin Studio in the in the 1950’s Chwast helped lead a shift in American graphic design away from the sentimental (think Norman Rockwell) towards the conceptual. His work is not completely abstract, since he always has a subject, but it is far less concerned with rendering than his predecessors, and in the 50’s, his designs appeared in stark contrast to the formalism of swiss modernism.




The AIGA event was held to promote his new book Seymour: The Obsessive Images of Seymour Chwast from Chronicle Books from Chronicle Books. The presentation (as well as the book) was organized by obsession: used cars, fashion, war, fauna and flora, body parts, body parts, Mexican wrestlers, and fine food, to name a few. Within these categories, the breadth of his work is startling. He showed an incredible range of work, from politically charged collages and illustrations to his more recent metal sculptures of sushi rolls and fruit baskets. My favorite obsession has to be the one entitled “unreliable diagrams & charts.” The one he showed last night (see below) is amusing commentary on the lost art of letter writing.



Following the slide show I was surprised and delighted to see Chwast don artist smock and situate himself in front of a large pad of paper. He then agreed to draw whatever people in the audience shouted out. Cool! If only the audience could have come up with something more interesting than.. A CAT! Really? I thought I was in a room full of creative thinkers? (Not that I was any help, slouching down, quivering at the mere thought of audience participation) Several other animals followed, including a rhino and a giraffe, then onto a portrait of Steven Heller and a sad face (again with the highly original audience suggestions). It was funny because all of the animals (including the portrait of Heller) looked the same, with rectangular shaped bodies and tails extending directly out to the side.

I guess it is true what Paula Scher says in her opening essay for the book, in reference to Seymour’s style “Somehow everyone, including cats, dogs, and other animals will look... vaguely Jewish and from the ‘40s.”
Topics: arts and culture, design        SHARE: