25-002 Chwast Original Ink Drawing 16 x 20

Offered here is an original rapidograph ink drawing by Seymour Chwast. It is unsigned. Circa 1979. 16 x 20 in a matte black aluminum frame with a glass face. This drawing was reproduced in The Push Pin Graphic illustrating a short story about a woman waiting for a phone call. “Clarence wasn’t quite sure what Elizabeth meant when she said ‘give me a ring sometime.'”

This editorial illustration assignment was given to our 1979 illustration class at Cooper Union. The class was taught by a two-person team: Seymour Chwast and Walter Bernard. The class took place in Seymour’s Push Pin office. Walter Bernard was the art director of Time magazine. I saved my drawing done for that class. It was not good.

Seymour’s artwork was first reproduced on photo paper, then hand-colored by an assistant using Cellotak, a wax-backed color gel. The printer would reproduce the colored version. Once completed, the original drawing was discarded. I’ve included an image of the final color page from the Graphic.

I was hired by Push Pin in 1982. One of my first tasks was to help clean out the art files. We filled a dumpster with art deemed not worth saving. Three decades of original art by Paul Davis, Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast and other Push Pin artists. Naturally, I saved a few.

From Seymour’s website: “A master of historical styles and movements, graphic designer Seymour Chwast is known for his diverse body of work, and lasting influence on American visual culture. Cofounder of the internationally recognized and critically acclaimed Push Pin Studios, Chwast has developed and refined his innovative approach to design over the course of six decades. … Droll humor and conceptual acuity were the foundation on which he built a visual language that advanced editorial illustration beyond pictorial mimicry of a sentence or headline. His images complemented and supplemented the words, gave them additional layers of meaning. What’s more, Seymour is master of the visual pun, which enables him to manipulate pictorial concepts as a sculptor shapes soft clay.”