Seymour Chwast




Seymour Chwast, a close associate of Milton Glaser, is another practioner that I admire for his thinking as well as for the imaginative range of his works.

Jerome Snyder in an article in Graphis wrote:

"Chwast is fundamentally a humorist. His humor is dry, ironic, only rarely sardonic. The play on images is witty, not flamboyant, taking off on human foibles or meanness in a seemingly deadpan banality that is, despite its first-glance ingenuousness, rich in veins of sophistication and subtlety." To disclaim the idea that humor is a serious business misses the fundamental fact that all comedy has its roots in basic incongruity. A deep awareness of life's anomalies detracts not a whit from the widely accepted belief that Chwast is one of the most influential artists of this century and that he has created a style that is synonymous with the most creative and progressive aspects of graphic art and design. Clearly, there is much more to the man than his sometimes amused and bemused view of the world.

But to get the fully rounded picture we must go back to the figure of Pluto, smiling over the shoulder of the top-hatted swell. On more than one occasion Chwast has announced, "Walt Disney was my idol when I was a little boy, as he was everybody's." As a result, even today, he remembers the first drawing he made: a portrait of a lady in a beauty shop drawn with a mascara pencil on a piece of cardboard. Chwast's mother insists the first effort was a giant Pinocchio rendered on a mattress carton.

Here is a collection of his works:






















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