Seymour Chwast

Seymour Chwast was born in the Bronx on 18 August 1931. He grew up in Brooklyn, where art teacher Leon Friend at Abraham Lincoln High School introduced him to the possibilities of graphic design. He enrolled at Cooper Union in 1948 and graduated with a BFA in 1951. At Cooper he met Milton Glaser, Edward Sorel and Reynold Ruffins — the four people with whom he would shortly change the direction of American graphic design.

After graduation Chwast worked briefly at the New York Times and at Esquire. In 1953, still freelancing, he and Ruffins and Sorel began producing the Push Pin Almanack — a small folded mailer modelled on early American almanacs, combining woodcut illustration, hand-lettering and deadpan facts. It brought in enough work that in 1954 the group formalised as Push Pin Studios, with Glaser joining from a Fulbright fellowship in Bologna.

Push Pin operated as a deliberate counterweight to the European modernism arriving in New York through Unimark, Vignelli and the International Style. Where the modernists insisted on Helvetica and the grid, Push Pin drew from Art Nouveau, Victorian printed ephemera, comic illustration and folk art. The Push Pin Graphic, launched in 1957, sent that vocabulary directly to three thousand art directors and editors for free. It ran to eighty-six issues over twenty-three years and became one of the most influential design publications without ever having a subscriber or an advertiser.

In 1970 the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs mounted “The Push Pin Style” — the first time the museum had ever exhibited graphic design. The show travelled through Europe and Japan. Glaser left the studio in 1974 to establish his own practice; Chwast retained it, renaming it The Pushpin Group.

Chwast’s political work ran alongside the commercial output throughout his career. His anti-Vietnam War posters — End Bad Breath (1967) and War Is Good Business / Invest Your Son (1967) — are among the most reproduced American protest graphics of the twentieth century. He continued producing anti-war work through the Gulf War, Iraq, and beyond, and in 2014 published a book-length survey of five thousand years of human conflict as illustrated broadsheet.

He was awarded the AIGA Medal in 1985, inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame in 1983, and named an Honorary Royal Designer for Industry in 2005. In 2023 the Cooper Hewitt awarded him its National Design Award for Design Visionary. He continues to work in New York City.

Push Pin Studios operated from 1954 to the present under various names, but its decisive period ran from its founding through to Milton Glaser’s departure in 1974. During those two decades the studio produced posters, book jackets, magazine covers, corporate advertising and the Push Pin Graphic — a promotional periodical that looked unlike anything else being produced in American design at the time.

The studio’s approach was explicitly historicist. Chwast and Glaser understood that the canon of print design from the fifteenth century onwards offered a resource that the International Style had largely discarded as ornament. Victorian woodtype, Art Nouveau letterforms, the American dime-novel cover, the French affiche — all of it was available for reworking. The result was not pastiche. It was a methodology: take a historical visual language, understand its internal logic, and apply that logic to a contemporary problem.

The 1970 Louvre exhibition made the argument internationally. A studio that had been sending free mailers to art directors in New York since 1957 was now exhibited in Paris as a cultural phenomenon. The show demonstrated that American graphic design could be something other than corporate Swiss modernism — that illustration, wit and historical literacy were not obstacles to design credibility but its source.

“We were against the numbing rigidity of modernism and the rote sentimental realism of commercial illustration.” — Push Pin Studios

Seymour Chwast co-founded Push Pin Studios alongside Milton Glaser, Edward Sorel and Reynold Ruffins. The two men directed the studio for two decades and remain the central figures of its legacy. Glaser’s page covers his independent trajectory; Chwast’s is the story of what Push Pin became after 1974 — smaller, more focused, and still producing work in the same spirit.