The Push Pin Legacy. Poster House

 

Without a doubt the biggest influence on me as a young art student and then later as a young man looking for a gig in the New York ad world was Push Pin Studio. Soon after graduating from the two year college where I majored in advertising I made up a portfolio to take around to the ad and design agencies. I was 19 and it was 1966. Instead of going the usual route of the typical portfolio, work place in large plastic folders placed in a big portfolio I set about making a portfolio in a small sketchbook that soon became a small fat sketchbook. I filled it with collages, ads, my own photographs, drawings and whatever else struck my young fancy. I started to leave it off at major and minor agencies and without a doubt I would be called up for interviews. I saw some of the top designers and ad men of the time, all mad men.  They had never seen a portfolio like mine before and I thought I was on my way. No way.

I did take a chance and left it with Push Pin Studios and sure enough a few days later I got a phone call from the secretary to come up and meet with Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast two of the founding designers of the studio. I was besides myself and I nervously made it up to the studio located somewhere in mid town Manhattan. I think I saw Glaser first and then on another day I met with Chwast. Both were nice and encouraging but of course they didn’t offer me a job. Chwast noticed that I had used one of his pieces in one of my collages and commented on it in a friendly way.

It was still a thrill for me, and seeing the very good but very small exhibition now on at New York’s very good but very small museum devoted to the posters and designs of this important and great studio,  the memories came flooding back. Maybe a year or so earlier I was in the gift shop of the museum and overhead someone talking to someone who turned out to be Seymour Chwast. I took my nerve in hand  and went up to him and told him how 50 or so years ago I had been interviewed by him and what a thrill it was for me. Of course he didn’t recall the meeting but was pleasant and told me that I was probably a very good artist. The traffic of our lives is always full of surprises. The exhibit is nicely designed and installed with examples many of the the members of the design studio with special emphasis of course on Glaser and Chwast. Very colorful and full of memories of the period and with each example recalling where I was and pretty much what I was up to at the time. As I said the museum is small and I would have loved to see a much large exhibition of this great design studio. I’ve included a few photos of the show along with examples of my teenage art that was influenced by Push Pin.