The Left-Handed Designer

In this colorful, finely produced retrospective of the work of illustrator/graphic designer Chwast, picture captions are the only text (apart from a brief interview written by the art director of the New York Times Book Review, Steven Heller), but the captions prove revealing of Chwast's approach to his commissions. A founding partner of Push Pin Studios, he is an innovator in the field of illustration who broke away from the realistic mode made popular by such artists as Norman Rockwell. Chwast's bold drawings, paintings and prints appear in magazines and books, on posters, record jackets, beer cases and cereal boxes. His style is distinctive, with simple figures and humorous sensibility; readers who are not consciously familiar with his work will immediately recognize, say, his posters hereused to promote television productions such as I, Claudius, Rumpole of the Bailey and Nicholas Nickleby. October