In the audience were hundreds of Japanese art students. The occasion was the opening of a show of the work of four of the greatest American illustrators of the twentieth century: Seymour Chwast, Paul Davis, Milton Glaser, and James McMullan, the core of New York’s fabled Pushpin Studio. The show was titled Pushpin and Beyond: The Celebrated Studio That Transformed Graphic Design. Up on the stage, aglow with global fame, the Americans had every reason to feel terrific about themselves. Seated facing them was an interpreter. The Suntory’s director began his introduction in Japanese, then paused for the interpreter’s English translation: “Our guests today are a group of American artists from the Manual Age.” Now the director was speaking again, but his American guests were no longer listening. They were too busy trying to process his opening line. The Manual Age … the Manual Age … The phrase ricocheted about inside their skulls … bounced off their pyramids of Betz, whistled through their corpora callosa, and lodged in the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas of their brains.
