Surrealism was central among the numerous historical graphic styles appropriated and reinterpreted by the artists at Push Pin Studios. In these posters (and in countless other examples in Push Pin Graphic), they take the typically surrealist device of anatomical synecdoche (the part representing the whole) and draw it through the contemporary visual language of advertising: the foot by itself is rendered as it might appear in an advertisement for shoes or stockings, but altered—often absurdly—to more wryly reflect the owner of said foot.

This print appeared in The Push Pin Style, and here, as there, is difficult to understand through a reproduction: the image is printed on a reflective ground. My (somewhat hastily digitized) version above looks very little like the image in the monograph. (But, I think, conveys in some small way the original’s weirdly-successful color palette.)

Glaser’s examples in particular show a layering of disparate styles and the application of conventionally incompatible formalist devices: below he takes a perhaps more familiarly modernist approach to series and iteration, which he often uses to contextualize and emphasize difference and particularity.