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1992 AIGA MEDAL
Creativity speaks to the heart of the process of graphic design.
What were the creative forces that allowed Lester Beall to produce
consistently treat art and design over the span of a 44-year
career? Over this span of time, Beall produced solutions to design
problems that were fresh and innovative. He studied the dynamic
visual form of the European avant-garde, synthesized parts into his
own aesthetic and formed graphic design applications for business
and industry that were appropriate, bold, and imaginative. In his
mature years he led the way with creative and comprehensive
packaging and corporate identity programs that met the needs of his
clients. Along the way in his work manner and style, Beall proved
to American business that the graphic designer was a professional
that could creatively solve problems and at the same time deal with
pragmatic issues of marketing and budget. The qualities and values
that led to Beall's effectiveness are timeless and provide
contemporary practitioners with an historical reference base upon
which to evaluate present standards.
Beall felt that the designer “must work with one goal in mind—to
integrate the elements in such a manner that they will combine to
produce a result that will convey not merely a static commercial
message, but an emotional reaction as well. If we can produce the
kind of art which harnesses the power of the human instinct for
that harmony of form, beauty and cleanness that seems inevitable
when you see it? then I think we may be doing a job for our
clients.” For Beall that creativity was present at every stage of
the design process. He said, “the designer's role in the
development, application and protection of the trademark may be
described as pre-creative, creative and post-creative.”
Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1903, Beall's early childhood
years were spent in St. Louis and Chicago. He was educated at
Chicago's Lane Technical School and graduated from the University
of Chicago. He began his design career in 1927. By 1935 Beall had
decided to move to New York and in late September of that year had
opened a studio/office in his apartment in Tudor City on
Manhattan's east side. In 1936, while maintaining the office in New
York, he moved to Wilton, Connecticut where he established his home
and studio in a rural setting. He was to remain in Wilton until
1950. Many of the significant works from this period were done in
this location. Through the 1930s and 1940s Beall produced
innovative and highly regarded work for clients including the
Chicago Tribune, Sterling Engraving, The Art Directors
Club of New York, Hiram Walker, Abbott Laboratories and
Time magazine. Of particular interest was his work for the
Crowell Publishing Company which produced Colliers
magazine. The promotional covers “Will There Be War?” and “Hitler's
Nightmare” are powerful designs which distill messages of the time.
In these works he utilizes angled elements, iconic arrows,
silhouetted photographs and dynamic shapes, all of which captures
the essence of his personal style of the late 1930s. Also of
interest in this period are the remarkable poster series for the
United States Government's Rural Electrification Administration. In
all Beall designed three series of posters between 1937 and 1941
with the simple goals of increasing the number of rural Americans
who would electrify their homes and increasing public awareness of
the benefits of electricity. His poster for the ill-fated “Freedom
Pavilion” at the 1939 World's Fair was another dynamic example of
this time in which he used what he called “thrust and
counter-thrust” of design elements.
Beall had moved his office to 580 Fifth Avenue around 1940. He
worked there as well as from his home in Wilton, Connecticut. In
1949 he purchased Dumbarton Farm in Brookfield and, in 1950, he
moved to consolidate all his operation there. He had developed some
of the farm's out buildings into a professionally-praised office
and studio space. During the 1950s and '60s Beall's design office
expanded both in its staff and scope, adding associate designers
and mounting full-scale corporate identification campaigns for
large companies such as a Caterpillar Tractor, Connecticut General
Life Insurance Company, The New York Hilton and Merrill Lynch,
Fenner Pierce and Smith, Inc. His identity program for
International Paper Company from 1960 was his most extensive
identity program and is noteworthy for the graphics standards
manual, one of the first to be so fully articulated.
Beall maintained, throughout his life, a core of sources which
stimulated his perception, creativity and methods of making art and
design. He was a highly visual person with a great need to express
himself. Always first and at the center of his ways of working were
his form experimentation in the drawing and painting of the human
figure. He was always at work in his studio, whether it was
creating design, art or photography. His wife, Dorothy Miller
Beall, characterized her husband as “first of all an artist, not
only because of a vital and important talent, but because of an
emotional spiritual quality, a very special attitude.” His daughter
Joanna remembers this fine art expression as “a major part of his
thinking.” Beall, in his memoirs, confirms this by recalling that
“all through my life as a designer, I have spent considerable time
developing myself as an artist. I am constantly drawing, with
particular emphasis on the figure, which I find fascinating though
difficult in term of evolving something that is not completely
abstract but certainly not literal or realistic.”
Photography also was a lifelong interest to Beall and an
important part of his creative process. He experimented with
photography and photographic processes almost from the beginning of
his career in design in Chicago. Cameras, a photographic studio and
a darkroom were always necessary for his visual experiments. In the
'30s he had seen the experimental photographic work of the European
avant-garde designers such as Herbert Bayer, El Lissitzky, and
Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. Beall would experiment regularly with
photograms, and with straight photography both in and out of the
studio. Even today, many of Beall's photographic images remain
unusual and innovative visual experiments. Beall carried his camera
with him on all his travels. These images formed an image bank from
which he drew inspiration for his lectures. Others found their way
into direct graphic design application for his clients such as in
the cover for ORS, a journal for health services
professionals. A more complex photographic technique is used on the
cover of What's New, a house organ of Abbott Laboratories.
This image from 1939 shows a complex integration of photographic
and graphic elements, set in a scale which juxtaposes the size
relationships of foreground and background.
The psychologist Erich Fromm said, “Education for creativity is
nothing short of education for living.” Beall's creative activities
were powerfully influenced, enhanced and supported by the working
environments that he established to support them. Whether he was
working from his office near the Loop in Chicago, an office in a
New York skyscraper or from the pastoral setting in Connecticut,
Beall was sensitive to the importance of the space around him and
how this could influence his creativity. In 1968 he wrote: “By
living and working in the country I felt I could enjoy a more
integrated life, and although I still need the periodic stimulation
of New York City, the opportunity and creative activity in an area
of both beauty and tranquility seemed to me to far exceed anything
that a studio and residence in New York might offer—the way a man
lives is essential to the work he produces. The two cannot be
separated. If I could condense into a single idea the thinking we
are trying to do here at Dumbarton Farm, it would be to achieve,
through organic and integrated design, that power of inevitability.
This has for a long time been an effort to work out a way of living
for me and my family—and for the people who work with me. It gives
me more time at home. It surrounds me with atmosphere I feel is
pretty essential to good creativity.” With Beall it was not so much
that he had his studio in the country, but that he had a way of
life built around the country, part of which involved having his
studio there at his elbow.
As with other pioneers of his era, Beall believed that the
designer cannot work in a vacuum. He remarked, “all experience in
fields directly or indirectly related to design must be absorbed
and stored up, to provide the inspirational source that guides,
nourishes and enriches the idea-flow of the designer.” Beall's own
interests in other art forms provided further stimulus to his
immense curiosity and creativity. Dorothy Beall wrote that Lester
“believed that anyone interested in design must necessarily be
interested in other fields of expression—the theatre, ballet,
photography, painting, literature, as well as music, for from any
of these the alert designer can at times obtain not only ideas
related to his advertising problem, but genuine inspiration.” His
books and periodicals were another great source of inspiration for
Beall. He collected books and periodicals seriously from the
beginning of his design career in Chicago. By the Sixties, Beall
had accumulated a major personal collection of publications on
creative forms such as art, design, photography and architecture.
He also collected seminal magazines such as Cahiers d'Art
and rare volumes such as the famous Bauhausbucher. Music
was another important ingredient of Beall's creative environment.
He was very familiar with jazz, having grown up with it in Chicago.
While working in his studio there in the mid-'20s, he would often
listen to live broadcasts on radio. Throughout his life, he would
surround himself with music, be it jazz, or the classical
compositions of Europeans such as Stravinsky, Prokofiev and
Shostakovich.
Beall, in 1963, when writing about what he saw as the
qualifications for a designer, listed “an understanding wife.”
Throughout their life together, from the earliest days of struggle
in Chicago to the golden years at Dumbarton Farm, Dorothy Miller
Beall was by his side, relating to his friends and clients. She
participated as she could to realize her husband's work, career and
life. She said, “I have always felt very close to my husband's
career, having been a part of it from the very beginning.” Together
Dorothy and Lester built living environments for themselves and
their family which were rich with collected folk art, antiques,
Americana, as well as contemporary works. Beall said, “A lot of
wives take a dim view of their husbands coming home for lunch.
Dorothy actually looks forward to my coming home; perhaps even too
much so. I enjoy getting over to the house, being surrounded by the
things in my home.” In remembering the beginning of Beall's career,
Dorothy recalled “It was a time of discovering the interdependence
of painting, sculpture and the technique of modern industry and of
the underlying unity of all creative work.” For many years after
Beall's death, Dorothy preserved the artifacts of his career,
sustained his name in the design press with articles and was
continually supportive to inquiring students or researchers.
Beall was a major synthesizer of the ideas of European
avant-garde artists and designers into the mainstream of design for
American business. An associate Fred Hauck, with whom he had shared
office space in Chicago, was probably the major vehicle through
which Beall received those exciting ideas from Europe. Hauck, who
had lived and painted in Paris and had gone to Hans Hofman's school
in Munich, returned to Chicago and shared with Beall an enthusiasm
for the European artists and designers, especially the Bauhaus.
Hauck showed Beall valued copies of the Bauhaus books and
publications of the avant-garde which he had brought back with him.
This interest as well as such publications as Arts et Metier
Graphiques, and Bebrauschgraphik helped Beall
consolidate his own thinking away from a limiting vision of design
as ordinary middle-American commercial illustration and towards a
new dynamic, progressive form of graphic communication.
Beall earned great respect form his clients and staff. Bob
Pliskin recalled that Beall “was a good man to work for. He had the
gift of enthusiasm and he knew how to communicate it. He gave us
freedom and guidance too. His studio was a happy, stimulating place
where work was fun and clocks did not exist. And Beall could teach.
He taught us to spurn symmetry, which he called an easy out? a
static response to a dynamic world. He taught us that the solution
to a design problem must come from the problem. That form must
follow function.” About Beall's graphic design imagery of the 1940s
Plisken wrote, “You couldn't miss Beall's work. It riveted you?
held your attention? and planted an idea in you head. He was a
skillful typographic designer and he liked working with type and
typographic symbols. He loved arrows. Loved them and used them in
nearly everything he did. It was a natural symbolism for him
because the arrow was and is the simplest, most direct way to move
the eye from one spot to another.”
The recognition of Lester Beall's pioneering efforts has been
slow in coming. It is fitting that his importance to design is now
to be acknowledged again by The American Institute of Graphic Arts.
Looking back, however, he was consistently commended for the
excellence of this work. As early as 1937 Beall was given the first
one-man exhibit of graphic design at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York. Then, in 1942, Beall's greatness was acknowledged as he
accompanied a distinguished group of colleagues, namely Dr. Agha,
Alexey Brodovitch, A.M. Cassandre, Bob Gage, William Golden and
Paul Rand in an ADG exhibit, “A Half Century on the Greatest
Artists of the Modern Media.” August Freundlich remarked in the
brochure, “These are men who have bridged the gap between art and
commerce. Although we fully recognize their success within their
commercial regions, it is their success as creative artists, as
creative thinkers, as innovators, as inventors that concerns us.”
It took the New York Art Directors Club until 4 years after Beall's
death in 1969, to vote him into their prestigious Hall of fame in
1973. At that time Bob Plisken, who worked for Beall in the early
1940s, spoke on his behalf, “In my opinion, Beall did more than
anyone to make graphic design in America a distinct and respected
profession.” Lorraine Wild, in her writing on American design
history, has characterized Beall as a leader of those designers
form the Thirties to the Fifties whose work has a “quality of
openness and accessibility. It is evidence of all the energy spent
trying to make a real contribution to the common good and the
environment. The stakes were clear—a new profession was formed.”
Another distinguished design historian, Ann Ferebee, knew Beall
personally and is steadfast in referring to his formative work as
“the conscience of American design.” Philip Meggs in his A
History of Graphic Design, credits Beall with “almost
single-handedly launching the Modern movement in American design.”
The excellence of Beall's life and work has made him into a near
mythic figure who, even a quarter of a century after his death,
still dazzles the imagination of many students and professionals
alike.
“The quality of any man's life has got to be a full measure of
that man's personal commitment to excellence?” Beall would have
felt good about these words spoken by Vince Lombardi, because
competition and commitment were the ways in which he was able to
achieve brilliance in his professional career in design. Beall
said, “When a designer designs a beautiful product he has unveiled
a simple truth. In short, this product of his creativeness
communicates a simple message—a message that will outlast the
product's function or salability. The designer, furthermore, can
then be said to have contributed something of value to his
culture.” So it is entirely appropriate that Lester Beall's legacy
to the profession is now honored; his was surely a “lifetime
achievement.”
Copyright 1993 by The American Institute of Graphic
Arts.
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