Natasha Kroll; BBC-TV Production designer
Hyfler/Rosner
Brilliant designer who brought about a style revolution at
BBC Television
Bernard Lodge
Wednesday April 7, 2004
The Guardian
The designer Natasha Kroll, who has died aged 89, was best
known for her pioneering production design at the BBC in the
late 1950s and early 1960s, and subsequently for her design
of several feature films. Yet she had earlier established a
reputation as an innovative designer of shop-window display.
To both strands of her career, she brought a creative
sensibility that was rooted in the progressive design
philosophy of prewar Europe, and, like many fellow Europeans
who settled in Britain in the 1930s, she enriched the visual
language of her adopted country.
Kroll was born in Moscow, but in 1922, when she was eight,
her family moved to Germany, where she received her formal
art education at the Reimann School, in Berlin, studying
design and, in particular, shop-window display. When the
school moved to England in 1936, she was given a post as
assistant teacher, and got her first opportunity to test her
skills professionally in the Rowntrees department stores in
Scarborough and York.
But it was in 1942, when she became display manager for
Simpson Piccadilly, that her characteristic talent flowered.
It was Kroll's good fortune that this relatively new West
End store was uncluttered by inherited tradition, and that
its deputy chairman Dr Samuel Simpson was, like its founder
Alec Simpson, an admirer of modern design.
The latter had commisioned work from the Bauhaus designer
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and the English graphic designer Ashley
Havinden. The facade of Joseph Emberton's controversially
modern building had a sweep of concave, non-reflecting
display windows, and these became the setting for Natasha
Kroll's inventive installations.
In Britain at that time, shop-window display seldom showed
the influence of progressive design. At best, a form of arch
surrealism was attempted; at worst, there was a predictable
dowdiness, a condition not alleviated by wartime austerity.
For all their innovation, Kroll's designs were tempered by a
practical attitude. In her definitive book Shop Window
Display (1954), she stressed that "the windows were
essentially settings for the merchandise". The lighting and
objects were there only to enhance the clothes.
At that time, it may have been considered perverse to
surround or support the smart Simpson clothes with wooden
crates, bricks and ladders, but Kroll cleverly deployed such
basic objects to enhance, by contrast, the clothes'
elegance. The rough-with-smooth gambit was only one aspect
of her stylistic range.
Many of the trends developing in the fields of exhibition
and graphic design - such as the use of dramatic photo
blow-ups - were echoed in the Simpson windows. Frequently,
the displays were minimalist: simple panels, strategic
lighting, with the actual lighting units featured as display
elements.
There were topical displays - an exuberant window
celebrating the liberation of Paris, and wastebaskets
stuffed with clothing coupons to mark the end of rationing.
There was a seasonal display with a Christmas-tree
silhouette of lights stretching the full height of the
Piccadilly frontage, which, for many years, became an annual
feature. At this time, Kroll also encouraged young
designers, such as the French artist André François and the
textile designer Terence Conran, just out of art school.
In 1956, Kroll was invited to join Richard Levin's design
department at BBC Television. Levin had recruited his
production designers mainly from cinema and the theatre,
their expertise being ideal for drama or situation comedy,
but for the talks and factual programmes, which made up just
under half the broadcast output, there was scant design
support. Producers frequently ordered the drapery or rostra
they required from the scenery store.
This chaotic situation impelled Levin to create a studio
design unit, headed by Kroll, to originate a style
specifically for the new medium. Abhorring the kind of
visual dishonesty that made a studio interview appear to be
taking place in a book-lined study, she and her team started
from the premise that the viewer should be aware that such
an event was occurring in a television studio, albeit one
modified by design.
The unit thus gave regular programmes their own house style,
ranging from the elaborately decorative to the minimalist
extreme - often incorporating no more than a couple of well
chosen chairs. In that pre-Habitat era, many a viewer's
first sighting of a Corbusier or Bertoia chair might have
been as part of Kroll's set for a talks programme.
Huw Wheldon's pioneering arts magazine, Monitor, was one of
the programmes that Kroll designed personally. Her simple,
translucent panels, or selectively cropped photo blow-ups,
modulated by lighting, established a recognisable tone for
the programme, and gave unity to its multiple-feature
format.
Those who knew Kroll only as a champion of modern design
would, however, have been surprised by the rich informality
of her home in Putney, south-west London, a haven of
bourgeois comfort furnished with items of Biedermeyer and
Victorian furniture, a profusion of folk art and few, if
any, items of modern design.
This happy ecleticism, and an eye for rich detail, fed back
into her work, more obviously in the design of period
dramas, on which she worked more frequently after leaving
the BBC in 1966 to freelance. Designing for the corporation,
as well as for LWT and Yorkshire Television, she built an
impressive list of credits, including The Lower Depths, The
Death Of Danton, Ring Around The Moon, The Seagull, Eugene
Onegin, The Soldier's Tale and The Cherry Orchard. In 1967,
she was elected a Royal Designer for Industry.
Kroll went on to design for the cinema, and won a Bafta
award for her work on Alan Bridges' The Hireling (1973). But
it was an old Monitor colleague, Ken Russell, who gave her
perhaps her greatest opportunity - the production design of
his Tchaikovsky biopic, The Music Lovers (1971). Such
settings as her vivid evocation of the St Petersburg Easter
fair must have been coloured by nostalgia for the country
she left as a child, and to which she had never returned.
Kroll never married, but like a Russian doll in reverse, she
had inside her a fond, motherly nature. This became apparent
on occasions such as her annual Boat-Race party, when her
riverside home overflowed with the children of her friends,
colleagues, and the extended family of her brother Alex, who
survives her.
· Natasha Kroll, designer, born May 20 1914; died April 2
2004