Clair Stewart, 98; branding pioneer introduced such identifiable company logos as Laura Secord, Air Canada, Bank of Montreal and CTV, and 'professionalized the design industry in Canada'
Hyfler/Rosner
Corporate branding pioneer demonstrated that 'good design
means good business'
He studied under members of the Group of Seven and then
introduced such identifiable company logos as Laura Secord,
Air Canada, Bank of Montreal and CTV, and 'professionalized
the design industry in Canada'
SANDRA MARTIN
November 22, 2008
An artistic figure in the commercial world, Clair Stewart
was one of the earliest and most significant graphic
designers in this country. A modernist and a cultural
nationalist, he sold printing firms and clients on the
concept that logos, packaging, and memorable corporate
identities are powerful marketing tools. From the thirties
through the seventies, he created innovative looks for
venerable brands such as Laura Secord, Air Canada, Bank of
Montreal and CTV, tutored and mentored a generation of
graphic artists and co-founded Stewart and Morrison, the
country's first truly modern graphic-design company.
Before Mr. Stewart, there were printers and engravers who
might throw in a little design work on the side. After him,
there was a sophisticated infrastructure of professional
associations and a network of urbane and complex Canadian
design firms more than capable of competing internationally.
"He was a pioneer in Canadian design in the 1940s and
1950s," said Don Watt of DW+Partners. "He brought print
sophistication to the Canadian design scene and was the
first one to establish a U.S.-style consulting design
practice while everybody else was a commercial artist."
Pointing out that Mr. Stewart "professionalized the design
industry in Canada," Mr. Watt said that "he had the ability
and the ideas and the necessary capital to realize them."
Amiable and persuasive, Mr. Stewart worked in the city
during the week and retired to Highfields, a large country
property outside Toronto on weekends. He and his wife, Amy,
were such close friends with writer Robertson Davies and his
wife, Brenda, that they eventually became country neighbours
and Mr. Davies wrote his novel Fifth Business in the
Stewarts's house. And it was at this same safe house in
Caledon East that Soviet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov holed up
after defecting from the Kirov Ballet following a guest
performance with the National Ballet at Ontario Place in
1974 - although the Stewarts were tactfully not at home at
the time.
One of his neighbours was film director and producer Norman
Jewison, who bought a property in Caledon in the late
seventies. "He was the first guy I met in the country who
looked like a country squire," said Mr. Jewison. "I was
always running over there to ask about what trees and shrubs
to plant." Describing his friend's "reforestation" projects,
he said, "He was like Jimmy Cagney. When Jimmy Cagney
retired from movies, he moved to northern New York and
bought this enormous tract of land and planted trees. He was
a great guy."
Clair Cuthbert Stewart was born in a small town on the
Prairies, two years before the sinking of RMS Titanic. The
eldest of three children, he was the only son of Rev. R. G.
Stewart, a Presbyterian minister and his wife Lena
(Johnston ) Stewart. His father's vocation took the family
to congregations in disparate parts of the country, so Clair
grew up in Vancouver, Victoria and Edmonton before the
family settled in Belleville, Ont., in the twenties. That's
where Clair went to high school.
His graduation coincided with the family's move to Toronto
when his father was called to minister to the congregation
of St. John's Presbyterian Church in what is now Riverdale.
Clair, who had inherited his father's love of the visual
arts and his easy-going disposition, enrolled in the Ontario
College of Art in 1928. Several members of the Group of
Seven were instructors there, including Franklin Carmichael
and J.E.H. MacDonald, who became principal in Clair's first
semester. By the time he graduated in 1932, he had been
inculcated with The Group's nationalist beliefs and fervent
passion for challenging conservative definitions of "art"
and embracing romantic expressionism in their landscapes.
He wanted to work as an illustrator, but since there was no
such thing as a graphic-design firm in Toronto at the time,
he took the boat to England where he landed a junior
position at Askew Young, one of the leading commercial art
studios in London.
After three years, he returned to Canada, more for emotional
than artistic reasons. In the late twenties, his parents had
bought a modest cottage on Sturgeon Point in the Kawartha
Lakes area of Ontario. Nearby was a much larger summer home
belonging to the family of tycoon Sir Joseph Flavelle.
That's how Clair Stewart met Sir Joseph's granddaughter, Amy
McLean, of the Canada Packers fortune. They were married on
Sept. 7, 1937, and eventually became the parents of six
children - five sons and a daughter. While his parents were
not poor, hers were extremely rich, a circumstance that
allowed Mr. Stewart some ease in pursing his artistic and
commercial ambitions.
Very little had changed in the graphic design world in
Toronto while Mr. Stewart was abroad. He found a job at a
small firm headed by Jack McLaren and John McCall, two
former salesmen from Rous and Mann, a printing company that
had employed several Group members. Mr. Stewart, who was
head of the art department, would dream up ideas and then
sell both the concept and himself to potential clients, an
approach that he honed throughout his career. At McLaren and
McCall, he did work for Canadian Cycle and Motor Co.,
Imperial Oil, Birks, and for his father-in-law's firm,
Canada Packers.
During the war he created patriotic war posters, organized
and led a RCAF camouflage unit on the B.C. coastline and
then trained as a pilot in Ontario. The war ended before he
could be sent overseas.
After being demobilized in 1946, he was appointed art
director at Rolph-Carr-Stone, a well-established Toronto
printing firm with plants in Halifax and Montreal. His most
revolutionary act was to insist that graphic design was a
distinct entity, clearly itemized on invoices, and that he,
as head of the art department, was the primary link with
customers. That may sound arrogant, but in the late forties
few customers knew what they wanted, or appreciated that
aligning and integrating illustration with typography made
for more effective advertising.
Besides forging his own career path as a designer, Mr.
Stewart was helping to create an environment in which
graphic design would develop into a sophisticated specialty
with its own professional association. For example, in 1948,
he was a founding member of the Art Directors' Club of
Toronto (now The Advertising & Design Club of Canada) and
the Association of Canadian Industrial Designers and two
years later he helped create the Packaging Association of
Canada. He also served as the first Canadian correspondent
for Modern Publicity, a London-based international
graphic-design review, and began submitting examples of
excellent Canadian work as early as 1950.
As a designer, Mr. Stewart tested his mettle at
Rolph-Carr-Stone on wine labels, a standard printing
contract for the company. He approached the president of one
winery and told him bluntly that his labels were "no good,"
intoned his mantra that "good design means good business,"
and suggested that Canadian wine bottles could look as good
as imported ones. Within a few years he and his staff were
designing almost all of the wine labels in Canada, according
to Eric Setliff in an M.A. thesis he wrote on Mr. Stewart's
career.
From wine, he moved to candy, replacing the pioneer look and
the engraving of an elderly Laura Secord with a spare, white
package with a sky-blue border and a floating medallion
portrait of a younger and more attractive woman as the
19th-century Canadian heroine. The new design won a medal
from the Art Directors' Club of Toronto in 1952 and the
loyalty of the company, which retained the look for close to
half a century.
With successes like that and clients that included the
government of Ontario, Canada Steamship Lines, Salada Tea,
Bright's and Jordan's wines, Mr. Stewart was given his head.
In the decade he worked at Rolph-Carr-Stone, he hired a
score of new designers, including a young man named Ted
Morrison, who would later become his business partner, and
developed a distinctive style that his colleague Hans
Kleefeld once described as "evocative" and marked by "an
elegant simplicity." Mr. Setliff discerned two trends in Mr.
Stewart's work from this era: an illustrative style with
simplified forms and single colours that resembled paper
collages but with a more fluid line; and an aesthetic that
combined realistic watercolour illustrations with lettering
and pen work using late Victorian script, type and
decoration, as in the book covers and "decorations" that he
made for The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks and Leaven of
Malice by his good friend Robertson Davies.
By the mid-fifties, Mr. Stewart was spending such a large
proportion of his time meeting with clients, working as an
art director and speaking about design to professional
groups that he had little time to sit at his drafting board.
At the same time, U.S. design firms were snagging some of
the top creative jobs in Canada and luring promising
designers to work for them. What the profession needed, to
compete here and abroad, in Mr. Stewart's view, were
dedicated and independent design firms that weren't tied to
particular printers or engraving processes.
In 1960, he and Ted Morrison left Rolph-Carr-Stone to form
Stewart and Morrison, an independent design company. Rudy
Eswarin, another RCS employee, became a third partner, and
Hans Kleefeld, a German-trained designer, soon signed on as
director of graphic design. Despite the loss of three key
employees, RCS didn't begrudge the defection and helped S&M
survive by sending them design work for the next three
years.
Initially, Mr. Stewart, who had the contacts and the
financial resources, expected the new company would focus on
designing packaging for products, but in the wake of Allan
Fleming's stunning 1961 logo for Canadian National Railways
(a flowing design linking the letters C and N to form a
visual image, akin to a train travelling on a railway line,
that even now, nearly 50 years later, is still one of the
premier logos in the short history of Canadian graphic
design) corporations came calling, wanting S&M to help them
create corporate identities - what we call branding today.
Beginning with logos and working through letterhead,
business cards and other communication vehicles, S&M became
the go-to design shop for corporations wanting to present a
coherent, cohesive and recognizable image to the public.
Air Canada was their first big account, followed by Canada
Packers, Manulife, Toronto Dominion, The Banks of Nova
Scotia and Montreal, the Montreal Expos, TransCanada
Pipelines, The Arthritis Society, the interiors of the
Ontario Pavilions at Expo 67 in Montreal and Expo 70 in
Japan, Molson Breweries, Inco, Catelli and CTV. Reversing
the branch-plant trend in Canada, S&M opened offices in New
York in 1964 and in London in 1970.
In 1981, Mr. Stewart, who was by then in his early 70s, sold
his interest in S&M and embarked on a new lifestyle -
country gentleman at his family property in Caledon,
northeast of Toronto. For the next quarter century, he and
Amy put as much energy, thought and passion into planting
trees, designing gardens, digging ponds, painting
watercolours and designing an annual Christmas card as he
had earlier invested in building his company and forging the
infrastructure for a Canadian design industry.
In 1998 Mr. Stewart was given the Les Usherwood Award from
the Advertising and Design Club, followed two years later by
the Order of Canada.
CLAIR STEWART
Clair Cuthbert Stewart was born May 20, 1910, in Kenton,
Man. He died Friday, Nov. 14, 2008, of pneumonia in
Headwaters Hospital in Orangeville, Ont. He was 98. He is
survived by Amy, his wife of 71 years, six children, a dozen
grandchildren and his extended family.
There was a private service in a chapel that Mr. Stewart had
designed in Calvin Presbyterian Church in mid-town Toronto,
the church the family had attended for many years.