Richard Guyatt; Royal College of Art professor who was a key player in the birth of graphic design
Hyfler/Rosner
Christopher Frayling
Saturday October 27, 2007
Guardian
Richard Guyatt, who has died aged 93, was one of the
original group of professors assembled in 1948 as part of
the reform of the Royal College of Art. He helped to
relaunch the institution as a place that prepared
postgraduate students for lives in the specialised design
professions just beginning to emerge, through teaching by
active practitioners rather than career academics.
Designers would no longer "occupy a small back room", wrote
the college's principal, Robin Darwin. They would combine
"the sensitivity of artists, the technical know-how of
production engineers and amused and well-tempered minds".
Guyatt's inaugural lecture, Head, Heart and Hand, published
in 1951, agreed with this but added that, while satisfying
the material dictates of "Head" and "Hand", art and design
teaching should never forget that it is also geared to
follow the promptings of the "Heart".
The reforms of the late 1940s - specialisation, partnerships
with industry, practitioner-teachers, a new status for
designers, and above all encouragement to find one's own
voice - were to revolutionise art education in Britain, and,
in time, the design professions as well. Guyatt, known to
everyone as Dick, was right at the centre of them.
When he arrived in South Kensington, as the college's
youngest professor, Dick's new specialist department was to
be called the school of design for publicity. It was only
after an irate article in the Times, welcoming the
reorganisation but complaining about the vulgarity of the
phrase "publicity design", that a new title was sought. As
Dick wrote a few years later: "With a certain sense of
relief, but not much conviction, the name graphic design was
chosen. No one was quite sure what it meant, but it had a
purposeful ring." And it avoided the pejorative associations
of the interwar label, commercial art, as well as the
limitations of publicity.
This was the first time graphic design had been used in an
educational setting, and it propelled the phrase into the
language. In time, the school expanded to consist of a
complex set of interrelated elements: graphics, typography,
illustration, printmaking, photography, film and television
design, with research into the readability of print,
cartography, natural history and graphic information, the
Lion and Unicorn Press to produce limited edition books,
and, from 1950 onwards, the student magazine Ark.
Dick worked at the college - as professor, pro-rector and
from 1978 to 1981 as rector - for 34 years. And for most of
that time he wore the same lovingly patched blue denim
jacket - doubling as an artist's smock - which he had
designed himself.
In 1963, he published Graphics RCA, the catalogue of an
exhibition of 15 years' work by his students which toured
Europe. It reads like a history of the best in British
graphic design: posters by David Gentleman, Michael Foreman
and Brian Tattersfield; book covers and advertisements by
Alan Fletcher; a cookery strip by Len Deighton; the set for
BBC Television's Quatermass and the Pit by Cliff Hatts; and
a still from Ridley Scott's student film Boy on a Bicycle.
As Darwin wrote in his foreword to the catalogue, the school
had by then become a focus for the entire college, and its
creative atmosphere was directly attributable to "Professor
Guyatt's own ruminative imagination" - and his no-nonsense
brand of toughness.
Dick was born and spent his childhood in La Coruña in
Galicia, north-west Spain. His father, the British consul in
Vigo, died when Dick was 10 and he was despatched to school
at Charterhouse, where his talent for drawing was first
recognised. He went on to serve as apprentice to Oliver
Messel's theatre design studio, and in the evenings attended
life-drawing classes held by Bernard Meninsky, a famously
inspiring draughtsman, at the Westminster school.
"Meninsky's love of drawing was truly infectious," Dick was
to recall, "and through it he was able to impart something
of the wonder he knew to be lying behind the drab facade of
ordinary vision."
It was at one of these classes that he met and fell in love
with Elizabeth (Lizzie) Corsellis, who would become his wife
for 70 years. She appears, briefly, in the apaché dance
sequence of the silent film Piccadilly (1929).
Dick became deeply influenced by the books and teaching of
the Russian philosopher PD Ouspensky, "who first opened my
eyes to the limitations of human perception", and in
particular to the part played by the emotions in human
understanding: the emotional drive generated by an idea
needed both practical skill and intellectual analysis to
test its feasibility. Dick and Lizzie shared this
enthusiasm.
At 19, he began his career as a freelance graphic designer
with posters for Shell-Mex and BP as well as book
illustrations. Two of his Shell posters - Sham Castle in
Bath for the Visit Britain's Landmarks series, and Racing
Motorists for These Men Use Shell - have become classics.
Dick once told me that the face on his Racing Motorists
poster was altered without his knowledge because it was
thought to be "far too handsome". The amended version
featured a cut-out photo of the designer himself smoking a
cigarette. He remained a 60-a-day man until he was 65.
During the second world war, he was recruited by the
camouflage directorate to help hide Scotland's factories
from the Luftwaffe, a sort of advertising in reverse. Much
of his time was spent in aerial reconnaissance, crouched in
the hull of a Sunderland flying boat, sketching possible
targets in pastel with a view to blending them into their
surrounding landscapes. Several of the postwar professors of
the Royal College of Art first became friends while working
in camouflage.
As part of the 1951 Festival of Britain on South Bank in
London, Dick co-designed - with college colleagues Robert
Goodden (obituary, March 26 2002) and Dick Russell - the
Lion and Unicorn Pavilion, celebrating as twin aspects of
Britishness the solidity and strength of the lion and the
imagination and eccentricity of the unicorn. In his long and
versatile career, he created coins for the Royal Mint,
postage stamps and postal order forms, the WH Smith logo,
the packaging for Anchor butter and dinner services for
embassies and colleges. He was a member of the stamp
advisory committee and was made CBE in 1969.
His best-known designs were the elegant and whimsical
commemorative mugs he created for Wedgwood - the Coronation
of 1953, the Prince of Wales's Investiture of 1969, assorted
royal weddings including that of Prince Charles and the
Princess of Wales - always with plenty of ribbons and a
beauty and clarity of line. His last mug was produced in
2005, at the age of 91, for the bicentenary of the Battle of
Trafalgar.
It was Dick who appointed me a professor at the RCA in 1979.
We remained firm friends. When I visited him at his home in
Ham, Wiltshire, a few days before he died, in the cottage
where he and Lizzie, who died in 2005, had together created
a very romantic English country garden, draped over his
incongruous hospital bed was his family's frayed donkey
blanket from Spain. I noted that his hospital bed, crammed
somehow into a small cottage bedroom, had probably been
inspired by the design research unit at the RCA. He said,
deadpan, as always: "Yes, it is rather uncomfortable." The
design world, and art education everywhere, will miss him.
· Richard Gerald Talbot Guyatt, designer, born May 8 1914;
died October 17 2007
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