Philip Thompson; artist who was a visual polymath
Hyfler/Rosner
Prolific artist, designer and teacher who put his
distinctive thumbprint on 'every banal scrap of paper'
Lucy Sisman
Thursday May 24, 2007
Guardian
Philip Thompson, who has died aged 79, was a visual
polymath: an artist, illustrator, designer and a great
communicator in the language of graphics. His fellow
designer Richard Hollis said he had a gift for making every
banal scrap of paper, shopping list or gas bill into
something marvellous - "the back of the envelope was his
oeuvre". Even his handwritten envelopes are treasured, and
many are framed on walls.
Derek Birdsall, who first met Thompson when they were at
Central School of Art and Design, London, in the early
1950s, called Thompson a lateral thinker with a breadth of
knowledge that showed in all his work; Hollis described Art
Without Boundaries, the compendium that Thompson co-wrote
with Gerald Woods in 1974, as the key to his interests,
which were everything visual.
Besides creating, Thompson collected - in fact, he kept
absolutely everything: he had filing cabinets and
beautifully numbered cardboard boxes piled to the ceiling,
bursting with the cuttings, photographs, bus tickets, menus
and ephemera that nourished his work. He liked to touch, as
well as look.
Born in London, he was later brought up in Hastings, and
studied for two years at the town's art school. After
national service in the army, spent mainly in Egypt, he went
to the Central school for four years. From 1953 to 1957 he
worked at the WS Crawford advertising agency, and then went
freelance before setting up his solo business in 1960. His
many jobs included exhibition graphics, murals, catalogues
and corporate identities; press design for the Sunday Times,
the Economist and British Rail; book jackets and design for
Heinneman, Methuen and Penguin. He drew for Private Eye, the
Oldie, Artists & Illustrators, and for the Independent and
the Daily Telegraph.
Among his clients for illustrations were the British
Council, British Airways, HarperCollins and IBM. He wrote on
design for, among other publications, Architectural Review
and Design magazine. With Peter Davenport, he co-wrote The
ABC of Graphic Clichés in 1981 (republished as The
Dictionary of Visual Language). He exhibited his paintings
at the Royal Academy, had one-man shows, and was elected to
be a royal designer for industry by the Royal Society of
Arts in 2000. He was a visiting lecturer at Central School
of Art and Design (1971-80) and Middlesex University
(1980-85), and a tutor of graphic design at the Royal
College of Art (1987-95).
I was one of those whose lives were enriched by his
teaching, though like everybody else who knew him, I most
remember his silences. He loved art schools as they were
before they were incorporated into academia in the 1980s,
since he recognised that after the change they shrank from
being exciting nurseries for talent to production lines for
career artists and designers. He felt it important that
students should be taught history so that they knew about
the origin - and descent - of ideas.
Indeed, ideas were the basis of his own distinctive visual
identity; whatever medium he was working in, you could see
his mind at work through the quality of his ideas. The
cartoonist Peter Brookes said: "Philip had what all
illustrators and artists admire and strive for, an immediate
thumbprint: the ability to make a mark and let you know who
did it." What people call style was simultaneously present
and absent in his work: he was versatile and yet his hand
was recognisable on sight.
Thompson was opinionated and had a confidence in the next
thing, a nonchalant ability to take chances, a daring
willingness to put himself on the line. That was his life
code. Yet he was a shy, ascetic and modest man, whose
friends often did not know about his long and distinguished
career - although they were grateful for the quality and
generosity of his help.
Towards the end of his life, he wondered if his wide and
intense curiosity, which had made him happy, had been a
mistake; if it might have been better to have done just one
thing. He saw design as a profession that needed a keen
intelligence to bring it off.
A legendary hypochrondriac, he was witty about his health
even when he knew he was dying. "In spite of everything," he
wrote when he was about to exhibit paintings last year,
"(and there's an awful lot of everything), life is still
worth living." He worked until his last days to finish his
final book, I'm Trying to Connect to You.
His wife, June, died in 1979; they had four children, Nigel,
Caroline, Dominic and Madeleine. In the 1980s Birdsall
booked Thompson and the teacher and artist Bobby Gill to
lecture at the RCA on the same day, since he wanted them to
meet. They were together for 19 years.
· Philip John Thompson, artist and designer, born April 26
1928; died May 9 2007
Hyfler/Rosner
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:tdadnTs7jJh2w8vb...@rcn.net...
> Philip Thompson
> Prolific artist, designer and teacher who put his
> distinctive thumbprint on 'every banal scrap of paper'
>
>> Nigel,
> Caroline, Dominic and Madeleine. In the 1980s Birdsall
> booked Thompson and the teacher and artist Bobby Gill to
> lecture at the RCA on the same day, since he wanted them
> to meet. They were together for 19 years.
Very cool interview with Bob Gill follows which might only
interest someone in advertising but I post it anyway:
Issue 64
Eye Feature
Reputations
1960s culture
'I’ve never had a problem with a dumb client. There’s no
such thing as a bad client. Part of our job is to do good
work and get the client to accept it.'
by Patrick Baglee
Bob Gill
Bob Gill (born 1931, Brooklyn, NY) attended Philadelphia
Museum School of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art
before starting a freelance career in New York. His early
work included illustrations for Esquire, Architectural
Forum, Fortune, Seventeen, The Nation, children’s books and
film titles. He won a New York Art Directors Gold Medal for
a CBS television title in 1955.
In 1960 he moved to London to work for Charles Hobson, a
London advertising agency and formed Fletcher / Forbes /
Gill (a forerunner of Pentagram). The trio’s Graphic design:
Visual Comparisons, (1963), sold more than 100,000 copies.
Gill resigned from the partnership in 1967 and resumed
freelance life, which included teaching, writing children’s
books and film-making.
In 1975 he returned to New York, where he designed a
proposed 'peace monument' for Times Square, directed The
Double Exposure of Holly, a hardcore porn film, and
collaborated with Robert Rabinowitz to devise the multimedia
musical Beatlemania, which ran for three years on Broadway.
Gill’s books include I keep changing, Ups & Downs and Forget
all the rules you ever learned about graphic design.
Including the ones in this book and Graphic design made
difficult. His clients include Nestlé, D&AD, Apple Corps,
the Rainbow Theatre, the Anti-apartheid Movement, Pirelli,
CBS, Universal Pictures, Joseph Losey, Queen, Design, High
Times and the United Nations.
He continues to advocate a no-nonsense approach to
problem-solving, writing (in 1981) that 'Drawing
(illustration) is just like design. It’s a process. A means
not an end. Both are a way of making statements. So unless
you have a specific point of view about something, don’t
even begin the process.' He received the British D&AD
President’s Award in May 1999.
Patrick Baglee: You paid your way through art school by
playing music in the resorts of the Catskill Mountains north
of New York. What was that like as a young man?
Bob Gill: My Mum couldn’t afford to put me through college
so I started going up to the mountains when I was twelve or
thirteen. I was a terrible pianist of course but what a
thrill it was getting away from home. To save on food, the
management had us eat in the children’s dining room. One
year Mel Brooks was the MC on the same bill as me – I never
dreamt he would make a living in that area.
PB: What were the circumstances that led to your arrival in
the UK – was it an inevitable adventure?
BG: I was about to go on holiday. I had been working since
around 1951 in New York and was an up-and-coming hot
illustrator and designer. I wasn’t making any money but was
building a reputation, and it looked like it was going to be
a wonderful career. I had no thought of joining anybody or
getting a job. I was born to be a freelance illustrator and
designer – there’s no doubt about it.
I also started teaching at the School of Visual Arts. I had
a very nice life. I was a bachelor and it was terrific. I
was packing to go to Europe for two weeks, when I got a
phone call from a friend saying there was a guy from an
English advertising agency interviewing art directors in a
hotel in Manhattan. And I thought it would be more
interesting working in a foreign country than holidaying in
it. And I said to him I wasn’t real serious about
emigrating, but if he wanted to hire me I’d love to work for
him for the summer. It was a miracle – just dumb luck.
PB: How did you feel about London when you first arrived
here?
BG: I thought almost from the first day that I would spend
the rest of my life in London. It turned out that I stayed
for fifteen years – which isn’t bad based on a feeling.
Someone had given me Alan Fletcher’s telephone number
because he was one of the hot young designers about my age
in London. I arrived in the middle of a public holiday and
everything was absolutely locked up. London was a ghost
town.
So I called him, and he was just leaving for a few days. I
said I’d just come from New York and had his number, and he
was wonderful. He said: 'I’m just walking out the door, I
can’t even talk,' because he had a train to catch or
something, but he said he would leave the key under the mat
and that I was most welcome to spend the weekend and make
myself at home. I got to know him and love him like a
brother.
PB: You began work in a London advertising agency.
BG: It was very boring, a hack agency called Charles Hobson
[later sold to Grey Advertising] and it was very confusing.
I was absolutely intoxicated with London but at the same
time (and though I didn’t do bad work) I was surrounded by
people who were very uninteresting to me. And there was
another strange thing: the Prime Minister of the time
[Harold Macmillan] was making about £7500 a year and I was
making £10,000. The owner of the agency thought that the
Americans were just going to be the greatest gift to
advertising.
PB: There must have been some moments of relief?
BG: The agency had the White Horse Whisky account, and was
on the brink of losing it. So I said: 'I don’t drink whisky.
I don’t know the first thing about whisky, so I can’t
possibly do an ad until I know something more. I’ll have to
go up to the distillery to find out about it.' I set off for
Glasgow, and I sat down with a group of very dour executives
who told me why White Horse (which is essentially exactly
the same as Bell or Haig) is unique. But it’s a subtle thing
of course, and you have to be a whisky drinker. 'How so?' I
asked.
And the executives all stood up and walked me down this long
corridor through two huge doors. One of them told me that in
here are samples of all the premier brands in Scotland, and
only a real whisky drinker can possibly hope to tell them
apart, 'but we’ll let you try, and maybe you’ll begin to
understand the difficulties of making these brands
distinct.' The doors were heaved open, and I looked down
this room to see a long table covered in a white cloth with
a row of twelve glasses, each with a shot of whisky that had
just been poured by a 'concierge' – an ex-military man in a
fancy uniform.
I was first into the room and so I looked the concierge in
the face and mouthed: 'Which one?' The concierge mouthed
back: 'Third'. I let the executives describe what to look
for in the aromas and colour and so on. And then I picked up
a couple of whiskies, sipped them, and then picked up the
third glass and sniffed it. 'That’s it,' I said, 'no
question.' The agency kept the account.
PB: How did you make the break from there to becoming
involved with Fletcher and Forbes?
BG: I met Forbes through Fletcher – they were working in
Forbes’s apartment as freelancers sharing expenses. This was
after becoming disenchanted with the agency. It was a
strange situation because if I had told Nicholas Kaye (the
owner of the agency, who liked to think of me as his son) I
was going to quit, as kind as he was and as generous as he
was, he could have had me assassinated.
And then I had an inspiration. I went to him after Fletcher,
Forbes and I decided to get together and I said: 'Nicholas –
let’s quit' and he said: 'What are you talking about?' I
said 'Let’s get out of here and start a design office.'
Well, he was so moved by the fact I wanted to take him with
me so he said: 'No, you go. I’ll finance it and I’ll feed
work to it from the agency – packaging and so forth, and I’ll
be a silent partner – I don’t want my name on it.'
PB: What was the arrangement you reached?
BG: Fletcher and Forbes were very generous. They were
prepared to give up 25 per cent, so instead of the three
there would be four of us owning this entity
Fletcher/Forbes/Gill, because this was the only way I could
leave. So Kaye was a partner in the company. It was April
Fool’s Day 1962 when we started, and it took us a year to
get a telephone.
Amateurs ran London – it took months to get a carpet, a
telephone or a typewriter. Then one day Nicholas called and
said: 'Bob, what’s going on? Already six months have gone by
and there is no money coming in', and so I said: 'Nicholas,
why don’t you resign? We’ll give you your £25 back and your
investment with interest.' We borrowed the money from
Barclays and by a miracle we were able to own ourselves. Of
course today, Kaye would have owned 25 per cent of
Pentagram.
PB: How did you get noticed in the 1960s?
BG: The 1960s were a time when there was a lot of hunger for
names and so forth and so everybody seemed to get their
share of publicity. You really had to hide not to become
known. And of course Britain was recovering from the
Festival of Britain, which was an awful period – just about
the dopiest, most provincial stuff. And suddenly the 1960s
hit – somewhat due to an American invasion. There was
Brownjohn, and I came over and Bob Brookes, an art director
who became a photographer. There were lots of American
photographers – maybe half a dozen. Also because of the
McCarthy era in America, a lot of film directors and
producers were driven out of America following the
blacklist. It was an amazing period for film. Look Back in
Anger opened the 1960s – Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – all these
working-class films which were unheard of before.
All the photographers were working class: Donovan, Duffy,
Bailey; and Jean Shrimpton was the model, Biba and Mary
Quant were fashion, and then there was the English invasion
of America with rock’n’roll – it was an amazing period on
every level. It was just dumb luck that I was there.
PB: What made the partnership with Alan Fletcher and Colin
Forbes so successful?
BG: It was like shooting fish in a barrel. We had a great
combination of the American interest in an idea with
impeccable Swiss layout and typography. Not that I was
helpless in that area or that they [Fletcher and Forbes]
didn’t have great ideas, but there was no one in London who
had these two strengths in combination. It was all over in
about five minutes.
Now for me, in London, everything was like being on the
moon, so everything I saw was new and fresh. I remember when
I was at the Hobson agency, the reproduction of stuff was so
bad in newspapers (the agency didn’t care about concept or
typography – just reproduction) that they would use
Scraperboard illustrations in line.
PB: Was this lack of care and attention frustrating?
BG: At the first meeting at the agency, where they accepted
one of my ads for a box of chocolates, I said: 'I want to
get a nice photographer.' They said, 'Oh no – we have to get
a Scraperboard artist,' and they showed me what they meant
and I said, 'Jesus – this is awful.' Then I said, 'Wait a
minute,' and pulled a pound note from out of my wallet and
said: 'Let’s get this guy, someone who really knows about
good line drawing,' and they said: 'You must be joking.' I
said: 'No – get me the Bank of England!'
So I spoke to the engraving department and said: 'Get me the
chief engraver.' He was on holiday, but the number two was
available. I told the guy where I worked and that I admired
his work and wondered whether he would like to render a bar
of chocolate for me. He said he’d never done anything but
notes, but for the equivalent of more than a week’s salary,
he got involved.
PB: How did the clients of that time differ from those of
today? Were their expectations different? Did they
understand what you could do?
BG: Look, this is the stuff that dreams are made of.
Designers are always saying: 'If we only had the right
client, what beautiful music we could make.' But if they had
the right client, the client wouldn’t need them. It’s
amazing how designers are so naïve that they could want it
both ways. I’ve never had a problem with a dumb
unsophisticated client. I enjoy teaching – I believe in it –
it’s part of the designer’s craft.
There is no such thing as a bad client – there are only bad
designers and part of our job is to do good work and get the
client to accept it. The worst thing that could happen as a
designer is to go into a client’s office and see
pre-Colombian art on the shelf and a Picasso on the wall.
And I say Oh-oh, the guy’s wife is an art historian and he’s
going to show the job to her, or he’s got an adviser to buy
works of art and it’s a killer.
I love to start from scratch with somebody who couldn’t care
less about design and knows nothing about it. Because then
it’s a very interesting process. I’m not a con-man, I
believe I’ve got something to contribute to what this client
has to communicate and also I never presume to tell a client
what to communicate. The fun is to invent a way of saying it
in an interesting manner: the client is the expert in shoes,
or butter. So there is a nice symmetry there. They are
experts in one area and I know something about how to do it.
PB: You say that you have no preconceptions about 'good
design'.
BG: That’s absolutely true, but I hasten to add another
truth. I could work with a client for two or three years and
for one reason or another the relationship ends. This has
happened a number of times. And then they hire another
designer and you see the work that they do. And it’s as if
they have had no contact with you whatsoever. So it doesn’t
stick.
PB: Has your way of working been successful?
BG: I have a very high acceptance rate. In fact I think it’s
easier to get my work accepted because it’s based more on
reason than on simply saying 'Isn’t this wild?' So I
certainly am not unhappy about how victimised I’ve been by
the philistines. The irony is that most people concerned
with creating good design take their values from the
surrounding culture – from Graphis magazine, say. So they’re
all doing the same designs – which to me is boring. So if
you are not concerned with what 'good design' is and you let
the design come from the idea, you get an original design.
PB: Having spent most of your life as a freelancer, how do
you operate? Do you still enjoy it?
BG: Well, I have no thoughts of retiring. Established
designers like myself are in a different position. By now
there are hundreds of people in the world who know you, and
some are interested in you, and even if they don’t call you
once a week or once a month, if there are 500 of them and
each calls you every three years – that’s a living.
Sometimes I’m busy, and sometimes I’m not. Being in a
fashion business, I feel lucky to have been so active for
by-and-large the past 40 years.
PB: You have placed your work and thoughts into a series of
books – was this your gift to the industry, or something a
little less philanthropic?
BG: One does a collection of work with some text to explain
it a bit and make it a little richer for one reason alone –
it’s my portfolio. It would be unseemly for someone so
established to have a portfolio. If an insurance company
rings you up and says: 'We don’t understand what graphic
design can do,' a twenty-year-old sends a portfolio.
An establishment designer has a reputation where you wouldn’t
even dream of showing stuff – so in my case I say 'Here’s a
book.' Every few years I collect new work and old work that
represents me well and I find a publisher and publish it.
PB: You’ve stepped out of education almost entirely of late.
Why?
BG: Having taught for a long time, it just no longer
interested me. A lot of things have happened in the past ten
or fifteen years that are frightening. This current
generation has grown up with the 30-second commercial, which
has very bad implications. One is that because it is a
glamorous job making them, very talented people make
commercials – it’s a very 'now' job. In the 1960s, the now
job was to be a graphic designer – which is no longer the
hot, sexy profession.
The result is that the people making these things can tell
any story, however complicated, within 30 seconds, and
therefore by implication anything that takes longer than 30
seconds is boring. People’s attention spans have been
narrowed. People get bored quickly because of the skills of
communication. But almost nothing meaningful can be
communicated effectively in 30 seconds – only the trivial.
People’s frames of reference have become very narrow. So the
average student’s knowledge only extends as far back as a
year, which is frightening. The combination of reduced
attention span and reduced frame of reference gives you a
country of idiots. Teaching them is a killer. The primary
reason I have taught for 40 years is that I’ve been waiting
for someone to teach me something. It has never been an
obligation – if I see a doctor, I want him to be there
because he enjoys being a doctor.
PB: Did you make any efforts to try and change this state of
affairs?
BG: I was once so frustrated with some students (and they
were no worse or better than any others) because they would
spend so little time on a job: they were never trained to
work on anything for a long time. So I said: 'Bring in a job
that took eight hours to accomplish. Don’t tell me it took
seven-and-a-half hours to think of and half an hour to
complete. I want to see physical evidence of eight hours’
effort.' Well, the results were wonderful, because they had
never spent eight hours on anything.
PB: You’re currently working on Unspecial Effects for
Graphic Designers. What is the aim of the book?
BG: We can’t compete. We can’t compete with video makers and
special effects. It’s pathetic what print can do compared
with the razzle-dazzle people see around them. But luckily I
was never interested in special effects, even before there
were special effects. I’m not someone who’s been on the
cutting edge either when I started or now. I’m interested in
reality. I’m interested in looking at things and saying
things about them the way they are. Each one of my jobs is
about things people could have seen themselves had they
bothered to look.
BG: Now, one can exaggerate. It would be boring to limit
yourself to images that were literally there. But there is a
difference between reality exaggerated and a special effect
in a video that says nothing about the human condition. And
these people are not interested in the human condition but
about shocking. I shock my clients by saying: 'Hey – have
you ever noticed this before?' That’s about reality, and
nothing to do with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
PB: So how have computers changed what you do?
BG: The computer has revolutionised the graphic designer.
Any job that had to be printed in the past was a mystery.
Insurance companies didn’t know anything about the mystery
of design and print, so they went to a design agency and
paid a lot of money. It was a magical mysterious thing.
Today for a few quid you can buy a programme and a typist
can do an annual report that’s adequate for 85 per cent of
companies because it meets basic requirements. Well this is
serious, because all of a sudden we can’t just get away with
doing something that just works. One of the things I do that
a computer can’t do is think. Layout is not the imperative
anymore. We have to think and do what the computer can’t do.
This is not new to me. This was always my value and this was
always of interest to me.
PB: You enjoyed an on-and-off working relationship with
Robert Brownjohn. What was he like?
BG: We all started in New York around the same time in 1950
or ’51. Brownjohn went a different route to me to set up an
agency called Brownjohn Chermayeff and Geismar, which was a
precedent of Fletcher Forbes Gill – a collaboration of three
like-minded designers. I went the route of freelance but we
were in the same age group and we respected each other’s
work. I ended up going to England while Brownjohn had a
serious drug problem in New York. He wrote to me and said
would I get him a job in England? I said if he could lick
his drug problem, he could certainly find a job. He had a
dazzling portfolio and was one of the best designers of his
generation.
PB: Did your friendship continue once he had arrived?
BG: We weren’t very close in England. He lived in this a
drug world and then he became a heavy drinker and gained
about 100lbs and I think he liked the idea he was much
larger than life. When he died, I felt it was my duty to
rush over to his studio to preserve his work. He’d left
Cammell Hudson and Brownjohn and was freelancing again. I
wanted to gather his work but his studio was unbelievable.
You never saw such chaos – half-eaten sandwiches, odd socks.
But I didn’t care what sort of a state he was when he went –
he was a designer before he was an addict which meant that
somewhere there would be a clean version of every job neatly
filed away so that when he went to the studio in the sky his
portfolio was ready. From the mid-1950s to mid-1960s, his
work was in transition, so there wasn’t much stuff there.
After his death I gave an evening for him at the American
Embassy where 200 or so people came and reminisced about
him. He was a character. He was the most interesting job he
ever did.
PB: Does praise matter to you?
BG: I’ve had two compliments that I treasure most of all.
One was from Brownjohn, who said he was the 'second-best
designer in England'.
And the other was from Paul Rand, whom everyone, including
me, calls the President, because he was the father of modern
American graphic design. He told me I was his favourite
designer. I value those comments very much.
PB: How’s your piano playing?
BG: Well, the fun of being a jazz piano player is in playing
with other people, but I don’t play with anyone and I haven’t
played in a long time. I hardly touch the piano. And I was
never any good. For some reason, from the age of six or
seven, I always wanted to be a freelance graphic designer.
© 1999 Bob Gill / Patrick Baglee
Hyfler/Rosner
Philip Thompson
Designer, writer and cartoonist
The Independent
31 May 2007
Roger Bates
Philip Thompson, artist and designer: born London 26 April
1928; Tutor in Graphic Design, Royal College of Art 1987-95;
married June Johnson (died 1979; two sons, two daughters);
died London 9 May 2007.
The designer, writer, painter and teacher Philip Thompson
was, in the words of the graphic designer Derek Birdsall,
"the most cultured and articulate man in our business".
Thompson also became an illustrator and cartoonist, making
political illustrations for The Independent and The Daily
Telegraph, designing The Oldie (for which he wrote articles
and drew covers) and cartooning for Private Eye,
particularly for the Victor Lewis-Smith column. I knew him
especially through his drawings in Artists & Illustrators
magazine, for the agony column, on which we collaborated for
more than 12 years.
Philip Thompson was born in 1928 in London, but his parents
later moved to Hastings. There he studied drawing and
painting under Vincent Lines. Lines had been taught at the
Central School of Art by A.S. Hartrick, who in turn had been
a student in Paris with Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. With
this lineage established, and having completed Army service
in the Middle East, Thompson enrolled at the Central School
in London in 1952.
His fellow student Birdsall remembers him as "the most
fastidious and stylish guy I'd ever met". When Thompson won
a £40 drawing prize, he ordered an Edwardian suit from a
classy tailor, and took his girlfriend June to Spain for
three weeks. He once went to a fancy dress party on a
stretcher, bandaged and apparently covered in blood, with
June in attendance as his nurse.
After Central, Thompson worked for four years at Crawford's
advertising agency, and in 1958 designed a poster for London
Transport ("To Town Tonight"). In 1960, he set up a
freelance consultancy, which produced exhibition graphics,
murals, catalogues and corporate identities. The Sunday
Times commissioned work, as did The Economist, British Rail
and Shell. He did a great many book jackets for Heinemann,
Methuen and Constable, but it was his work for Penguin,
commissioned by Birdsall - then Consultant Art Director for
Penguin Education - that produced some of the great book
covers of the era.
In 1972 he co-edited, with Gerald Woods and John Williams,
Art Without Boundaries, 1950-70 for Thames & Hudson, and
with Peter Davenport he wrote The Dictionary of Visual
Language (1980), described by its editors as "the first
attempt to codify a modern iconography". It is illustrated
with over 1,700 examples from the work of the world's
leading art directors, designers, photographers,
illustrators and artists. Thompson purported to spend the
rest of his life in fear of litigation over issues of
copyright, but of course, the real threat was from those who
had not been included in this magisterial compilation.
Thompson had a witty, fluent writing style and published
articles in The Independent Magazine, Architectural Review,
The Sunday Times and Design magazine. In The Oldie in 2003,
he gave an account of a winter spent in Dorset with the
painter Bobby Gill, preparing for an exhibition at Lyme
Regis Museum, and entertaining an astronaut who'd been to
the Moon.
For the agony column in Artists & Illustrators, Thompson
drew cartoons based on the readers' letters and my replies.
We shared the view that, as artists are often inspired by
their neuroses, we should promote and develop these rather
than attempt to dispel anxiety and offer conventional
consolation. A letter from one embittered reader complaining
that open exhibitions often contained a qualification like
"open to all left-handed lesbians of Welsh extraction under
the age of 45" prompted one of Thompson's finest creations.
Thompson drew as he spoke, the drawing often keeping pace
with and supplementing the conversation. Some of his best
drawings for Artists & Illustrators were inevitably about
the mechanics of the artistic process itself. Two figures in
a vignette are complaining that the shape of the drawing is
giving them a crick in the neck. A beautifully drawn truck
is dumping a mass of overwrought cross-hatching into a
land-fill site. Auerbach and Kossoff are weighing an oil
painting to see if it's finished.
Philip Thompson painted throughout his life, and exhibited
at the Young Contemporaries, the New English Art Club and
the Royal Academy, as well as in many commercial galleries.
He showed at the Cleveland Drawing Biennale, and regularly
at the Cartoon Gallery of his friend Mel Calman, whose books
he designed.
He was a master of the marathon phone conversation. With
Birdsall he spent hours "discussing life and its meaning -
as well as modern jazz, 'Beachcomber', Thurber, Steinberg,
André François, Mr Pooter and Spike Milligan". With me, it
was the painting of Roger Hilton and Basil Beattie, the
decline of the art schools under Blair, Alan Fletcher, more
Thurber, Harold Ross, Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson, the
indignities of ill-health and the awfulness of hanging
watercolours in the bathroom.
Thompson was a visiting lecturer at the Central School of
Art from 1971 until 1980 and at Middlesex, 1980-85. In
November 2000 he was elected RDI (Royal Designer for
Industry) by the Royal Society of Arts. From 1987 to 1995 he
was Tutor in Graphic Design at the Royal College of Art, and
it was there that he met Bobby Gill. It was in her studio
that I last saw him, surrounded by paintings and the
accoutrements of painting, wry, humorous, a man in his
element.
Roger Bates
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:tdadnTs7jJh2w8vb...@rcn.net...