ARTWORK Hacienda 5th Birthday Poster
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The union of Peter Saville and Pentagram is not, on
first hearing, the most obvious of marriages. The prince of the 1980s stylists
welcomed as an equal partner in the stronghold of graphic ideas; five years
ago the notion would have been unthinkable. A year ago it might, at a pinch,
have been thinkable, but few would have believed it likely to happen.
The first thing Saville's Pentagram partnership points
up is just how completely the design decade is over. One by one the proselytes
of style have recanted, repented and re-dedicated themselves to the pursuit
of content and the responsibilities of communication. Saville, famous from
the beginning for his Anthony Price suits, Rolex and BMW, is no exception.
"We are trying to understand ideas now," he says, "because
styling doesn't mean anything any more. You used to be able to say an awful
lot with how you styled something; it would position it culturally. That
doesn't work now. You aren't communicating much with the look of something,
because it gets appropriated so quickly."
Yet, despite his apparent about-face, there has always
been more to Saville's graphic design work than style alone. "His work
clearly comes from a different generation," says Pentagram partner
John McConnell, "but it wasn't so style-directed. There seemed to us
to be an intelligence there that meant it wasn't solely a style game. In
the end, with any partner, you want intelligence. If you look at the range
of Peter's solutions, it's very wide."
It was McConnell who first suggested Saville's name
to the other partners after Saville, struggling with his ailing six-year-old
business, PSA, had called on him for advice. In the course of their conversation,
McConnell asked him if there were any other design groups he would consider
joining. Saville said "Pentagram", assuming the question was purely
hypothetical, and the seed was sown. (He had, in fact, already considered
forming a "Pentagram for the 1990s" with Neville Brody and Malcolm
Garrett.) When, after many meetings, David Hillman presented a selection
of Saville's work to the thirteen other partners, who had flown to France
for the occasion, there wasn't a single dissenting voice: Saville was in,
bringing his own partner, Brett Wickens, and two other designers with him.
The British partners will be hoping he stays. The London
office has had the misfortune to lose two partners in the last decade; to
lose any more would seem like carelessness. David Pelham stormed out in
1984, still only a year into the two-year probationary period (new partners
must buy equity in Pentagram at the end of this time), while Howard Brown,
appointed in 1987, lasted a matter of months. With its founding partners
(Crosby, Grange, Fletcher and Kurlansky) now in their fifties or sixties,
Pentagram urgently needs to refresh itself with younger blood. Saville,
now thirty-five, joins John Rushworth, also in his thirties, who was promoted
to partner from the position of associate this year.
The question of the company's profile and direction
is naturally an issue of some sensitivity. Pentagram is universally admired
by its peers, not least for its unique system of internal organisation -
with each partner in effect running his own business - which has proved
to be not only workable, but conducive to design of the highest standard.
Yet the very soundness of the Pentagram philosophy, the stability of its
orginisation and its refusal to play costly games in the City, made it seem
less vital, and less relevant, in the style-obsessed, stock market-watching,
go-getting 1980s. Immune to the parochial temptations of style, and sustained
by its formidable international reputation, Pentagram preferred to pursue
its ideal of "timeless", ideas-based design. This meant, in practice
- at least to the jaded younger observer - solutions not so very different
in kind from the solutions of the 1970s, when Pentagram really had seemed
hip, vital and relevant.
So it's easy to sympathize with Saville when he observes,
as tactfully as he can, that he is part of a generation "a little bit
out of sync, with the Pentagram generation". Or when he ventures less
cautiously: "We have to make Pentagram a bit funkier again. We have
to get it how it was in the early 1970s, because when it started they were
all these groovy guys, among the best-known names in their fields."
Saville arrived, at the end of the 1970s, with a bit
of fanfare himself. He was still a graphic design student at Manchester
Polytechnic, in the company of fellow designer Malcolm Garrett, when he
became involved in the founding of Factory Records with Tony Wison. Saville's
posters and record sleeves - for Factory, Dindisc and Chrysalis - made an
immediate mark. By 1981, Saville had been recognised with a trio of D&AD
silver awards. Ten years later, many of the early covers still stand out
as among the most impressive graphics of their period.
Saville cut through the noise, amateurishness and squandered
energy of punk graphics with images of striking simplicity. From the beginning,
he was out to anticipate new trends in type. Philip Johnsons's drawing of
the At&T building gave him the idea that a classical revival was coming,
so he used Roman lapidary letters on the cover of Joy Division's Closer
above a photograph of a French cemetary. On the surface there wasn't a great
deal to it - with Saville it has always been a matter of sensibility as
much as substance - but the resonance of the design, for fans of the music,
was large.
For the first half of the 1980s, Saville treated his
prolific commissions as an extension of his education. His borrowings from
the history books and type manuals were legion. Saville, like the artists
of the period, called it "appropriation". Jan Tschicold had got
him started, but he rapidly moved on to Berthold Wolpe's typeface Albertus
(for New Order), Herbert Bayer and the Bauhaus (for Orchestral Manoeuvres
in the Dark), and a more or less wholesale lift of two pieces of Futurist
graphics by Fortunato Depero (again for New Order), for which he was arraigned
in The Face as a participant in "The Age of Plunder", He was himself
appropriated when Julian Schnabel employed a detail from the cover of Closer
in the painting Ornamental Despair.
As recently as 1988, Saville resurrected Wim Crouwel's
1967 New Alphabet for a couple of posters - superbly, it must be said -
but since the mid - 1980s he has been concerned to evolve a more personal
style. Saville surprised everyone when he rejected oblique imagery for a
portrait photograph on the cover of New Order's Low-life (the choice of
a sans-serif type-face pre-Arena, pre-Octavo, was, as usual prescient).
But this opened the way for designs such as the sleeves for Peter Gabriel
and catalogues for Yohji Yamamoto, where the framing of the few compositional
elements is even more rigorously controlled. It's this editorial rigour
which is arguably Saville's greatest gift as a designer and art director,
and it is certainly an essential part of his appeal to the equally unsparing
partners at Pentagram. "He's intelligent enough," says John McConnell,
"to leave things out, which is the hallmark of work that is truly classic,
as opposed to work that is just passing through."
Saville's problem in recent years has been the same
one that faces any designer, however talented, who comes up through the
music business. "If you can package records...you can package anything,"
Saville insisted in 1981, in the first flush of success. It's a reasonable
theory, spoilt only by the fact that clients are a literal-minded breed
hungry for previous experience. And as Saville now admits, with an honesty
that speaks much for his present self-confidence, he did indeed lack experience.
"Somebody might have paid me a vast amount of money to do a record,
but I actually didn't know much about doing a letterheading, or producing
a catalogue, or laying out a page of text. You're this infamous designer
for only one thing, and the truth is that you are not much good at anything
else."
His saviour came in the form of Nick Serota, then director
of the Whitechapel Art Gallery. "He was one of the most important people
we ever met, because he was prepared to look at what we'd done and say,
'Okay, you do record covers, I think you can do a gallery identity.'"
Serota, by Saville's account, was an exceptionally patient man. It took
a month for Saville to realise that he could drop the words "art gallery"
to leave the single name "Whitechapel".
However protracted the birth, the project was a turning
point for Saville and Wickens. Thought at first by some observers to be
too low key, boring even, the Whitechapel identity has worn well and won
friends. In France it led to a commission to design the identity for the
"Magiciens de la Terre" exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, which
in turn brought them an identity proposal for Jack Lang's Ministry of Culture.
Suddenly Saville was on the brink of a full-scale identity programme. "I
was terrified by the idea of that one materializing because, if it had,
I don't think we would have been able to do it at that point."
He no longer has to worry. At Pentagram, Saville and
his team will have the resources to undertake projects on this scale. They
will have a structured, tested framework in which to operate, long-term
financial targets to meet, monthly progress reviews, and a financial advisor
on hand. The prospect of so much support clearly enraptures Saville, who
speaks of time sheets with the zeal of the newly converted, and of the Pentagram
partners' "forgiving toughness" with an almost filial pride. Saville
has wrestled with the problems of running his own company, made mistakes
which he freely admits, and finally accepted that he just isn't the managing
director type.
As for the work we can expect to see, it appears unlikely
that Saville's essential concerns will change that much. There will be fewer
record covers: "I'm thirty-five. The things I think about are not that
appropriate to fifteen - or twenty-year-olds buying a record." But
his stop-at-nothing perfectionism is not likely to falter. (One former staff
member speaks of three-day marathons spent deciding how to space a block
of type, and still having to put all the pencils back in the drawers before
they could go home at two in the morning.) Saville has not lost his touch
for what he would once have called "aspirational" graphics. The
lessons of album cover design could be applied he believes, to the packaging
of perfume and luxury cosmetics.
"In some ways it's not that unlike packaging a
band. If I did a New Order cover, I never actually packaged the record:
it was an ongoing process of presentation. And to some extent selling a
perfume or cosmetic is similar. You are selling a concept."
At school with Saville in the early 1970s, Malcolm
Garrett used to chide him: "You always use your paint straight from
the tube". But it is no longer enough, says Saville, simply to choose
an exotic typeface and rely on that for effect, as he and so many other
stylists did in the 1980s. There are dozens of designers who do "Peter
Saville" better than he does himself, so why not leave them to it?
When everybody knows all the references, and everybody can make graphics
look good, the only way left for designers to distinguish themselves is
in the regard that they pay to the content. But wait a minute: isn't that
precisely Pentagram's point?
This article originally appeared in Blueprint Copyright
Rick Poynor
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