Richard Beck
Richard Beck was an English designer who trained and studied in England and Germany, before coming to Australia. He was born in 1912, and educated at the Slade School of Art in London and the Blocherer School in Munich, before arriving in Australia in 1940.
On arriving in Australia, he established Richard Beck Associates, who produced packaging, corporate image design, exhibition and general advertising work. At the same time, he also worked as a freelance designer for several Melbourne advertising agencies. His diverse range of commissions included the design for the Melbourne’s first decorated tram during the Royal visit of 1954. He was also notably selected to design the official Melbourne Olympic Games poster for the 1956 games. The poster was part of a world tour of Olympic Games Posters of the modern games by artists such as David Hockney, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in 2012. The exhibition’s curator declared Beck’s striking poster, the first not to feature an athlete, the best on display.
In 1998 his Orient Lines poster was one of 100 posters chosen from more than 10,000 posters housed by the Victoria and Albert museum to represent the history of the poster since Tolouse Lautrec in the 19th Century. The V & A also acquired his Olympic and London transport posters. One of Beck’s notable awards was the National Packaging Associations gold medal for the best Australian export pack of 1960 – awarded to him for the famous black and white Coonawarra Estate Claret bottle he designed. When people visited the Estate they asked where the path, featured on the label, was. So the estate dug one – a fine example of life imitating art.
The heritage listed Richard Beck mural on the eastern exterior wall of the former Hosies Hotel, is the first major abstract mural produced in Melbourne. In many ways the mural, unveiled in 1956, is a pre-curser to the current government-sponsored program to integrate public art into the city streets and buildings. Mimmo Cozzolino, student of Beck’s and a noted graphic designer in his own right, had this verdict on Beck and his mural: “I was lucky enough to meet Dick Beck when I was a design student in the late 1960s at Prahran Tech when he was teaching there. Dick was a big, softly spoken, shy man who hardly ever spoke about his own work. Hosies Mural was no exception. It was sometime after he died that I discovered he had designed it. I had seen it before I knew this and had always been intrigued by its imposing size (three storeys tall) and its quasi-religious feel (notwithstanding the fact that it was on a pub).
The mural displays the hallmarks of a Dick Beck design: stunning simplicity in form and colour. He stood out from his contemporaries because he could distil a visual concept until only the bare essentials were left. The mural is a quintessential bit of 1950s design where depth is achieved by the playful juxtaposition of cool colours at the back and warm ones at the front. As I stand with my back to Hosies Mural and squint towards Feld Square, I realise that it has taken nearly half a century for some other designer to emulate Dick’s groundbreaking architectural abstraction. Perhaps they were inspired by Hosies Mural?”
In 1969, he was appointed Head of Graphic Design at Prahran Technical College, and remained in this role until 1972. He was also a visiting lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Beck’s work is represented in several national and international collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the London Transport Museum, the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Art Gallery of Victoria.
Early commercial art and graphic design archives, such as the collection of Richard Beck’s, highlight the breadth, scope and diversity of projects undertaken by designers working in Australia during the 20th century.
The Design Institute of Australia Hall of Fame recognises the achievements of Richard Beck.
