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Anthon Beeke
Anthon Beeke was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 1940. Apart from a few months of evening classes at the school of applied arts, he received no formal design training. After working as an apprentice for a number of overseas designers, he spent an important formative year as an assistant to Jan van Toorn. In 1963, Beeke established his own graphic design practice, working mainly for literary publishers, museums, cultural magazines and theatre companies. His independent career was interrupted from 1976 to 1982, when he was assistant director of Total Design; until the foundation of his own Studio Anthon Beeke in 1987 he occasionally worked with Dutch designer Swip Stolk. Beeke's designs have always generated controversy, from his 1969 alphabet composed entirely of naked women, to his notorious 1980 poster for Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida - intended, the designer claims, as a feminist statement. Beeke now employs a staff of eight in his Amsterdam office. He has been awarded innumerable prizes for posters, books, magazines and calendars. His clients include the Stedelijk Museum, Tomeelgroep, the newspaper publisher Perscombinatie and book publisher Prometheus. He is currently involved in the international trend-forecasting magazine View on Colour.
Carel Kuitenbrouwer: Are you pleased by the stir your posters sometimes cause?
Anthon Beeke: Yes, of course. That's what I find most important in a poster: that it's a means of communication, it can make people angry, you can use it to stir up a debate. That's when the medium really works. It's the sort of power I have from time to time - a power that's granted me by clients. I'm not always provoking, that would reduce the tension. You have to measure out the indignation and anger, not walk around toting a red hot poker all the time. If you do that, you're nothing but a pain in the neck.
Those posters that show genitals, for the theatre group Toneelgroep Amsterdam among others, are statements made by me as a man to women. I'm talking about a rat in the kitchen, that part of us in which we as men are not kosher when it comes to women, yet which we see as completely natural.
CK: Why make these statements?
AB: If, like me you live in a community of reasonably humane, culturally well-grounded freethinkers, in a city which has manifested its mercantile spirit from the sixteenth century by systematically plundering the world and accumulating an enormous wealth, a city which offers a tremendous amount of energy, so I try to give Amsterdam some of my energy back.
My posters may be a curse to some, but they confirm what others already feel. We are allowed, indeed given government subsidies to post them up freely, and this is a good I would like to preserve. I don't think I could have come out on the streets with these posters in Berlin, Paris, Madrid, London or wherever, not to mention America, where they begin to tremble if you post them on the walls of their so-called progressive art schools. So you might say I do it to set an example.
CK: How do you express your involvement in your projects?
AB: There are many ways to do that, whether for theatre or museum posters. Some exhibitions, for instance, have a second subject apart from the visual art. Take the example of the exhibition of Latin American art at the Stedelijk Museum, which gave me the opportunity to show something more of Latin America than I was asked to do.
CK: How did that work?
AB: The title of the exhibition was 'UABC', the initial letters of the countries the works came from: Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Chile. It was a large exhibition intended to draw a large crowd, so the poster had to be fresh and eye-catching, clear and not cryptic. To begin with I used the warm, vivid colours of the Latin America we all long for - samba-rumba, so to speak. But we also know about the 'foolish' mothers walking around the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and the many intellectuals in Chile who had their hair shaved off. We know a lot more is going on there - we've read about it in the papers, seen it on television, we know people who've fled and the stories they've told us. Of course, it's impossible to explain all this in a poster that's meant to publicise the new visual art of these countries, and I'm not being asked for political statement. But you can nevertheless try to indicate something of the mentality of that part of the world, and your own feelings about it.
So if in the 'u' of Uruguay - a country where most of the Indians have been massacred - I show the mourning colours of those Indians in feathers, at first sight it might seem like nothing but a bit of folklore. Then in the 'A' of Argentina I put the most dangerous cactuses, the sort that spit little arrows. In the 'B' of Brazil I put meat - not because of the cattle, but because the life of the Indians is worth nothing there. The cut-off hair in the 'C' of Chile disrupts the seemingly folkloristic concept. Where does the hair come from? Collected by Pinochet's barbers, of course. Until recently, if you didn't agree with the authorities in Chile you were awarded the distinction of a crew cut - one big concentration camp, really . . .
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