Designer from the Shadow

Exhibition

Exhibition introduces us with the works of vastly fruitful graphic designer, photographer and painter Mr. Dušan Bekar who has been active in the field of commercial and corporate design from the beginning of the ’50s to the early 21st century in Croatia and is still active today. Although it covers vide time span, Exhibition is not intended to cover the entirety of author’s rich opus within a given period, but to address only the key moments and the pivotal points of his professional development.

Dušan Bekar was born in Zagreb on April 28th 1931. Since childhood he has shown talent for drawing and remarkable interest in painting. In the world of pictures Bekar was introduced by his father Zorko, a graduate agronomist and oenologist through the works of the Slovenian painter, illustrator and satirist Hinka Smrekara “Idemo u Indiju Koromandiju!”. It was the father’s invitation into the world without limits, the world of games and fun filled with grotesque figures and surreal scenes. Initially Bekar sketched human figures, but at the same time he began to form his own worlds — the scenery of everyday life that had become the game itself. After the death of his father in 1944, Bekar’s artistic development took over his aunts, who would supply him from 1946 on a monthly basis with artistic monographs, photographic and photo books, and subscription for Graphis and Gebrauchsgraphik professional journals. Formal education he gained in in 1948 the 1st and the 2nd Industrial School in Zagreb (Photochemistry Department). Afterwards he was briefly employed in Chromos’s Color Laboratory while he attends the OZEHA’s (Croatian Advertising Agency) Graphics Designer Course.

In 1949 he began to work with OZEHA on advertising campaigns for consumer brands. In the first half of the 50’s he created advertising campaigns and promotional material for the aftershave brands Radion (with commercialist Marijan Serdarušić) and Pitralon and Niva of Neva, toothpaste Kalodont and cleaning agent VIM of Saponia and Biokrin (with Zlatko Martinović). During this period, as the most important project, Bekar emphasizes the design of the chemical industry trademark Labud (Swan) which was the white swan labeled in the red triangle. Also, he emphasizes the complete branding, the design of posters and promotional materials of Peresam laundry detergent line. From that early period there are also trademarks of Bagat sewing machines and RIS rubber products factory. He also designed Bagat’s of promotional posters, catalogs and brochures during the upcoming years, and for RIS, along with the mentioned materials, ad campaigns and rubber gloves product case. The Medis Medical Gloves Product Box was awarded in 1965 by the Yugoslav Oskar for Packaging. In the mid-50’s Bekar started to work with the MTČ textile factory, also via OZEHA, to design complete packaging for their production lines from female nylon and perl stockings and socks, slippers but also male socks and pajamas. Along with the individual campaigns for major food SLJEME and PODRAVKA companies’ specific products and the electrical appliances, instruments & machines factory TEŽ in the 1950s and 1960s, during the mid-60s Bekar created a promotional hardcover product catalog of the ULJANIK Shipyard via OZEHA’s Rijeka branch. At the same time, he also signed the product design of the Oil Company INA’s Alfa D, Extra HD and Super HD motor oil canisters, which won the Yugoslav Oskar for Packaging in 1966. However, the most complex and overreaching project Bekar has made with OZEHA was the design of the entirety of the promotional materials for almost complete production range of the BOROVO Footwear Company and the branding of the most prominent brands of working shoes such as BOROSANA, RELAKS and STARTAS from 1970 to 1990. This prodigal cooperation brought to OZEHA numerous professional awards and was rewarded for the TV Commercial RELAKS at the Festival of Advertising Videos in Pula and also for the overall campaign of the 50 years of BOROVO Company at the Yugoslav Economic Propaganda Conference in 1981.

Side by side with his engagement with OZEHA, Bekar also worked with for a photochemical Company FOTOKEMIKA which was, in some way, a product of his co-operation with renowned sales manager Mr. Josip Sudar, who was at the time also a part of the OZEHA circle. For Mr. Sudar, Bekar has illustrated the Economic Propaganda professional manual where he entered the set of his already finished illustrated templates made in 1955 for his own research. Bekar as a creator and Sudar as a sales manager have created a legendary series of black and white ads from the late 50’s to the first half of the 60’s for the FOTOKEMIKA Company (Enjoy Life — Snap a Pic!). It was an illustrated poster of “Grab a Site” featuring a key visual white silhouette of a rabbit who is “photographed” with the EFKA 20 Pan film packaging on a floral green-yellow background and a series of posters focusing mostly on women and children, most often combined with illustrations and photos on a yellow background.

That illustrative combination is the main characteristics of at that time mature Bekar as the Designer which has developed out of his earlier phase. Representative example of said phase is a poster of Two Friends which comes in two versions created with a certain time distance. On earlier poster we see the drawing of two smiling friends whose bodies make the illustrated camera and packaging for the EFKA 17 Pan film on a purple background. On the later version, friends are shown on a yellow background, but instead of illustrating the camera, Bekar uses a photography. For Bekar everything starts with drawing and painting, as is the case with most of his fellow contemporary graphic designers. Namely, the photography was in the Croatian advertising industry up to the 50’s rarely used and pictorial-illustrative approach to the design of propaganda material was the mainstream as was in the most of Europe. Bekar initially, along with his older counterparts who worked in the OZEHA’s circle — Bis, Faist, Maurović, Vulpe and others — is in line with these trends, but his natural tendency to new technologies and experimentation draws him to the other side — photography. In the earliest period of his work, he uses decent quality photographic equipment — a camera and a zooming apparatus and begins to experiment intensively in his home lab, so that in the late 40’s his first abstract photograms were created. He also used this technique while he was designing posters for the 1st Visual Communication Exhibition in the former Yugoslavia. The poster was awarded in tough competition among the best artists of the period like Ivan Picelj and Edo Murtić were. By the end of the 50’s, it becomes apparent that Bekar increasingly express himself through photography and over time it surpasses the traditional visual arts in Bekar’s work, which was especially encouraged through the cooperation with FOTOKEMIKA Company.

Bekar is, in fact, FOTOKEMIKA’s home-designer since 50’s till late 80’s while he designed an enviable amount of different visuals — packaging, brochures, catalogs, prospectuses, flyers, manuals, posters, box office calendars and greeting cards. He also developed a complete visual identity of the company a logo and unforgettable trade mark — a black and white silhouette of a man with a camera which was used on all types of products, one of which was prominent for a long time on the Croatian Capital Zagreb Main Square. He also created the EFKE logos, black and white EFKE films, color films from the series of FOTOKEMIKA Color, Efkecolor, Efkechrome, Black and White Varycon Paper, Bromal Papers, Efke Brom Large Format Papers, Difucop Papers, Photochemicolor Papers and Sanix X-ray Film Packaging and First Packaging for Video Cassettes. Packaging for Fotokemicolor papers was awarded in 1973 by the Yugoslav Packaging Oskar. Some of the visuals he has developed between 1954 and 1955, such as the cover of Efke photophotographs and photopapers, are valuable examples of his experiments in the field of kinetic and optical arts, and appear mainly in FOTOKEMIKA’s works and posters that discuss the photograph (12th and 13th International Photography Exhibitions, poster for the Yugoslav Photography Exhibition in Warsaw in the late 50s, which were awarded in Poland), which would mean that they came directly from the understanding of the media. With the perceptual illusion of space, Bekar played in shaping posters for the exhibition. In the “Opening the Sales Routes” exhibition in 1963 he applied a distorted picture of the spiral /spiral drawing and with that motif pointed to the essence of marketing sales philosophy. It will be similar to the motif a few years later which he used in SAPONIA’s laundry detergent CIN packaging. On the red base of the box, a white circle with a black spiral design emerged from the running drum of a washing machine. For this packaging, a three-dimensional, electric engine powered cardboard model was also developed. It should be noted that Bekar has also shaped 3D objects. One of the earliest examples is the solution to the FOTOKEMIKA’s “My Nose — My Pride” ad which illustrates a smiling male face with a camera in his hands, whose nose is a 3D box in the form of film packaging. Later on, almost every more significant project involving the design of visual identity would be made with the both 2D and 3D solutions of the logo (Borovo — Autogume, HEP, Croatian Olympic Committee, RIS, Universe ’87 …)

Bekar’s concept of design, in his own words, is a solution of space, through the game play of dots, lines, and lights at the same time containing a solid narrative structure — as well as a brief, understandable and direct message. Apparently unobtrusive and lovely depicting playful and warm, well known real life situations, it stimulates the desire to possess the subject with the convincing emotion that draws from the private life and personal experience. This is evident, for example, in visuals for LABUD’s Peresam product or GHETALDUS Company designs in late 50’s. The single-color illustrated detergent advertisement Peresam sums up the idea of ​​a happy family. In the visual focus, are mother, father and a smiling boy who is enjoying their happiness. The mother rests her hand on the stylized detergent package with a soft smile on her face while her husband gently kisses her cheek. The message is simple: use Peresam and the whole family will be happy — if the mother is unburdened and happy than the father and the child will be happy too. An interesting example is the interaction of a man with sunglasses and sun on GHETALDUS’s Sunglasses poster. In the left corner, we see unhappy sun while a man with sunglasses teases it (in the series there was a yellow poster with a sun wearing sunglasses, but we are still trying to reach the original).

Based on these and other unpublished examples, we can identify Bekar’s consumer psychology utilitisation, which is a consequence of understanding the overall marketing process. When he creates campaigns for widely used products, Bekar uniquely communicates the essence of a commercial message through the art of painting and painting techniques — later on graphic and photography techniques. Scenes from everyday life in which main roles are played by consumers — women, mothers, housewives, children, fathers and sons, are shown on a monochrome background, usually in the spectrum of yellow to red. On the other hand, the product being advertised as a subject of desire is treated either by painting or by photography and it is placed in the focus of each ad. Over time, Bekar developed this pattern by completely painting it down and reducing it to a mere object, for example, on the cover of the ĐONOVI (Shoe Soles) catalog for the 80’s BOROVO Company ad campaign, we see only a seductive, almost sexy red shoe sole floating above an orange-red surface.

In the area of ​​corporate design, since the mid-60’s, Bekar created visual identities for clothing companies — Slovenian LABOD and Croatian GALEB, the visual identity of Oil Company INA, one of the PODRAVKA Company logos and its slogan “From Heart to Heart” — visually accompanied by infinite red and white hearts, as well as corporate materials for the City Savings Bank / Credit Bank Zagreb (KBZ). Since the 70’s untill the 90’s, the series continues and Bekar builds major projects such as AGROKOMERC Company identity redesign, complete visual equipment of “twin” hotels Pollux and Castor in the City of Rabac, and visual identities for the 1987 The Universiade and following companies HEP, Marles, Narodne novine, Petrokemija, UPIN, KONY etc. An important part also makes the design of commodities — such as New Year’s greeting cards and calendars which Bekar created for almost all the companies he worked with. He often combined various techniques — drawing, graphics, paper folding art, photograms, photomontages, collages (FOTOKEMIKA, INA, OZEHA, PODRAVKA, RIS …). Calendars are mostly made in monochrome black-and-white photography and later studio color photographs of strong color in the recognizable Bekar spectrum. In 1984 Bekar’s son Duško Dušan Jr. joined his father’s work as a photographer and junior designer remaining developing his own designer studio in later years.

Bekar is one of the few designers who are bestowed with the gift of interdisciplinarity, he is an author who is equally skillful in drawing, painting, graphic and photographic techniques. Hi is a designer whose work was contemporary current trends in the world of design without being subjected to strict form, yet marking a design space with certain visual the constants we read as unambiguous as his. Perhaps the greatest Bekar’s contribution to commercial design, stemming from the inherited tendency toward new technologies (along with his son he entered the World of Macintosh Computers) and experiments, is the implementation of contemporary trends in the area of ​​artistic image space research, in the widest sense, into a visual message intended for the average consumer. Bekar’s world of paintings and words, in which we have been actively participating as consumers for decades, is almost not mentioned in the visuals of graphic design and visual scenes in general from the 50’s to the present. Some of his works are available in museum collections and occasionally reviewing advertising are often misdiagnosed, wrongly named or not even credited. This cannot be attributed to the neglect or lack of interest among the scholars of the profession and Bekar’s works, but perhaps the fact that the author himself did not considered the importance of exhibitions or monographs — to this day. Today, we have a chance to face a mere fraction of the author’s opus in the field of commercial and corporate wide-spectrum design. In such sense, this exhibition, as a small sample of Bekar’s half a century long life’s work, is an important contribution in witnessing of Croatian design trends from 1950’s till late 1990’s. It is also the foundation upon we can detect other phenomena which belong not only within the design realm but also within to the scope of overall society development. — Written by Alira Hrabar Oremović