Ivan Chermayeff
Ivan Chermayeff, who has died aged 85, was one of the most admired graphic designers of a generation that redefined the profession. His 60-year professional life, from which he never retired, was shared with a fellow student from Yale, Tom Geismar, and a succession of other partneirs, the first having been Robert Brownjohn and the most recent Sagi Haviv. The work of their firm – currently known as Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv – included many famous corporate logos, of which that of Mobil is probably the best known, but it ranged widely over 3D objects, such as the giant red figure 9 on the pavement in West 57th Street, New York (1974), signage, museum displays and campaigns for the environment and politics.
Chermayeff and his partners claimed their work was “problem-solving”, which included first working out what the problem actually was. Wittily eliminating the superfluous, it struck home with techniques ranging from hand-drawing and collage to unadorned photography. In 1985, Chermayeff metaphorically located himself in “a little corner close to the children where no one speaks in riddles or through layers of fog. I want everyone, as well as myself, to be closer to art, which is sideways to life, and to a kind of graphic design which is sideways to art.”
Although his professional education and career were in the US, Ivan was born in London, to Barbara (nee May) and Serge Chermayeff. Serge’s life had brought him from Chechnya to London, via a stint in Argentina, and in 1932 he was turning from an interior designer into an architect. On the garden terrace of the family house in Sussex that Serge completed in 1938, Ivan used to sit in the lap of Henry Moore’s Recumbent Figure, now in Tate Britain. With Ivan’s younger brother, Peter, later an architect, the family emigrated to the US in 1940 and Serge started a new career as a teacher.
Never an easy man to live or work with, he supported both his sons in their careers, and his connections with Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and other painters, sculptors, writers, designers and architects meant that they grew up in the aristocracy of modernism, spending holidays on Cape Cod among like-minded people at play.
Ivan claimed it took him seven years to recover from his design education, which included Harvard, the Institute of Design in Chicago, and Yale, where Paul Rand, whom he greatly admired, was among his teachers. He relied on instinct and a good eye, claiming that the best ideas came in the back of a taxi on the way to see the client. He liked outsider art and rubbish, “the carbons from forms, the envelopes from letters, candy bar wrappers”. He collected single workmen’s gloves left behind on roads and squashed by wheels, and all these found places in the collages, mostly of faces, that he made for his own enjoyment.
Tall, smiling and purposeful, Chermayeff was an engaging personality for whom work and leisure seemed to mingle without separation.
Ivan Chermayeff, graphic designer, born 6 June 1932; died 2 December 2017
Timeline
1932: Born in London, England
1940: Moved to the United States
1955: Recieved a BFA from Yale University; also studied at Harvard and the Institute of Design in Chicago
1957: Founded the New York-based branding and graphic design firm Chermayeff and Geismar with Tom Geismar
1959: Won the commission for the U.S. Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair
1960: With Geismar started the craze for abstract corporate symbols with their design for Chase Manhattan Bank
1967: Awarded the Industrial Arts medal from the American Institute of Architects
1971: Award the Gold Medal from the Philadelphia College of Art
1979: Awarded the Gold Medal from the American Institue of Graphic Arts
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/dec/28/ivan-chermayeff-obituary
