Homage to Dick Hess

Interview at the Connecticut home of the late Dick Hess, co-inventor of Paint By Numbers and one of the 20th century’s greatest illustrators and graphic designers

Dick Hess, 1934-91. Like my father, worked for J Walter Thomson and Benton & Bowles, and here’s the introductor comments from the FULL article that can be accessed from the link below.

Richard Hess comes to the front of the stage of the Odeon cinema in London’s Leicester Square. Before him stands a large laundry basket. The 1,300 graphic design students cram the place with an expectant hush. Hess takes off the top of the basket and deftly launches two rubber-band birds, brightly coloured and wings flapping, high above the front stalls. The crowd goes wild and Hess – tall, craggy and delighted that his trick has come off – goes on to show slide after slide of incomparable work.

The occasion was this year’s International Congress of Graphic Design Associations student seminar on ‘metaphor and ambiguity’. The illustration Hess has done over the years – he is 55 – contains a fair amount of both: it is a brilliantly drafted mix of Rousseau and Magritte, cast in the upbeat language of American magazine publishing and the annual reports of giant US corporations.

But Hess is not just a prolific and, at times, wonderfully waggish illustrator, nor is he just a fine public speaker. He is also a superb art director and designer, able to work with some of America’s most famous illustrators (Saul Steinberg, Milton Glaser) and with photographers of the rank of Art Kent. He has made films for Pepsi-Cola, AT&T, UPI and Corning; children’s games for the Pressman Toy Company; and political posters for the grape-pickers of California. There seems, in short, very little he can’t do in the world of design.

Yet, though British readers of Time, Newsweek and New York have seen his covers, few know the man. Hess has been a director of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, has won many awards in the US, and has exhibited as far afield as Paris and Tokyo. Only this year, though, will he have a one-man show in London. Between those admiring students in the Odeon and the respect of his peers in the small, elite Alliance Graphique International – peerssuch as Henri Henrion, who introduced his speech, or Mel Calman, who has organised his exhibition – ignorance reigns. Yet Hess is indisputably one of the greats.

Born of a milkman father and a secretary mother, Hess began his career by doing cartoons in class. ‘It was good for getting girls’, he says, somewhat abashed. Growing up in Detroit gave him, he recalls, ‘a fine sense of labour politics’. His father was a union man and the murals of Diego Rivera ‘were indelible childhood images – I still paraphrase them when doing labour themes’. Indeed, until a few years back, Hess would spend 10, perhaps 15 per cent of his time working on causes for free – a considerable feat, given that he can command up to $5,000 for a three-day stint to produce a cover for Time. ‘I’m a social person’, he notes, ‘a socialist, but not organised – an egalitarian’.

At the age of 18, with no formal training behind him, Hess got his break in the shape of Max Kliner, a man who deliberately went bankrupt every 18 months. Kliner was, Hess smiles ruefully, ‘a complete scoundrel’, but he did do two good things. First, he gave Hess a couple of Graphis annuals, featuring the work of Henrion, George Him and other Europeans; these made a profound impact on Hess. Second, Kliner gave Hess a job with his Palmer Paint Company, a Detroit firm specialising in the manufacture of colouring books for children. The task for Hess? As part of a team of two, to translate into mass­ production a painting technique pioneered by John Genagy. That technique? Painting by numbers.

Hess, then, can rightfully claim to be co-author of a graphic medium that has entranced millions. He used, he says, to be ashamed to mention this episode, such are the vulgar associations of painting by rote. But now he has no need to be defensive. ‘I still paint by numbers’, he says, speaking figuratively. He still, too, collects old Palmer sets at flea markets, and points out that the company once had 50 artists on its books and is still going today. ‘Some of those kits had 200 colours in them. I remember doing a Last Supper with 84 separate hues’.

During his stint at Palmer, a teacher and poster-artist, Richard Kozlow, recommended Hess to enter several art directors’ awards. When he won first and third prize in one of them, he found himself approached by no fewer than seven ad agencies. He picked J Walter Thompson, becoming an art director in its Detroit office at the tender age of 21. His 24-sheet posters won him further awards, but he was fairly baffled by his luck. With characteristic modesty, he observes: ‘I didn’t know anything but success – and I didn’t know anything! Later, when I’d be stumped for an idea, I thought the dream was over’.

Then, one day, the chief of JWT in Detroit came into the studio and asked: ‘Who knows about film here?’ Hess, who liked movies, stepped forward – an impostor, as he freely admits. That move ensured a shift into making $30m-worth of TV commercials. In those days, they cost $10,000 or less each and, in the era before Ted Bates, were shown only two or three times.

Then, summoned by a three-page telegram and two airline tickets, Hess transferred to the NW Ayer agency in Philadelphia. They were, he says, ‘conservative frauds’, and he was always in trouble. ‘I ran a team of seven misfits and one ex-­con’, he remarks. Nevertheless, it was at Ayer that Hess perfected a series of scenic posters for companies like Atlantic Richfield and cars like Plymouth and Dodge. Large and free of copy, they mimicked the landscapes in which they were set; in effect, too, they functioned as forerunners of the timber-strewn, naturalistic annual reports and employee magazines he was to do years later for Champion International Corporation, a multi­-billion-dollar paper manufacturer.

After Ayer came directing spells in New York: first with Benton & Bowles, then at a small agency called Van Brunt. Then, in 1965, Hess opened his own consultancy in Manhattan, going on later to form a partnership with the delirious name Hess and/or Antupit. His clients included IBM, Xerox, General Foods, Du Pont and Pan Am. In 1966 he redesigned Evergreen magazine, and, in 1970, Harpers.At his peak, he employed 18 people. Those were heady days.

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To open and download the PDF of the FULL article, click on this Homage to Dick Hess link.