Richard Hollis Designs for the Whitechapel: A Graphic Designer and an Art Gallery at Work in Twentieth-Century London

Richard Hollis has been called the graphic designer’s designer. Best known as the author of the classic Graphic Design: A Concise History (1994), it is his six decades of design work that is currently undergoing a long overdue critical reevaluation. In Richard Hollis Designs for the Whitechapel, author Christopher Wilson focuses on the visual identity Hollis developed during the 1970s and 80s for London’s then up-and-coming Whitechapel Art Gallery. Working closely with curators and artists, Hollis designed a series of conceptually rigorous posters, brochures, and catalogs for pioneering exhibitions by artists such as Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Cornell, Philip Guston, and Frida Kahlo. This timely collection presents all of Hollis’s masterpieces of understatement, alongwith critical essays and interviews.