An Invitation to ‘Modern’ doi:10.

1093/jdh/eps022
Journal of Design History

Melbourne: The Historical Vol. 25 No. 3

Significance of Richard Beck’s

Olympic Poster Design

John Hughson
‘Olympic Games Melbourne: 1956’, the poster designed by Richard Beck for the
XVI Olympiad, introduced a significant stylistic interruption to the imagery used to
promote the Olympic occasion and its ideals. Posters for previous summer Games,
since 1912, featured different renditions of the semi-naked male athletic body. Beck’s

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poster dispensed with human figuration, instead offering a sparse geometrical design
said to depict an invitation card. While there is little formal evidence to indicate the
commission of a specified design, Beck’s image fitted well the agenda pursued by the
local organizers, for Melbourne to be represented as a ‘modern’ destination, a location
where the Olympic Games could be conducted at distance from old enmities. This
paper looks at Beck’s poster in parallel to other projects produced for the Melbourne
Olympics, such as the Olympic Pool complex, the Arts Festival, and his own designs of
graphic material and public art objects for the same Olympics, as well as tracing the
designer’s professional trajectory from Britain to Australia. The paper’s major aim is to
create greater awareness of Richard Beck’s design so that its significance to the history
of Olympic posters might become better known, and its contribution to Australian
modernism better understood.

Keywords: Australia—Melbourne—modernism—Olympic Games—poster design—Richard

Beck

The Melbourne Olympic Games of 1956 retain a symbolic prominence within pop-
ular accounts of Australian cultural and social history. They were the first Olympic
Games to be held in the southern hemisphere, and for this reason alone tend to be
seen as a key moment in Australia’s stepping up to the international stage at the
end of the decade following the conclusion of the Second World War. The 1956
Olympic Games were nicknamed the ‘Friendly Games’ to coincide with the depic-
tion of Australia as a culturally inclusive nation that had become home to migrants
from various parts of war-ravaged Europe.1 The Olympic Games were heralded as an
occasion where Australia’s welcoming host status would be displayed to the rest of
the world, although given the incipience of television and its lack of global spread at
the time, the media spotlight did not really shine as brightly on Australia as popular
memory may indicate.2 Nevertheless, the Olympic Games were seized upon as an
opportunity to declare Australia, via its second largest city Melbourne, ‘modern’, and
the Games undoubtedly spurned urban developments that were undertaken with a
view to have Melbourne’s reputation enhanced as an emerging international destina- © The Author [2012]. Published
by Oxford University Press on
tion. The official poster for the Melbourne Olympic Games, designed by Richard Beck
behalf of The Design History
(1912–1985), featured the motif of an invitation card, and subtly captured the desired Society. All rights reserved.
image of a modern Australia to which the world was being welcomed in 1956 [1, 2].3 Advance Access publication
Can this poster, which has been little discussed in the literature on Australian art 28 July 2012.

268
 Downloaded from http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 23, 2012
Fig 1.  ‘Olympic Games
Melbourne 1956’ (copyright:
IOC), designed by Richard
Beck. The digital image of the
1956 Olympic Games poster
has been kindly supplied by
the International Olympic
Committee

and design thus far, be regarded as a significant image within the history of modern
Australian visual culture? An affirmative answer is advanced towards the conclusion
of this paper, suggesting a reconsideration of Australian modernism via reference to
modern design; a position that moves beyond the more customary tendency within
Australian intellectualism to privilege the fine arts, especially painting, within discus-
sions of modernism in that country.4

John Hughson
269
Beck’s poster also has a rather significant place within the
design history of Olympic Games posters. His was the first
design for a poster of the Summer Olympic Games to pre-
sent an image not reliant upon a depiction of the heroic male
athletic body. Artistic images had been used in publicity since
the inception of the modern Olympic Games in 1896, with
the first ‘official’ poster appearing in 1911, ahead of the
Stockholm Olympic Games of 1912. Its image, designed by
the Swedish artist and printmaker Olle Hjortzberg, initiated
controversy with its male athletic figure spared full frontal
nudity only by a pair of ribbons running across the middle
of the poster.5 Controversy notwithstanding, Hjortzberg’s
design commenced a tradition whereby the male athletic
body, reminiscent of the Greek form, was represented in the
posters for the Summer Olympic Games, until Beck’s design
for 1956. Beck’s poster had more in common with posters
for the Winter Olympics, some of which, commencing with

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Hugo Laubi’s design for the ‘2nd Olympic Winter Games’ in
St Moritz in 1928, contained no human figures at all. Laubi’s
poster featured a flag of the Olympic rings overlapping a
Swiss flag in the foreground with the Swiss Alps in the back-
ground. A rather similar design was used by Knut Yran for
the poster of the Oslo 1952 Olympic Games. A non-figurative
design, by Franco Rondinelli, was again used for the poster
of the Winter Games of 1956 in Cortina d’Ampezzo. The
Fig 2.  A photograph of
image of a snowflake encircling the Olympic rings positioned above the Dolomites and dignitaries examining the newly
the steeple of the Church of St Filippo and Giacomo, centred within a deep sky blue printed 1956 Olympic poster.
background, offers an interesting companion piece to Beck’s poster for the Summer National Archives of Australia,
Olympic Games of the same year.6 Series No. A7135, Control
Symbol OGC 1059/4
It can only be speculated as to why some of the posters for the Winter Olympics
were the first to favour non-figurative imagery. Thompson proposes that the smaller
scale and tangential relationship to the main Olympiads may have meant less rigid
demands being placed on designers, and this resulted in the Winter Games having
‘more imaginative and interesting’ posters.7 As indicated further into the discussion,
there is no evidence to suggest that the Organizing Committee for the Melbourne
Olympic Games imposed design criteria, and this may explain why Beck was able to
produce a poster without the athletic figure that had always featured in posters for the
summer Olympiads. Beck’s poster, described by him as featuring an invitation card, was
partly similar to International Style graphics of the day; at least in regard to its reliance
on a clean-lined, singular, geometrical image, set within a surrounding empty space.8
The modernity of the design was achieved despite Beck’s reliance on rather rudimen-
tary materials during its preparation in proto-form [3].9 Beck’s poster commenced
a trend away from non-figurative imagery that continued with one of the four posters
designed by Yusaku Kamekura for the 1964 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo (10).
Subsequent posters, including those for the 1968 (Mexico City), 1972 (Munich), 1976
(Montreal) and 1980 (Moscow) Summer Olympic Games followed this direction (11).

It can be assumed that the designers of subsequent posters would have been aware of
Beck’s 1956 poster and his work may have had some influence upon theirs. Yet, irre-
spective of the extent of the actual influence, given his break with tradition, it is not an
exaggeration to hail Beck’s image as one of the most significant within the history of

An Invitation to ‘Modern’ Melbourne

270
Fig 3.  Photograph in
newspaper (unspecified) of
Richard Beck working on the
design for the Olympic poster.
This proto-version differs from
the final design, particularly
in its typography. Collection:

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Powerhouse Museum, Sydney,
92/1256–1/4

Olympic posters.12 Furthermore—linking back to the point made in the opening para-
graph—recognition of this international significance prompts a proper evaluation of
the poster’s contribution to Australian art and design. Australian cultural criticism has,
to some extent, continually reinforced the self-negating ‘cultural cringe’ of which A.
A. Phillips wrote in 1950, whereby Australian artists nervously derive authority in their
work by basing it on what they see as acceptable in Paris and elsewhere.13 Therefore,
that Beck’s image was at the cutting edge of international Olympic poster design
has no small bearing on how it should subsequently be assessed as a contribution to
Australian modern art and design. This argument is taken up following a necessary
outlining of the cultural context in Melbourne at the time of the Olympic Games, to
which Richard Beck orientated his work.

More than just the Games: Melbourne 1956 and the Olympic
Arts Festival
The 1956 Olympic Games were the first to feature an Arts Festival and this had a sig-
nificant impact on how the Australian arts became involved with that occasion. Prior
to 1956 the Olympic Games knew a tradition of Arts Competitions, the idea dating
back to the credited founder of the modern Olympic Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin

John Hughson
271
(1863–1937).14 A fin de siècle humanist, de Coubertin, although quite derivative as an
intellectual, was the most passionate enunciator of the essential relationship between
sport and art.15 A key objective of the modern Olympic Games in de Coubertin’s vision
was the reinstatement of this relationship, which had been severed over previous cen-
turies and stood little chance of repair without an intervention to effectively promote
amateur sport precisely at the time when large scale professional sports were emerg-
ing in the western world. Apart from promoting amateur sport for its own sake, the
modern Olympic Games, first held in 1896, offered the possibility, or so de Coubertin
hoped, for the sport/art ‘marriage’ that he sought.16 As a means of implementation,
de Coubertin proposed an arts competition, inviting entries in various fields across
literature, the fine arts and music. De Coubertin’s enthusiasm in this regard was not
shared by other key figures involved in the Olympic movement, and the first arts com-
petition did not occur until the Stockholm Games of 1912.17 It seems reasonable to
say that the arts competitions only survived because of the patronage given them
by de Coubertin during his lifetime. When Avery Brundage became President of the
International Olympic Committee in 1952, he actively moved against the arts competi-
tions and they were dispensed with ahead of the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne.18

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Writing in Meanjin, a leading Australian journal of criticism, Geoffrey Hutton wel-
comed the 1956 Olympic Games Arts Festival as an opportunity for the Australian
arts to be given a ‘show window’.19 Hutton expressed relief that the arts competitions
had been put to rest, suggesting that Australia would not be able to muster sufficient
applications of quality across the various fields to render such competitions viable.
From all reports it did appear that the quality of entries to the arts competitions had
diminished to the point of farce; the arts competition of the 1952 Helsinki Olympic
Games was described as a ‘sad flop’, not only an embarrassment, but an indicator of
potential damage to the reputation of the arts if repeated in kind at future Olympic
occasions.20 But while arts competitions may have seen their day, irrespective of where
the next Olympiad was to be held, Australia provided a rather novel setting for the first
Olympic Arts Festival. Arts communities can be notoriously at odds with sport, but in
a nation better known for its sporting than artistic accomplishments, the relationship
has been especially fraught in Australia, at least from the side of the arts.21 This was
as much the case in 1956 as in more recent times. To accompany the Arts Festival,
the Melbourne-based Organising Committee for the Olympic Games commissioned
a book—The Arts Festival—to carry chapters on the Australian arts and related areas
such as design and architecture.22 The chapters were written by leading figures, either
practitioners or critics, associated with the respective fields. In his chapter ‘Paintings
and Drawings’, the prominent art historian Bernard Smith, approached the coming
Arts Festival in cautious mood, pronouncing: ‘Australia is better known abroad for her
achievements in athletics than for her achievements in art. For she is a young nation
who still honours the stamina of her athletes more than she honours the vision of her
artists and writers.’23

While bringing the arts into the Olympic occasion, the Arts Festival of 1956 did little
to reconcile the division alluded to by Smith. At best sport and the arts enjoyed a brief
marriage of convenience, lived in separate rooms; a most relevant analogy as the arts
events were mostly staged and undertaken away from the sporting sites. Locations to
hold arts-related events included the Victorian National Gallery, the main auditorium
(Wilson Hall) at the University of Melbourne, the Public Library of Victoria, the National
Museum, and the Royal Melbourne Technical College.24 The closest the Arts Festival
came to the sporting arena was during a symphony concert performed inside the archi-
tecturally splendid Olympic Pool building, which was built prior to the Games for the

An Invitation to ‘Modern’ Melbourne

272
 aquatic events.25 The Arts Festival generated a good deal of hubbub within the arts
community, and ‘unofficial’ exhibitions were held in a number of Melbourne galleries
during the period of the Olympic Games.26 But again, there was no connection with
the Olympic Games as such.

As much as the arts competitions may have been of a dubious standard, their brief had
been to sponsor new works of art ‘inspired by sport’. The Arts Festival overlooked de
Coubertin’s dictum and mainly provided a forum for existing rather than new art. New
commissions pertaining directly to the Olympic Games, such as Leonard French’s mural
for the swimming pool at the University of Melbourne and Arthur Boyd’s ceramic sculp-
ture outside the Olympic Pool complex, were few.27 As the ‘official’ Olympic poster
under IOC imprimatur, Beck’s poster had a different commission status to these works.
Yet it stands in interesting relationship to the Arts Festival. The Arts Festival moved
away from de Coubertin’s art ‘inspired by sport’ dictum. Might the same be said for
Beck’s poster? In a simple sense, by containing no imagery of sporting activity, the
answer would be yes. However, such a limited view is contestable from the modernist
paradigm within which Beck operated. From a modernist perspective, the absence of

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figuration or obvious representation of a theme is no indication that a thematic inspira-
tion is not at work. Beck, although choosing not to portray a particular athletic figure
or movement, may well have been inspired by the very notion of the Olympic Games
and if we could know this to be the case his poster would justifiably be regarded as art
‘inspired by sport’. Given the lack of knowledge to the contrary, the possibility of such
an interpretation should remain open.

The Olympic Pool building is generally regarded as the crowning arts and design related
achievement associated with the 1956 Olympiad. Designed by Melbourne-based
architects McIntyre, Borland, Murphy and Murphy, the building was heralded by the
prominent architect and cultural critic Robin Boyd (1919–1971)—Boyd was a member
on the judging panel that assigned the architectural commission for the building of
the Olympic Pool—as a structure of ‘high originality and imagination’ and the ‘first
fairy story of Australian building’ [4].28 The Olympic Pool building remains central to
subsequent accounts that recall the Melbourne Olympic occasion as a key moment
in Australia becoming ‘modern’.29 Whether viewing that building today from the
outside, or catching glimpse of its internal structural magnificence during the diving
events in Peter Whitchurch’s ‘official’ film of the 1956 Olympic Games, the accolade is
understandable.30 The very obviousness of the building and its lasting presence on the
Melbourne cityscape affords it favourable and ready remembrance. Such advantage
does not extend to the 1956 Olympic Games poster. The ephemerality of the poster
as a material object rather nullifies the impact that it may otherwise enjoy as a cul-
tural item of enduring value. A related point, to be taken up, is that the lingering bias
against posters as an art form has impeded a proper understanding of the 1956 poster
as a significant work in the history of Australian modernism.

Robin Boyd is one of few prominent critics to point to the cultural importance of Beck’s
poster. Boyd, like many other commentators, was surprised when Melbourne was
granted the hosting rights for the 1956 Olympic Games, wondering ‘whether there
was any city less likely to pull it off’.31 Melbourne at the time was regarded as a rather
sleepy city by those Australians accustomed to the cultural centres of Europe and North
America, a Victorian city not only in terms of its location within that Australian state,
but also as a colonial remnant of the period during which it received its ‘letters patent’
from Queen Victoria. The State’s liquor licensing laws, requiring that drinking establish-
ments close doors at 6pm, were deemed a key indicator by critics that Melbourne was

John Hughson
273
 Fig 4.  Image of the Olympic
Pool building in Australia and
the Olympic Games: A Guide
for Visitors. The booklet was
designed by Richard Beck.
Collection: Powerhouse
Museum, Sydney, 92/1256–10/1

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just not modern enough to play host to an event on the scale of the Olympic Games.32
Yet, in his summary of the cultural aspects of the Olympiad, Boyd noted that there had
been some outstanding achievements to parallel the sporting success. At the top of
the list he elaborated on the Olympic Pool building while referring more briefly to the
medallions designed by the Hungarian émigré Andor Mészáros, and, importantly for
the argument being developed here, the poster design of Richard Beck.33

The hand that signed the poster: Richard Beck, designer/artist/

modernist
Robin Boyd and Richard Beck were acquaintances, both familiar figures (especially
Boyd) in Melbourne’s post-war cultural circles. Beck was an accomplished photogra-
pher as well as a designer, and considerable time in the latter part of his career was
given to producing a series of black-and-white portraits of his friends and associates,
including Boyd. As a young man Beck had established a successful design practice
in England before immigrating to Australia, via New Zealand, in 1940. If Beck left
Britain to be residentially distant from the catastrophe of Europe, it was not to avoid
involvement in the War effort. After arrival in Australia he took up active service with
the Australian Imperial Force until 1945. During these years he took photos of fellow
soldiers and field operations, some of which are kept in a collection at the Australian
War Memorial.34

His formal training as a designer was undertaken at London’s Slade School of Art and
at the Blocherer Schule in Munich, where he came into contact with the latest ideas in
European design, including those of the Bauhaus. Beck’s commissions while working
in England included poster and cover designs for the London Underground, the Orient

An Invitation to ‘Modern’ Melbourne

274
 Line and the Shell oil company.35 Beck continued poster related work in Australia,
where Shell remained a client, and he also turned his hand to packaging design, a
related key success coming with his label design for the winemakers S. Wynn and
Company’s Coonawarra Claret. The design, which won a ‘gold medal’ award from the
National Packaging Association (NPA) in 1960, still remains in use on a revised version
of the label. The NPA award was one of many won by Beck. Among the others was
a bronze medal from the Italian government for his Olympic Games stamp, which
was based on the same design as that for the 1956 Olympic poster [5]. In another
Olympic Games-related project, Beck designed the booklet Australia and the Olympic
Games: A Guide for Visitors. One of Beck’s largest scale projects also had an Olympic

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Fig 5.  Olympics Games Stamp.
Display card of Richard Beck’s
award-winning design, issued
by the Australian Postmaster
General’s Department in
1954. Collection: Powerhouse
Museum, Sydney, 92/1750–13.
In the subsequent year, a series
of stamps was issued in which
the blue background was
replaced by green. Presumably
this was to accommodate one
of Australia’s national sporting
colours

John Hughson
275
Games connection. This was his four-storey high mural
designed to adorn one side of the Hosies Hotel, which was
built in Melbourne in 1954 in anticipation of the forthcom-
ing Olympiad.

Following the acceptance of his design for the Olympic pos-

ter, Richard Beck, along with Robin Boyd, was appointed
by the Civic sub-committee of the Melbourne Olympiad’s
Organizing Committee to a panel charged with selecting
a series of street decoration projects to coincide with the
Games.36 The most memorable of these decorations seems
to be the mock Olympic torch, designed by Peter and Dione
McIntyre, which was suspended by cables above central
Melbourne’s main intersection of Swanston and Flinders
streets. Beck successfully submitted a project of his own,
Spinmobiles, constituting two forty-seven foot high columns
of tubular steel embedded in three feet of concrete, sup-

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porting five-foot wide rectangular metal frameworks, which,
in turn, supported decorative circular rotating objects, each
three feet, six inches, in diameter. The sheet-metal surface of
the Spinmobiles was painted with high gloss enamel in the
colours of the Olympic rings [6].37 The street decorations ini-
tiative brought an element of fun to Melbourne. They were
intended to counter accusations such as that made about
the city being ‘bland and British’.38 Ironically enough, they Fig 6.  A photograph of
took some inspiration from the decorative structures at the Festival of Britain, staged Richard Beck’s Spinmobiles,
on London’s South Bank in 1951. The common theme was to be welcoming and, in located on St Kilda Road.
Collection: Powerhouse
this spirit, Beck’s Spinmobiles offered a modern rendering of the ‘traditional triumphal Museum, Sydney, 92/1256–10/3
arch’ as a gateway to the city.39

The street decorations gave opportunity for architects, designers and artists to work in
unison on an urban visual project of rare public accessibility, scale and general inter-
est.40 As such, Julie Willis claims that the Olympic street decorations ‘truly signified
Australia’s engagement with modernism at the level of urban spectacle’.41 This is not to
suggest that the street decorations were without flaw. Functionally ambitious, most of
the decorations were hampered by operational glitches that, when read about today,
sound slightly comical. Beck’s Spinmobiles provide an example. Upon installation the
Spinmobiles did not spin, but only did so after some time once the concrete at their
base had fully hardened. 42 From photographs on file, the Spinmobiles—and other of
the street decorations—look archaic to the contemporary eye of the digital age. Yet,
in 1956 they were technologically and conceptually innovative, combining the princi-
ples of rationalism and expressionism. According to David Islip, the street decorations
formed part of a culminating collective project provided by the Olympic Games for an
architectural and design culture that had been nurtured at the University of Melbourne
since the end of the War.43

Research on the street decorations—such as that in Islip’s informative paper—and the

Olympic Pool Building is helped by the existence of journals such as Architecture in
Australia and Architecture and Art. The unfolding of historical events is always a matter
of dispute, but these sources from the day have been invaluable to researchers in get-
ting to some of the key ‘facts’ from which they can reconstruct (or even deconstruct)
an historical account of these objects. By contrast, there is little dedicated research
material from the time to assist with the study of Richard Beck’s poster for the 1956

An Invitation to ‘Modern’ Melbourne

276
 Olympiad. The present study has relied largely on materials assembled by the Beck
family and placed in public archive.44 The relevant official records of the Olympiad’s
Organizing Committee are disappointingly thin in historical detail. For example, they
provide no information as to whether or not there was a brief to which Beck’s poster
design was successfully pitched and then commissioned.45 References to the poster
within these records are scant and anonymous. It is only from subsequent announce-
ment in Australian newspapers in June 1954 that Beck’s identity as the design winner,
from a pool of five invitees, goes on the public record.46

The lack of information within the official Olympic records is frustrating for histori-
cal research, as little clue is given about the extent to which the Olympiad’s organ-
izers were involved in providing criteria for a desired poster design. Interestingly,
poster designs stylistically similar to Beck’s appeared in the work of students under
the tutelage of the prominent graphic design educator Gerhard Herbst, at the then
Melbourne Technical College in 1950, the year after Melbourne had been awarded
the Olympic Games [7].47 Beck may have had some involvement with this exercise
and, even if not, given the likeness to his own Olympic poster design, it can be pre-

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sumed that the student work was known to him. Uncertainty prevails, and without
an adequate formal record, possible influences to Beck’s design, whether or not it
complied with a specification, or even just to his perception of an official expectation,
will remain unclear.

Beck, nevertheless, would have been aware of the cultural significance of the Olympic
Games beyond sport and that those with vested interests were lobbying hard for a con-
trolling stake in how Melbourne should be prepared in advance of the Games and how
the overall occasion should be organized. Graeme Davison observes struggle for control
over the running of the 1956 Olympic Games being waged between two bases, which
he characterizes respectively as the ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernisers’, two sides of a pol-
itical and economic elite that effectively took the organizational reins once the Games

Fig 7.  A photograph—

reportedly dated 1950—of
the designer Gerhard Herbst
and students examining mock
designs for the 1956 Olympic
poster. Collection: Powerhouse
Museum, Sydney, from the
‘Gerhard Herbst’ curatorial
research file

John Hughson
277
had been awarded to the Victorian state capital by the IOC in 1949.48 The modernisers
were headed by Sir Frank Beaurepaire. A former Olympic medal-winning swimmer and
Melbourne Lord Mayor, Beaurepaire is regarded as the driving force on the bidding team
that secured the Games for Melbourne. An entrepreneur with a stated global vision,
Beaurepaire saw hosting the Olympic Games as an opportunity to enhance Melbourne’s
reputation as a cosmopolitan city for international business. He thus encouraged futur-
istic developments, which at the time, largely meant high-rise buildings. Beaurepaire’s
main antagonist was Wilfred Kent Hughes, a former Olympic athlete who viewed the
Olympic Games and sport as an extension of militarism. As a conservative minister of the
Victorian state parliament, he lobbied the Australian national government to adopt a
compulsory rigorous physical fitness program for young people. As the President of the
Victorian Olympic Council and Chair of the Organizing Committee for the Melbourne
Olympiad, Kent Hughes opposed the planning for the Games being conducted primarily
along business lines. This resulted in disputes with Beaurepaire’s group over a number
of issues, including the site of the main stadium. The delays in venue preparation led to
interference from the IOC President Brundage, who warned that the Olympic Games
might be taken from Melbourne if planning was not put back on track. Although Kent

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Hughes held onto his position of administrative leader in run-up to the Olympic Games,
the daunting threat handed down by the IOC President gave momentum to develop-
ments and planning initiatives that the ‘traditionalists’ may otherwise have continued to
oppose. Davison concludes that the ‘civic progress enacted in the Games…delivered the
future unequivocally to the modernisers.’49

As explained above, there is no indication that Richard Beck was given a brief on
poster design and there is nothing on record to suggest that his proposed design was
prepared in response to the stated or perceived whims of a prevailing political group-
ing. However, that the ‘modernisers’, as referred to by Davison, became influential in
planning for various aspects of the Olympic occasion can be regarded as favourable to
Beck’s own progressive outlook in design. However, even though Beck’s Olympic poster
was significantly modern—as already discussed, the first poster for Summer Olympic
Games to take such a direction—within its local context it did offer some concession
to tradition. It did so most notably in its placement of the official ‘Crest of the City of
Melbourne’ within its invitation card motif. That Beck highlighted this inclusion in his
own description of the poster is perhaps a clue to his awareness of political sensitivities
and his willingness to be conciliatory as an artist.50

The word artist is used decidedly in relation to Beck. The ‘object documentation report’
for the original copy of the 1956 poster states the following, under the heading
‘Significance’: ‘In the lower right hand corner in white is the signature of the designer
RICHARD BECK.’51 This is an indicator of Beck’s elevated status within the design pro-
fession, as a prominent freelancer who worked on a fee-for-work basis. Had the com-
mission for the poster gone to a large advertising agency, it is unlikely that it would have
carried a personal signature. The signature is a related marker of artistic license, one
rarely afforded in commercial poster work.52 Yet, even allowing that Beck would have
enjoyed a ‘much freer brief’ than that made available to a design team working for a
commissioned firm, he nevertheless had to comply with certain expectations, including
those designated by IOC guidelines for the official Olympic Games poster. The main
requirement in this regard is the display of the Olympic Rings. Rather than encumbering
Beck, he adapted this requirement to his modernist ambition. The Olympic Rings not
only add colour to the image, but their interlocking circularity also has them fit neatly
into the front fold of the invitation card motif, in a way that highlights the underlying
asymmetrical structure of the overall design.

An Invitation to ‘Modern’ Melbourne

278
 Beck was well accustomed to working on commercial poster projects, which sought
a high level of independent artistry. Most significant was his engagement as a young
designer with the London Transport and Underground advertising, administered by
Frank Pick. Perhaps best-known of Beck’s posters for the London Transport was that
now referred to as ‘London Transport is ever ready’. This was prepared as a ‘pair
poster’, where two posters constitute the one overall work. In many cases, the pair
poster would consist of one poster with an image, the other with text. However,
Beck’s ‘London Transport is ever ready’ (as the name suggests, advertising the pre-
paredness and reliability of the London Transport system) was almost totally image
based, both components featuring a black and white photo montage (with images
of destinations on one poster, buses and trains on the other) superimposed over
a sepia style illustration. London Transport also provided Beck with a design com-
mission pertaining to sport. A number of the London Transport posters advertised
professional soccer fixtures; one by Beck heralded matches located in the London
vicinity on Saturday 5 December 1936. The modernist image in this poster, using
a faceted technique to depict a football player in asymmetric relation to the goal-
post and his own shadow, bears some resemblance to C. R. W. Nevinson’s soccer

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related painting Any Wintry Afternoon in England (1930). Nevinson, like a number
of leading British artists, took commissions from London Transport in the 1920s and
1930s.53 It is reasonable to assume that Beck may have been influenced by these art-
ists, as well as other prominent international names in art and design who worked
with London Transport. These included the American-born graphic designer Edward
McKnight Kauffer, who drew upon Cubism and Futurism, if not with the ‘finality’ of
the fine artists associated with those styles.54 In regard to the 1956 Olympic Games
poster, Anne-Marie van de Ven has observed a similarity to the London Transport
poster Keeps London Going (1938), designed by the American Dadaist and Surrealist
photographer Man Ray. Van de Ven describes Beck’s Olympic poster as a ‘surrealist
impression of an oversized invitation card, floating out towards the viewer, against
the blue background of his image’.55

Beck’s involvement with Frank Pick’s ‘brilliant team’ was noted by the art historian Sir
Joseph Burke is his eulogy to Beck upon the latter’s passing in 1985.56 The London
Transport posters were well-known in European design circles, and Burke claims that
Beck’s posters within this project had established a strong reputation for him on the
Continent. Beck’s training at the Blocherer Schule no doubt stood him well for his
future career. He brought this experience back to Britain with his poster work in the
1930s, which, as indicated above, holds its own alongside that of other well-known
modernist graphic designers, such as McKnight Kauffer. Beck retained his eye for the
cutting edge in his work over the years, but he was not a slave to fashion. Sans serif
typography predominated in International Style graphics in the 1950s, but Beck, for
his Olympic poster, used a variant of Times New Roman that enhanced, rather than
diminished, the poster’s cleaned lined appearance. He also connected with the apolit-
ical tendency within commercial modern design, by detaching his poster image from
any obvious association with tradition or national sentiment.57 This further represents
a break with the Olympic posters that had gone before. Following the posters for the
1936 Winter and Summer Olympiads, both held in Hitler’s Germany, and regarded
as having ‘recourse to aggressively nationalist interests or human bodily stereotypes’,
Olympic posters moved away from aggressive nationalism.58 Nevertheless, a gentler
nationalism remained in evidence in the posters for the subsequent summer games
of 1948 in London and 1952 in Helsinki. Both posters featured a central image of the
male hero. The London poster was a rather kitsch rendering of Myron’s Discobulus,
whilst the Helsinki poster (originally prepared for the postponed Olympic Games of

John Hughson
279
1940) bore illustration of a statue of one of Finland’s most famous athletes, the 1920’s
generation Olympic medallist Paavo Nurmi.59 Beck’s poster displays the Melbourne civic
crest and unavoidably makes typographical reference to the host city. Otherwise, it is
spared iconography that could easily have been drawn upon to stir the national spirit in
celebratory anticipation of the first Olympic Games to be held in Australia.60.

Conclusion
The major aims of this paper are twofold and related: 1) to create greater awareness
of Richard Beck’s poster so that its significance to the history of Olympic posters might
become better known; 2)  to ensure that its contribution to Australian modernism
becomes better understood. The case for the former ambition is not particularly con-
tentious. A perusal of Timmer’s illustrated book on Olympic posters should be enough
to make the point to most people.61 Seen in illustrated sequence with the posters of
other Olympiads, Beck’s poster clearly presents an historical interruption of the pat-
tern previously seen in those for the Summer Olympics, and a new stylistic direction

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overall. However, it may be harder to convince people of the importance of the poster
to Australian modernism. This has to do with the Australian intelligentsia, unwittingly
or otherwise, carrying on a time-honoured privileging of the fine arts. Being distinctly
categorized at a remove from art, objects of design tend to be overlooked in the
ascendant art-historical accounts of modernism. And when the purview of modern-
ism is widened to take in design, this tends to create another high/low distinction
between architecture and the graphic arts, with posters not rating especially highly
even within the latter category. Although snobbishness over distinctions within art
has been shaken by the challenges of such artistic movements as pop art, and by
the growth of fields such as cultural studies within the academy, old prejudices are
tenacious. Towards the end of the nineteenth century John Ruskin rather sardonically
prophesied, ‘the fresco-painting of the bill-sticker is likely, so far as I see, to become
the principal Fine Art of Modern Europe.’62 Of course, Ruskin did not really think this
would occur, he was sounding annoyance at the intrusion of posters as a commercial
form into the art world, rather than sincerely predicting the downfall of tradition. That
tradition has remained rather resolutely intact, despite posters occasionally finding
their way into ‘art’ exhibitions.

The importance of design to the dawning of modernism in Australia was noted as

far back as 1929 by the prominent publisher and art promoter Sydney Ure Smith.
Dissatisfied with the prevailing narrowness of attitude, Ure Smith chastened the
Australian arts establishment for its reluctance to accept modern painting, by way of
unfavourable comparison to the more innovative field of design.63 Even with greater
acceptance by the 1940s, modern art in Australia could be described by a visiting
observer as existing within a ‘hornet’s nest’.64 However, the disputes served to instate
the fine arts as the major domain where debates over modernism in Australia were
played out. Twenty years on, influential books written before design history had been
established as an academic field—significantly Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting
(1962)—further consolidated the analysis of modernism in Australia within the intel-
lectual framework of art history.65 This tended to lock modernism within a ‘time-lag’
­theory, positing that significant stylistic influences are taken up late in Australia, in a
way that keeps Australian cultural life perpetually ‘dependent’ on external influence
and inspiration.66 Such an explanation, rehearsing Phillip’s claim about the ‘cultural
cringe’, contentious enough in regard to painting, goes little way to assessing the
­contribution of design to Australian modernism and modernity.67

An Invitation to ‘Modern’ Melbourne

280
 Tony Fry writes of Australian design involving a ‘different kind of history’, one that has
occurred both ‘on and in the margins’.68 Fry’s ‘geographical’ approach thus recognizes
how Australia’s design history has unfolded not only at a remove from a perceived
centre, but also outside of dominant discourses of art history. Richard Beck’s biography
and work are interestingly considered from this standpoint. Beck, although apparently
well-known and professionally and personally respected, remained a low-key figure
within Australian cultural life. His relative lack of involvement in organizational net-
working has meant that he has not been profiled in the historical accounts of Australian
design in the manner of other migrant designers of his generation, such as R. Haughton
James.69 Yet, his training at the Slade and the Blocherer Schule, and his subsequent
experience of working on commercial poster design within a series contributed to by
leading modernists, prepared him for a unique contribution to the Australian visual
arts, to which the 1956 Olympic poster is arguably his outstanding achievement.

Much of the despairing mid-twentieth century modern Australian art—including

work done by painters associated with the Melbourne based ‘Angry Penguin’ move-
ment—is set in the Outback.70 Beck’s migrant status spared him the vexed relation-

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ship with the Outback experienced by Australian-born, but non-Indigenous, artists
such as Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan. Given his ‘foreignness’ and different profes-
sional orientation, Beck’s contribution to Australian imagery stands in stark contrast
to the painters who presented a ‘modernism from the lower depths’.71 Beck offered
an optimistic modernism and, thus, an aesthetic sensibility relevant to the mid-1950s
Australia of his own experience and the poster he was commissioned to prepare for
the Melbourne Olympic Games. The poster, with its bright blue background—­possibly
a symbol of the Pacific Ocean—providing tranquil backdrop to the unfolding invitation
card in the foreground, does offer a rather simple welcoming. But, recognition of the
poster’s innocence should not deny its significance. The spirit of hope carried within its
design makes it an important symbolic statement in and of its day. A key work within
the history of Olympic posters, Richard Beck’s ‘Olympic Games Melbourne 1956’ war-
rants similar regard within the history of Australian visual culture.

John Hughson
Sport and Cultural Studies, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK
E-mail: jehughson@uclan.ac.uk
John Hughson is Professor of Sport and Cultural Studies at the University of Central
Lancashire.

If you have any comments to make in relation to this article, please go to the journal website on
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Acknowledgements: Permission for the use of Figs 3–5 has been given by the Beck family. In this
regard, I am very grateful to Mr Jon Beck. Figs 3–6 are from the Richard Beck Design Archive,
1926–1984, held at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.

Notes
  1 J. Hughson, ‘“The Friendly Games”: The Official IOC Film  
of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics as Historical Record’,  
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 30,
no. 4, 2010, pp. 529–42.
2 Ibid.
3 A commission for an unofficial poster, perhaps to
appeal to people of all ages, was given to another
Melbourne-based designer, Max Forbes. His cheery design,

John Hughson
281
 Melbourne—Olympic City was the result. A.-M. van de
Ven, ‘Images of the Fifties: Design and Advertising’, in The
Australian Dream: Design of the Fifties, J. O’Callaghan (ed.),
Powerhouse Publishing, Sydney, 1993, p. 37.
 4 A. Stephen, P. Goad & A. McNamara, ‘Introduction’,
in Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in
Australia, A. Stephen, P. Goad & A. McNamara (eds), The
Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2008, pp. xviii–xxxiii. This
introductory chapter reformulates a position set out in the
late 1980s in a book length essay. See I. Burn, N. Lendon,
C. Merewether & A. Stephen, The Necessity of Australian
Art: An Essay about Interpretation, Power Publications,
Sydney, 1988.  the Olympic Games’, International Journal of Cultural Policy,
  5 M. Timmers, A Century of Olympic Posters, V&A Publishing,
London, 2008, p. 21.
 6 For images of these three Winter Games posters see
Timmers, op. cit., pp. 28, 59, 61.
 7 B. R. Thompson, Olympiad: a Graphic Celebration, A. S.
Barnes and Company, San Diego & New York, 1980, p. 18.
 8 For Richard Beck’s descriptive comment about the invita-
tion card motif, see Thompson, op. cit., p.  19. My refer-
ence to the International Style has in mind that movement
associated with the ‘Swiss’ graphic design tradition. See R.
Hollis, Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of
an International Style 1920–1965, Lawrence King, London,
2006.
  9 I am very grateful to Mr Jon Beck, son of Richard Beck, for
sharing his insights about his father’s preparation of the
design in its formative stage. Mr Beck recalls his father,
‘doing the artwork at home and creating the shading
behind the front shape with a tooth brush, black ink and a
piece of fly wire to make a stipple effect.’ Email correspond-
ence from Mr John Beck, 4 March 2011.
10 Kamekura’s other three posters featured photographic
images of athletic bodies—another historical first. For a
thoroughgoing discussion of the these posters and other
graphic design work associated with the Tokyo Olympic
Games of 1964 see, J. Traganou, ‘Tokyo’s 1964 Olympic
Design as a “Realm of [Design] Memory”’, Sport in Society,
vol. 14, no. 4, 2011, pp. 466–81.
11 For images of these posters, see Timmers op. cit., pp. 72,
78, 88, 91, 99.  world: the 1956 Olympic Games and the representation of
12 A similar point is more modestly stated in The Official
Report of the Organizing Committee for the Games of
the XVI Olympiad Melbourne 1956, Government Printing
Office, Melbourne, 1956, p. 142.
13 A. A. Phillips, ‘The Cultural Cringe’, Meanjin, vol. 9, no. 4,
1950, pp.  299–302. Reprinted in Modernism & Australia:
Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917–1967, A.
Stephen, A. McNamara and P. Goad (eds), The Miegunyah
Press, Melbourne, 2006, pp. 623–7.
282
14 R. Stanton, The Forgotten Olympic Arts Competitions: the
Story of the Olympic Art Competitions of the 20th Century,
Trafford, Victoria, BC, 2000.
15 D. Brown, ‘Modern Sport, Modernism and the Cultural
Manifesto: De Coubertin’s Revue Olympique’, International
Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 18, no. 2, 2001,
pp. 78–109.
16 D. Inglis, ‘Cultural agonistes: Social Differentiation, Cultural
Policy and the Cultural Olympiads’, International Journal of
Cultural Policy, vol. 14, no. 4, 2008, pp. 465.
17 B. Garcia, ‘One Hundred Years of Cultural Planning Within
vol. 14, no. 4, 2008, p. 368.
18 Stanton, op. cit., p. 244.
19 G. Hutton, ‘Strike the Olympic Lyre’, Meanjin, vol. 14, no. 1,
1955, pp. 98–101.
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20 Ibid.
21 The antipathy has been captured neatly over many years in
the writing (and activism) of the Melbourne journalist Keith
Dunstan. See for example, K. Dunstan, ‘Sporting Obsession’,
in Hammond Innes Introduces Australia, C. Turnbull (ed.),
Andre Deutsch Limited, London, 1971, pp. 57–68.
22 The Arts Festival: a Guide to the Exhibitions with Introductory
Commentaries on the Arts in Australia, The Olympic Civic
Committee of the Melbourne City Council, Melbourne,
1956.
23 Bernard Smith, ‘Paintings and Drawings’, in The Arts
Festival, op. cit., p. 18.
24 The details of these venues and the exhibition dates are set
out in The Arts Festival, op. cit., p. 58.
25 Official Report of the Organizing Committee for the Games
of the XVI Olympiad, op. cit., p. 197. 
26 Simon Plant, ‘1956: Melbourne, Modernity and the
XVI Olympiad’, in Melbourne, Modernity and the XVI
Olympiad, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Bulleen, Victoria,
1996, p. 12.
27 Ibid., pp. 12. 
28 Boyd’s first quote is from G. Davison, ‘Welcoming the
Melbourne’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 28, no. 109,
1997, p. 71, his second is from G. Serle, Robin Boyd: a Life,
Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995, p. 148
29 For example, Plant, op. cit., pp. 12.
30 Hughson, op. cit., p. 539.
31 Serle, op. cit., p. 147.
32 Davison, op. cit., pp. 75–6.
33 Serle, op. cit., p. 150.
An Invitation to ‘Modern’ Melbourne
34 The biographical information in this paragraph is drawn
mainly from the notes on Richard Beck by Anne-Marie van de
Ven in the catalogue for Richard Beck Designer/Photographer
(the first survey of the British/Australian Designer, curated
by Merle Hathaway for Horsham Gallery) Horsham Gallery
(Victoria), 20 March–21 April 1996; and H. Edquist, ‘Richard
Beck (1912–1985): Designer and Photographer’, RMIT
Design Archives Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 12–16.
35 Images of Beck’s design work for the Orient Line accom-
pany the interesting short essay ‘Beck Indeed’. The essay is
available online at Quad Royal < http://vintageposterblog.
com/2011/03/28/beck-indeed//> accessed 23 September
2011. This essay interestingly speculates upon the profes-
sional motivation behind Beck’s decision to stay in Australia,
suggesting that after a heyday in the 1930s he may have
felt the prospect of interesting commissions in the UK was
in decline. If so, this shows keen anticipation of the ‘cosi-
ness’ and ‘nostalgia’ that returned to British graphic design
in the 1950s; cf. P. Dormer, Design Since 1945, Thames &
Hudson, London, 1993, p. 94. 
36 For a quite detailed discussion of the Melbourne 1956 street
decorations, see D. Islip, ‘1956 Olympic Decorations: the
Final Fling’, Fabrications, vol. 11, no. 1, 2000, pp. 26–43.
37 Ibid., p. 34.
38 Ibid., p. 29.
39 Edquist, op. cit., p. 15.
40 Islip, op. cit., p. 34.
41 J. Willis, ‘Signs of the Times: Lighting, Lettering and Logos’,
in Modern Times, Stephen et al., op. cit., p. 208.
42 Islip, op. cit., p. 34.
43 Islip’s paper persuasively argues that the decorations project
and the Olympic Games pool were the ‘crowning achieve-
ment’ of this design culture. This claim adds to the case for
looking at the significance of the Melbourne Olympiad and
its key cultural projects as harbingers of a shift in Australian
modernism.  London Transport in the 1930s. I am grateful to Jon Beck for
44 There are two Richard Beck archives of note. The longer
established of the two is the Richard Beck Design Archive,
1926–1984, held at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. An
original copy of the 1956 Olympic poster is held in this col-
lection. A  more recent archive, Richard Beck and Barbara
Beck Papers, has been gifted to the RMIT Design Archives in
Melbourne by Mrs Barbara Beck. 
45 The ‘official records’ in this sense are the minutes of the
meetings of the Executive Committee of the Organising
Committee for the 16th Olympiad, Melbourne, 1956, and
its various sub-committees. Minutes available are held at the
Public Record Office of Victoria. To arrange for the competi-
tion to select a poster design, a dedicated sub-committee of
the Arts Sub-Committee was formed. There are no minutes
John Hughson
available for the meetings of this sub-committee, and this
perhaps explains why there is so little on the public record
regarding the poster. 
46 Relevant unreferenced newspaper clippings are held in the
Richard Beck Design Archive, 1926–1984. There is no mate-
rial in the archive regarding the rival entries. 
47 Herbst’s students’ mock poster designs are mentioned in
a brief notice in the Melbourne newspaper The Herald
25 February 1953, p.  11. One of the posters appears to
have a boomerang as the centrepiece within its image. This
prompts thought about whether consideration may have
been given to including a symbol of Indigenous Australia in
the official poster. Beck used such imagery in his design for
a cover of the journal Meanjin in 1951, so he may well have
been open to a brief of this kind. 
48 Davison, op. cit., pp. 64–76. The information in the present
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paragraph relies on Davison’s account.
49 Ibid., p. 75.
50 Thompson, op. cit., p. 19.
51 Object Documentation Report, Reg. No: 91/14, Richard
Beck Design Archive, 1926–1984, op. cit.
52 Van de Ven, ‘Images of the Fifties’, op. cit., pp. 31–2.
53 John Hughson, ‘Not Just Any Wintry Afternoon in England:
the Curious Contribution of C. R. W. Nevinson to “Football
Art”’, International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 28,
no. 18, 2011, pp. 2670–87. 
54 John Barnicoat, A Concise History of Posters, Thames &
Hudson, London, 1972, p. 103.
55 Van de Ven, ‘Images of the Fifties’, op. cit., p. 36.
56 J. Burke, ‘A Tribute to Richard Beck’, loose leaf item in the
Richard Beck Design Archive, 1926–1984. It is pertinent to
point out that Richard Beck was not related to either Harry
Beck (designer of the London Underground Tube Map) or
Maurice Beck, both of whom did graphic design work for
clarification in this regard.
57 Cf. R. Jubert, Typography and Graphic Design: From
Antiquity to the Present, Flammarion, Paris, 2006, p. 311.
58 A. Tomlinson, ‘Sport and Design: Meanings, Values,
Ideologies’, in Image, Power and Space: Studies in
Consumption and Identity, A. Tomlinson and J. Woodham
(eds), Meyer and Meyer, Aachen, 2007, p. 121.
59 Images of these posters can be seen in Timmers, op. cit.,
pp. 55, 60.
60 This design decision is interesting in light of E. McKnight
Kauffer’s comment in the invitation to the Three Australians
exhibition at the Lund Humphries Gallery, London, in 1938:
‘We must get rid of the idea that [  .  .  .  ] Australia only
283
 stands for [  .  .  .  ] life in the open air and sports—espe-
cially cricket. Slowly and surely there are influences at work
introducing other aspects of what might be called a more
intellectual life.’ It is quite possible that Beck knew of this
comment. But even if not, the same sentiment, at least
possibly, had bearing on the absence of sportive imagery
in the 1956 Olympic poster. For McKnight Kauffer’s quote,
see the notes prepared by Anne-Marie van de Ven on
Celebrating Australia: Identity by Design, an exhibition at
the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, <http://www.power-
housemuseum.com/previous/celebrating_australia.php>
accessed 3 June 2012.
61 Timmers, op. cit.
62 M. Timmers, ‘Introduction’, in The Power of the Poster, M.
Timmers (ed.), V&A Publications, London, 1998, p. 8.
63 S. Ure Smith, ‘Editorial’, Art in Australia, 3rd series, no. 29,
September 1929, n.p. Reprinted in Modernism & Australia,
Stephen, et al., op. cit., pp. 88–90.
64 T. Sizer, ‘Letter to Miss Florence Anderson, Carnegie Cor­
poration, New York, Re: John Reed and the Contemporary
Art Society’, 15 November 1941. The letter is held in the
Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Reprinted in Modernism & Australia, Stephen, et  al., op.
cit., pp. 404–5.
65 B. Smith, Australian Painting: 1788–1960, Oxford University
Press, Melbourne, 1962.  to the nation’s inner landscape.
284
66 Stephen, et al., ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. xxi.
67 The echo of the ‘cultural cringe’ in Bernard Smith’s
Australian Painting is referred to by T, Smith, ‘Writing the
History of Australian Art’, Australian Journal of Art, vol. 3,
1983, p. 16.
68 T. Fry, ‘A Geography of Power: Design History and
Marginality’, Design Issues, vol. 6, no. 1, 1989, pp. 29.
69 For example, see M. Bogle, Design in Australia: 1880–1970,
Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998. Whereas Haughton James
is discussed in various pages of this volume, Richard Beck
receives only one passing reference as the ‘co-designer’ of
the 1956 Olympic poster (p. 135).
70 Burn, et al., op. cit., p. 70, refer to such artwork collectively
as ‘outback modernism’.
71 The term comes from a chapter by C. Merewether,
‘Modernism From the Lower Depths’, in Angry Penguins
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and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s (catalogue
from an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, 19 May
to 14 August 1988), M. Ryan (ed.), South Bank Centre,
London, 1988, pp.  69–77. The foreboding representation
of the Outback in the work of painters such as Tucker and
Nolan evinces an agoraphobic response, peculiar to the
experience of white urban-coastal Australians raised on the
mythology of the ‘bush’. Coming to Australia as an adult,
Beck would not have developed this particular orientation
An Invitation to ‘Modern’ Melbourne