A moralist who insisted that design matters, Tibor Kalman addressed the world as sovereign of a small but free-spirited nation called M&Co.
By Danny Abelson
Tibor Kalman (courtesy: William Van Roden)
To those of us who cared for Tibor Kalman and care for him still, his death, at the absurdly young age of 49, represents a deprivation that will be keenly felt for some time. His significance for the readers of this magazine, most of whom are involved in design and architecture, will almost certainly be lasting.
Tibor was not merely successful and uncompromising: He was a moralist. He devoted real time and effort to articulating a coherent set of beliefs about the activity of design. While there are many practitioners of design, and almost as many theorists, Tibor was a prolific creative director who delivered an ongoing commentary about what design is and should be. The fact that his presentations and pronouncements were often outrageous and funny did little to disguise the thoughtfulness and depth of feeling he brought to the subject.
Like Victor Papanek and Buckminster Fuller, Tibor began with the assumption that design matters. Or, to put it differently, that if it doesn’t matter, designers have no one but themselves to blame. Unlike many others who frown on fashioning baubles for the wealthy or manufacturing diversions for the stylish, Tibor was capable of being utterly absorbed by album covers and music videos and restaurant interiors. He just refused to limit himself. One of the reasons why he was able to wander far from the confines of the politically correct--despite being a passionately committed activist--was that, more than anything else, he loved the excitement of the new.
Moving to Rome to edit Colors magazine, directing a television commercial for Subaru, developing a line of watches: These were leaps into the void for Tibor. If he had suddenly taken up mountain climbing or marathon running his colleagues and collaborators would have been mystified. There is little need to battle heat exhaustion sprinting through the desert or to test the limits of endurance on Himalayan ranges when you seek out such huge challenges during regular working hours.
In what he did as well as what he said, in the way he ran his company and the way he celebrated and delighted in his status as an outsider, he exhorted others to resist the comfort of easy certainties and received opinions. Of course, no one who worked with him would ever have been inclined to sink into a relaxed, predictable routine.
The collaborator who wasn’t a little intimidated was simply not paying attention. It wasn’t just that Tibor had a formidable brain or that he had extremely good ideas. It was that he disregarded the rules, to brilliant effect. This resulted in a natural and sometimes all-too-visible impatience with the conventional and the lazy.
Collaboration was both a blessing and a curse for Tibor. It enabled him to make progress as an artist and designer--and frequently caused him frustration bordering on anguish. As anyone who worked with him will attest, he was fiercely opinionated. He lived with the tension that inevitably arises when a creative director propelled by the force of his own ideas has no taste for compromise.
A few years ago, over lunch in Rome--I had come to write for the AIDS issue of Colors--Tibor expressed his irritation about an important piece of the introduction that we were struggling with. I told him that he was not allowed to give me that why-didn’t-I-get-someone-else-for-this-job look. But I knew well, after our long history of friendship and collaboration, that once Tibor had a certain kind of belief in you, nothing he said needed be taken personally. He had enormous affection for all of the people who made up his staff. As a colleague and office mate of many years, I spent a lot of time with this evolving family uptown and down, and I count myself fortunate.
There was another way to earn Tibor’s trust. Be Maira. Tibor’s enormous faith in his wife’s ideas and creative instincts isn’t just an important part of his biography. It would be absurd and presumptuous to offer an explanation of why Maira was more his partner than his muse or sounding board. Frankly, it would be as unnecessary as a description of their work, which has been so widely disseminated and, even now, can be seen in a major exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I don’t think anyone with any imagination believes that the story is over.
There was something about the way that Tibor referred to Maira as an artist, some years ago, that made a lasting impression. I had the idea at the time that he was talking about her ability to remain true to her creative instincts. She had then, as she does now, the playfulness and originality that drives a very specific type of person--an artist--to continuously rearrange and re-create the world. And as everyone who knows her can attest, Maira is profoundly funny.
This was true of both Tibor and Maira when I first met them. We were all just out of college, and what is remark-able to me now is how much Tibor was already the person who would later go on to influence so many others. He combined an outsize, enthusiastic goofiness with a sharply focused intelligence. Part of his considerable appeal came from this unlikely combination, which was expressed in a relentlessly ironic humor.
But then paradox and irony are the natural habitat of the rebellious. A great deal of the work Tibor and Maira and company created explored the tensions between the expected and the actual, the rich and the poor, the professional and the amateur, design and un-design. And it was all done in a consistently witty, distinctive Dadaist language. In an industry plagued by pomposity and self-importance, much of their work managed to be funny and charming. A cornerstone of their style--the silly-clever magic of Maira’s books may be its purest expression--was the refusal to take themselves too seriously.
Playfulness is a great disguise, and in this case it camouflaged a toughness of mind. Smart clients, of course, noticed it anyway. Tibor adamantly refused to be a vendor and addressed the world as sovereign of a small but free-spirited nation called, for a time, M&Co. And, what’s more, he took delight in standing up to the creative person’s natural predator, the client. He certainly knew that if design was going to challenge the status quo, it would have to be very sharp and persuasive to prevail.
There are many former Sixties radicals around. But Tibor was an innovator whose work--no matter how meticulously crafted or aesthetically pleasing or cool or funky--was informed by the desire to change the world that most student activists shed at graduation.
One meets far too many people who are possessed of a certainty about their role in life. It’s something to marvel at: So many of them have absolutely no reason whatsoever for this sincere self-regard. What is exceptional is the combination of such resolute confidence with genuine talent. When that gift is itself linked to real values, we sit up and take notice. It goes without saying that we often sit up and take notice, like dogs, to nothing more than the barking of other dogs. But I think it’s fair to say, without making a saint of the poor guy, that many sensed a kind of purity in Tibor.
It is admirable to believe in yourself and your work and to wish to supplant the pedestrian and the expected. But it helps enormously when that work lives up to its promise and immediately creates new and better possibilities. Tibor’s work was not only good but--more unusually--important. Although he enjoyed his success, he was more interested in being emulated than admired, and would have preferred to inspire originality and encourage creative bravery than to be eulogized for those qualities.
Let the world say good-bye to Tibor. Those who work in his profession can do more. Young designers can learn from his refusal to settle--in any sense of the word--and can approach the creative process as though their lives depended on it.
Danny Abelsonis president of the Abelson Company, a design consultancy based in New York and London.
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