Sex, typography and beefy bravura - Robert Brownjohn`s legacy lives on

The most famous tale that's told about the late, possibly great Robert Brownjohn - graphic designer, some-time junkie, full-time character - is probably the Goldfinger story. According to The Herald, it goes something like this...

Brownjohn - BJ to his friends - was meeting James Bond producer Cubby Broccoli to discuss ideas for the title sequence for Goldfinger. This is the early sixties, and what you need to know is that by this time BJ had replaced his attachment to heroin with one for alcohol, much to the detriment of his waistline. He wanted to pitch an idea that involved images flickering across a golden, near-naked, nubile female form. But how to get that across? He decided to do it by stripping off and then, in an act of beefy bravura, to start dancing in front of a slide projector.

The fact that the third Bond movie does indeed begin with a credit sequence in which images from the film flicker across the the golden, near-naked, nubile form of model Margaret Nolan says much for Cubby Broccoli's ability to see beyond that eye-popping vision. He certainly couldn't have ignored it.

But then Brownjohn - who died in 1970, a few days short of his 45th birthday - was a hard man to ignore. A student of Bauhaus legend Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in Chicago, he made his name in New York, where he mixed with jazz musicians and artists (he was a friend to Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Andy Warhol, among others) and picked up his bad habit. In 1960 he boarded the SS Liberte to London, where he could get heroin on the NHS. He arrived just as the city - or at least the creative industries in the city - moved into fifth gear. Soon he was designing adverts (for banks and hosiery) and album covers (the Rolling Stones' Let it Bleed), shooting credit sequences for movies (he'd already done the titles for From Russia with Love before he danced for Cubby Broccoli) - and showing that you can sell anything with sex.

There's a poster on display at the new exhibition of his work at Kilmarnock's Dick Institute for a gallery show entitled Obsession and Fantasy. The word "obsession" is written across a naked female torso, the nipples standing in for the two letter Os. And, as you watch a golf ball disappear down Margaret Nolan's cleavage or see the name of actress Daniela Bianchi play suggestively across the thighs of the belly dancer filmed for the credits of From Russia with Love, it won't come as much of a surprise that Brownjohn once wrote an article for a design magazine and called it Sex and Typography.

Thing is, though, it's the typography that Brownjohn should be remembered for. You can see it in the street photographs he took capturing unusual and beguiling signage in New York, and in the work he did. There are two simple but beguiling images in the exhibition, both adverts for banks. One is a very simple poster, just five words, black on white: "Modern banking is electronic banking". But the letters are all phased, giving them a stroboscopic effect. The other is a TV advert for the Midland in which words associated with transport come up on screen. One of them is "automobile". The two Os drop down to act as wheels, and the word drives away.

Robert Brownjohn made words move. Sometimes he made them dance. Probably better than he danced himself.

The Robert Brownjohn exhibition is at the Dick Institute, Kilmarnock, until November 24.

Thanks to `` for the alert.

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