History

Anders Beckman’s School, as the College was originally known, was founded in 1939 by Anders Beckman, the leading Swedish advertising illustrator and exhibition designer of the day, and one of the greatest of all time.

Anders Beckman was a pioneer in the young Swedish advertising industry. He became famous for his classic posters for customers such as AB Aerotransport (the predecessor of SAS), the Red Cross, Orrefors and many others, for his high profile pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, for his posters and other marketing material for thr groundbreaking H55 exhibition in Helsingborg in 1955, and for his work for many other Swedish and international exhibitions and events.

Anders Beckman was a style guru for Stockholm’s creative culture and a legendary figure on the capital city’s social scene for four decades: always impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit and bow tie, with his characteristic handlebar moustache that became something of a logo for the school that bore his name.

As with many other truly innovative projects, Beckmans School arose organically, without any particularly detailed or precise plan. During their trips together to Paris and New York, Anders Beckman and Göta Trädgårdh, Sweden’s leading fashion illustrator and textile designer at that time, had realised the need for some form of training for creatives in Stockholm’s fast-growing advertising and fashion industries - a smaller, freer and non-academic school, inspired by creative and artistic groups such as the Matisse school and the Bauhaus group. One of the fundamental concepts was that the school should operate in a symbiotic relationship with the teachers’ own commercial activities. Beckman and Trädgårdh also viewed the school, right from the start, as a means of meeting both their own and their colleagues’ offices’ need for young, talented creatives.

                                        »You can do anyting you want
                                       as long as the school doesn´t burn down.«
                                                        Nunnie Beckman

The idea of founding a school took shape while Anders Beckman was working on the World’s Fair in New York, and once the event was over, Beckman and Trädgårdh started advertising for students. The response they met exceeded all expectations, as the World’s Fair had made Beckman a star. At a stroke, he had created a school for fashion and advertising. A curriculum was quickly improvised.

The main elements of this unique curriculum have remained the same for the almost seven subsequent decades. Beckmans is still a three-year practical and theoretical school to which students are admitted on the basis of samples of their creative work, and without any requirement for academic qualifications. Some of the other basic principles that were established from the start include the requirement for all teachers to be working in the business, for the classes to be small, with intimate relationships between students and teachers, and for the tuition to be based on practical exercises that allow the students to test their abilities under conditions that offer the maximum possible creative freedom, and to learn from their mistakes.

Anders Beckman decided from day one that the tempo and temperament of the school should fit in with his own personal pace and those of his colleagues in the advertising industry, working around the clock to meet deadlines but with plenty of parties, pranks and diverse social activities in between - a proud tradition that is upheld with honour to this day at Beckmans. And just like the international artists and architects who served as his role models, Beckman succeeded in creating a completely new and original artistic and pedagogic tradition that has survived its founders: a creative school in the widest sense of the expression.

The intimate format

Beckmans was run during the first decades of its life as an intimate family business, with Anders Beckman himself, his wife, Nunnie, Göta Trädgårdh and Gudde Wedsberg as the only employees, and with a staff of respected professional men and women from Stockholm’s creative culture acting as more or less regular guest tutors. The school soon made a name for itself nationwide, thanks to its high profile student exhibitions - and thanks, to an equal degree, to its legendary happenings, parties, masquerade balls, and wide variety of pranks for which the College is famous to this day. As the years passed, it became clear that it was from this tiny private school, housed in an apartment on Smålandsgatan in central Stockholm - and not from the big official institutions - that many of the key creatives in Sweden’s fashion and advertising industries were being recruited.

After Anders Beckman’s death in 1967, Beckmans entered a phase of new development that was, naturally enough, strongly influenced by the anti-materialistic ideals of 1968. The school’s dominant profile in the seventies and early eighties was Pelle Lindberg, who eventually also became its Principal. This era was also a time of upheaval in the Swedish advertising business, which was now beginning to take shape as an industry, and in the fashion industry, where the domestic textile industry was facing extinction, imposing new demands on Beckmans’ fashion courses.

In the early 1980s, Beckmans moved from the apartment on Smålandsgatan into a small building of its own, diagonallyacross the street, on Nybrogatan. The school grew slowly and its operations were expanded to include evening classes. The operations were incorporated with the aid of a number of companies in the fashion, design and advertising industries, which now became joint owners of the College, including H&M, IKEA, Lowe Brindfors and Svenskt Tenn.

Three study programmes - one college

In the nineties, Beckmans was led by Arne Gustavsson, a well-known figure in the Swedish advertising industry, who had enjoyed considerable success for many years, primarily as an advertising film director and producer. The biggest change during Gustavsson’s era was the establishment of the school’s third study programme, Product Design, in response to an initiative by Swedish star designer Jonas Bohlin.

The current combination of study programmes for advertising & graphic design, fashion and product design are, as mentioned earlier, unique in northern Europe, and play a major part in creating Beckman’s distinctive profile. Beckmans’ product design study programme soon established itself and has made a major contribution to developments in Swedish design since its launch. Different forms of creative cooperation between students and teachers from the three study programmes have been intensified and have come to have an increasing influence on Beckmans’ pedagogic culture.

Beckmans’ current Principal, Tom Hedqvist, who took over the position in 2000, is himself an art director and graphic designer, known also as exhibition designer and textile designer, with his characteristic, award-winning designs especially for Tiogruppen. He is also the first of the school’s Principals to have, himself, been trained at Beckmans.

Under Tom Hedqvist’s leadership, the school has undergone a long-discussed change that transformed it into a recognised college of higher education. This new status has, amongst other things, resulted in what Hedqvist calls a “stronger theoretical base”.

»As a student, you gain a stable theoretical foundation in design history, and also learn to discuss and articulate aspects on what we do,« says Tom Hedqvist. »We are also very keen to encourage students who want to do research in design. But at the same time, it’s very important to stress that we here at Beckmans have retained our unique culture, personality, atmosphere and integrity, even as a college of higher education.«

At the moment, ten per cent of the tuition provided at Beckmans comprises design history and theory. The first year at the College includes an orientation in the history of design that ends with a concentrated week where the students produce a piece of work on design pioneers and design classics. Year two sees the focus of the theoretical training shift towards developing the students’ ability to analyse the practical exercises. Year three places the emphasis on the students’ own writing and on training in the ability to communicate their design process verbally and visually.

Another important consequence of the transformation into a college of higher education was the abolition of the ever-rising term fees, which made Beckmans more accessible to a wider circle of talented students from a variety of backgrounds and social circumstances.

An international college

Beckmans’ status as a college of higher education has also made it considerably more international. Membership of European teaching programme Cumulus has facilitated matters for foreign students who want to study at Beckmans, and for Beckmans students who want to attend other colleges throughout the world to study at Masters degree level. On average, the College takes three exchange students per term, and there are plans to offer our own 80-credit Masters degree programme at Beckmans College of Design - thereby further enhancing the international exchange programme.

About Beckmans

• Beckmans - the innovative college
• History
• The unique pedagogic culture
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