When I was working at the ad agency Lintas in London, I stumbled upon the fact that in an earlier generation (in the 1930s and 40s), long before the arrival of TV advertising, there had been a coterie of outstanding young artists employed there. Lintas was originally set up as the house agency for the consumer goods giant, Unilever.
Perhaps the most significant of them was the painter, Keith Vaughan (above, “Landscape with figure”, 1959). A good Vaughan will go for upwards of £150,000 in today’s market. Others included the Australian, John Passmore, much of whose work is now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the New Zealand-born painter of English country houses, Felix Kelly, and the brilliant trompe l’oeil artist, Roy Hobdell. Having discovered their existence, I was lucky enough to commission an exhibition of their work at Agnew’s in Old Bond Street some fifty years later in 1988.
How was it that they all congregated at Lintas? Certainly it was not by accident. In fact, the dynamic boss of the business at that time, Ivor Cooper, understood that if the agency was to shine creatively, it had to have the most talented people – and for him that meant hiring the finest young artists. Of course, this was not the tokenistic artist-in-residence that some contemporary organisations employ. It was artists at the heart of the company's creative product.
But hiring the artists was just a start. An artist himself, Cooper encouraged them to develop their talents, giving them time off for study and even allowing them to do their own work at the office when time permitted. And the respect that the boss was held in meant that this freedom was not abused.
While not every business needs outstanding artists, all organisations need some highly creative people in their ranks. Yet research shows that currently less than one third have any reference to creativity or innovativeness in their recruitment or appraisal processes.
How is it where you are?
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