After the second world war, Romek Marber became one of Britain’s most distinguished graphic designers, whose haunting style will be familiar even if his name is not
Gestapo burst into the safe house in Krakow where Romek Marber was hiding in 1943, they ordered him to face the wall. He had broken out of the Jewish ghetto in Bochnia, but his guide had betrayed him, and he expected to be killed on the spot. His mother, twin sister and grandparents had already been murdered. Marber leant his forehead against the dusky wallpaper, and for the rest of his life would remember the paper’s pattern—an ornate motif picked out in two shades of green.
An encounter with a dress-designer while he was sweeping the floors in a clothing factory led him to evening classes in drawing, then to St Martin’s College of Art and finally to the Royal College of Art. The grant he had received, for displaced Poles, stipulated that his course be vocational, and he picked commercial design. Graduating in 1956, he turned down a job in advertising and soon set up his own practice.
Orna Frommer-Dawson, his long-term partner after his wife died and another fellow designer, says a key part of his process was swift decision-making. Marber would pace up and down his studio, pondering a commission and smoking his pipe . Then, quickly, he would decide. Often the results shimmer with an unsettling tension that is his hallmark: between a pursuit of order and an undertow of peril.
, Harold Wilson, then Britain’s prime minister, looms behind an outsized fist. As art director of the’s magazine Marber adorned a feature on the mafia with daggers and shadows. “Romek himself was not fearful,” says Ms Frommer-Dawson, “but when a subject needed to illustrate fear maybe he drew on his knowledge of what fear can be.”
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