Column | René Knip
On Jan. 23, 2025, beloved designer and teacher Hartmut Kowalke died in his hometown Breda. During his farewell service, colleagues, students and friends reminisced about him.
Hartmut was born on January 14, 1941 in Mettmann, Germany. He trained at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, where he was scouted by Total Design, which brought him to the Netherlands. There he worked with Wim Crouwel and Benno Wissing. After working as a partner at several leading design firms, he was a highly respected lecturer at the Academie St. Joost Breda from 1986 until his retirement in 2000.
René Knip on Hartmut Kowalke
Dear Hartmut,
You’re not here anymore. It was enough and it’s okay….
But man, how much we have all benefited from you! How much you have given us and inspired us endlessly!
I know so many names of former students who also experienced what I was privileged to experience. You were a teacher – and for many quickly a friend – who constantly challenged you to just do it, to believe in your plan and yourself. You were a master at taking uncertainties out of the equation. Uncertainty is the only certainty you have. A vital, golden law. Your very ability to allow so many students to grow and flourish has been such a tremendous gift during your time on earth.
And you granted it to all of us so much. Your pride was beautiful and genuine. This gift has made your life so intensely valuable. You lifted us all up and threw us upward. Toward the unknown, toward der Himmel über Breda.
Where your own graphic work remained tied to the zeitgeist and high quality of yesteryear and the grid long the most important, your mind was always experimental and exploratory in nature. I will remember your enthusiastic, unparalleled never ending monologues about…. – yes, about what really not – greatly missed.
Your oracular language was autonomous, unspoiled and liberated from any convention. Everything was brought into your mind and glued together; Buddhism, soccer, music, the mountains, art, politics, food, Japan, flora and fauna, architecture, everything and everyone and more. It was skillfully tied together and fused into a joyful metamorphosis parade that slipped past your listeners.
And always there was something in between that you could take further. What stuck. Combine the Bauhaus with Hieronymus Bosch and you end up with Hartmut. Your spirit is your oeuvre. And this oeuvre we will archive in our hearts.
You were also a notorious refugee. A social loner. A certain pain lived in you, but you preferred not to share it. You found it difficult to look into your soul. When asked too direct questions, when you got too close, you opted for a solitary time out or you went clowning around. During and after my St. Joost days I still sometimes wanted to try to change you, but in later years I abandoned that nonsensical need and loved you as you were.
My friendship had fortunately become unconditional.
I close my words with an image during our endless time together in the farmhouse in Friesland. It was a chaotic moment of renovation with people everywhere, noise and mess, but you quietly, fully systematic, swept the concrete floor of the gigantic barn. And this for hours … like the monk you were.
Dear Hartmut, Even though I am not here, I am with you and will stay with you.
René Knip
Dutch Graphic Roots #68 Hartmut Kowalke
In 2000 Gert Staal had a conversation with Hartmut, on the occasion of Hartmut’s farewell as teacher of Graphic Design at the Academie St. Joost in Breda. Read the entire interview at dutchgraphicroots.nl
