Gert Dumbar - "Gentleman Maverick of Dutch Design" - 1958 - SEPIA op papier Abstract - ges.

• Gert Dumbar (Jakarta, May 16, 1940) is a Dutch graphic designer at Tel Design and later Studio Dumbar, who gained national and international fame with his work. Illustrator Dick Wiarda (1992) characterized him as "The man behind the yellow train."

Life and work
Dumbar is a descendant of the patrician Dumbar family. He grew up in Bandung, and stayed in Indonesia until he was eleven. After studying for a year at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, he continued his studies with the design course at the Royal College of Art in London.
After graduating back in the Netherlands in 1963, he started at the design agency Teldesign. This agency was then still focused on industrial design, and Dumbar set up the graphic design department there. The first major clients were the Dutch Railways and the old PTT (Netherlands), the largest client for creative Netherlands at that time.
In 1977, Dumbar opened his own graphic design agency Studio Dumbar. In 1993, he designed the logo with a pilot light above a law book for the police. As someone directly involved in the Indonesian War of Independence, he designed the Indies monument in The Hague in 2002.
In 1983, Dumbar was awarded the HN Werkman Prize for graphic design for his oeuvre. In 2006, he won the Grand Prix with his studio at the Dutch Design Awards, and in 2009 he received the Piet Zwart Prize.

During his career, Dumbar developed at Teldesign from modernist to Dadaist and enfant terrible of Dutch graphic design.[6] With that attitude, he started Studio Dumbar, where he became an innovator of graphic design. In later years, he acted more as a mentor, and was seen as a typical representative of early Dutch design.
Enfant terrible of graphic Netherlands
In the seventies, still within Teldesign, Dumbar developed into the enfant terrible of graphic Netherlands with a new form of graphic design. He said about this at the time:
We are deliberately creating a schizophrenic image of ourselves; a design polarization in the positive sense of the word. One extreme and the other (...), strict typography-and-illustration versus avant-garde. It turns out that these two trends stimulate each other enormously.[8]
Dumbar's idiosyncratic new path led to such a disagreement with Jan Lucassen in 1976 that Dumbar left Tel Design and set up his own agency, Studio Dumbar, in his garden house.
Dutch Design
In the early nineties there was a growing interest abroad in Dutch design, which was labelled as Dutch Design. In 1992 in New York the Cooper Union art academy held an exhibition entitled Graphic Design and Typography in the Netherlands: a View of Recent Work. Gert Dumbar (1992) stated about this interest at the time:
Americans want to make stable myths of phenomena that are still in full swing, such as Dutch design. But our attitude is much smarter than the American talent for making myths. Eventually we Dutch will escape the myth.
While Dutch Design had become a fashion in America, Dumbar believes that its development in the Netherlands would pass it by.