
Hans Schleger [also known as Zéró] was born in Hans Leo Degenhard Schlesinger in Kempen, Prussia, Germany [now Kepno, Poland] on 29 December 1898 [he assumed the surname Schleger in 1919]. About 1904 he moved with his family to Berlin. After serving in the German Army from 1916 to 1918, he studied painting and drawing at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin from 1918 to 1921. From 1921 to 1924 he was publicity manager and set designer for a film company run by John Hagenbeck (1866-1940) in Berlin. He moved to the USA in 1924 and settled in New York, where he worked as a magazine paste-up artist and freelance advertising designer. Within two years of his arrival, Schleger had his own studio at 270 Madison Avenue which he ran under the name of Zéró.
One of his earliest commissions following his move to England was the redesign of the London Transport request bus-stop sign, and between 1938 and 1940, he was responsible for the design of the London Transport Underground map. He also received commissions to design posters for Shell and a series of advertisements for the corset brand Charnaux.
During World War Two Schleger designed posters for British government departments including for the Ministry of Food's Dig for Victory campaign.
During the second half of the 1940s, Schleger became involved in higher education and was guest lecturer at Chelsea Polytechnic, Central St Martins, Royal College of Art, the Regional College of Art, Manchester, and the Institute of Design in Chicago where he was a Visiting Professor for a year.
Following the war he worked as a consultant for the advertising agency Mather & Crowther before founding his own company, Hans Schleger & Associates, in 1953. He maintained his links with Mather & Crowther, a working relationship that lasted until 1963. Among clients of Hans Schleger & Associates were Mac Fisheries, Associated Electrical Industries, Hudnot cosmetics, Fisons, Finmar Furniture, British Rail, British Sugar Corporation, ICI, John Lewis Partnership, Hutchinsons, Shell-Mex & BP, Penguin Books, the Design Centre, Glenfiddich distillery, British Coal and Grant's Scotch Whisky. Schleger also designed the graphics for the Edinburgh Festival.
Hans Schleger was a pioneer and modernist in the advertising and graphic arts in corporate design. To him the design solution was partly the result of researching and analysing a brief with all its human and economic details, and partly his artistic intuition.
He was elected a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) in 1952 and participated in 'Art et Publicite dans le Monde', their first international exhibition held at the Pavillon de Marsan in the Louvre in Paris 24 March-8 May 1955. He was also a Fellow of the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers (FSIAD) and in 1959 he was made a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI) by the Royal Society of Arts.
Schleger's first marriage ended in divorce in 1943. In 1956 he married Patricia Marigold (Pat) Maycock (1928-2015). She had trained at Chelsea School of Art and had joined Schleger’s studio in 1949. They subsequently formed creative partnership and she played a vital role in the development of Hans Schleger Associates over two decades.
Schleger died at his home, 15 The Boltons, London on 18 September 1976.
He was one of a number of artists whose worked featured in the exhibition 'Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain c. 1933-45' at the Ben Uri Gallery in London in 2009. Hans Schleger's papers have been deposited at the V&A Archive of Art and Design in London.
Text source: Art History Research net (AHR net)
Text source: Art History Research net (AHR net)