Abram Games

Abram Games: Join the ATS (1941) - the poster was nicknamed "Blonde Bombshell"

Jersey Tourism Promotion (1950s)

Abram Games (Abraham Gamse) (born July 29, 1914 in Whitechapel , London ; died August 27, 1996 in London) was a British graphic designer .

Life

Joseph Gamse and Sarah Gamse were Eastern European Jews. They had emigrated to England and lived in the East End of London . The family Anglicized the family name in 1926. Abram (Abraham), the second of three children, attended the Comprehensive School in Hackney and then tried to get a scholarship to an art school. He attended two terms at Saint Martin's School of Art , relatively unsuccessfully and without a degree . In addition, he worked as a factotum in a design studio and in his father's photo business. In 1935 he won a London City Council award for a poster . From 1936 he worked as a freelancer and received his first assignments from the London Passenger Transport Board and Shell . He was politically active on the left. In 1938 he designed a poster for a call for donations for the republican victims of the Spanish Civil War .

After the outbreak of war in 1939 he was drafted as a simple soldier. In 1940 Jack Beddington , who had been Shell's public relations manager and now headed the film division of the British Information Department , brought him to the department for which Games created over a hundred posters during the war as a propaganda poster artist.

His artistic guideline at work was maximum meaning, minimum means . A maximum of meaning should be created with a minimum of design tools. His work is associated with the Bauhaus , constructivism and borrowings from surrealism . His propaganda posters advertising women for military service in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) became particularly well known . One of the posters in this series - Games had for one employee, 19-year-old Doreen Murphy, used as a model - was, however, set a feminist by one of the conservative deputies Thelma Cazalet-Keir excited the House debate from the War Office withdrawn from circulation. The poster was nicknamed "Blonde Bombshell" ( English for 'blond poison') and was considered too frivolous. Games' poster series Your Britain was rejected by Winston Churchill because of socialist content in which British workers were given hope for a more social post-war era.

After the war, Games worked as a freelancer into old age. He has designed posters and logos for companies such as the Financial Times , BBC , British Airways , Guinness and El Al . In 1951 he created the Festival of Britain emblem , which was also used for a postage stamp. In the 1950s, Games belonged to the generation of artists and designers who freed advertising from its text load and reduced it to a simple picture message. Games are producing stamps for the Royal Mail and for the Post in Jersey, Ireland, Israel and Portugal. He created book covers and illustrations for Penguin Books in 1956, but the publisher soon abandoned this "artistic experiment". For the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations , he designed in the sixties, a series of posters Freedom from Hunger . He was also involved with his work for the charity World Jewish Relief and volunteered in the London community of Reform Judaism . For them he designed Bible covers and covers of the newspaper The Jewish Chronicle .

From 1946 to 1953 Games held a teaching position at the Royal College of Art , one of his students was David Gentleman . In 1958 he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and in 1959 Royal Designer for Industry (RDI).

Games had been married to the textile designer Marianne Salfeld since October 1945, daughter of the chemist Ludwig Salfeld, who had emigrated to Paris in 1934 and found a job in London with Helena Rubinstein in 1935 . She was a granddaughter of the Mainz rabbi Siegmund Salfeld . Games and Salfeld had three children: Daniel (* 1946), Sophie (* 1948) and Naomi (* 1951). Naomi Games organizes the viewing, exhibition and publication of his works. The National Army Museum acquired a collection of signed mint condition posters from her in 2013 .

• Selection of public domain posters
• 

  Soldier aid

• 

  Counterintelligence

• 

  recruitment

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  Counterintelligence

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  blood donation

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  Counterintelligence

Writings and exhibitions (selection)

• Over my shoulder . Studio Books, London 1960.
• The poster in modern advertising. In: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. 1962, pp. 323-332.
• Naomi Games (Ed.): Poster journeys: Abram Games and London Transport. Capital Transport Pub. in association with the London Transport Museum , Harrow, Hampshire 2008.
• A. Games: 60 years of design . Howard Gardens Gallery, Wales 1990.
• Naomi Games, Catherine Moriarty, June Rose: Abram Games, Maximum Meaning, Minimum Means. Lund Humphries, Aldershot 2003.
• Designing the 20th Century: Life and Work of Abram Games. Jewish Museum London , 2014

literature

• Alan Livingston, Isabella Livingston: Games, Abram. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . On-line
• Ernst H. Gombrich : Topics of our time: twentieth century issues in learning and in art . Univ. of Calif. Press, Berkeley 1991
• Walter Amstutz: Who's Who in Graphic Art . Amstutz u. Herdeg, Zurich 1962.

Web links

Commons : Abram Games  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Abram Games in the WorldCat bibliographic database
• Abram Games , website

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c d} Rowan Moore: Abram Games, the poster boy with principles. In: The Observer . 23rd August 2014.
2. ^ Games, Abram , at 20th century london
3. ↑ Laura Freeman: Designer who taught us to keep it simple , Standpoint Magazine, September 2014.
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} Laura Freeman: Designer who taught us to keep it simple. In: Standpoint . September 2014.
5. ↑ Dictionary entry
6. ↑ ^{a b} Maeve Kennedy: Poster girl of ATS joins National Army Museum. In: The Guardian . 23rd August 2013.
7. ^ Edwin Heathcote : Designs for the future. In: Financial Times . September 13, 2014, p. 20.
8. ^ Naomi Games: Abram Games and Penguin Books . Penguin Collectors Society
9. ^ The Powder and the Glory , film
10. ↑ Erich Salfeld ( Memento of the original from October 21, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Claims Resolution Tribunal (CRT) , 2005.