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| Abram Games, WWII-era poster |
Without hesitation, one of the finest designers in modern history was British graphic designer
Abram Games (1914-1996). Shown here are two rather similar but equally excellent
posters he made during World War II, both of them appealing to the wartime public to be self-sufficient. As is characteristic of many of his posters, they are astonishing visual puns. In an essay in his book,
Topics of Our Times (London: Phaidon, 1991), British art historian
E.H. Gombrich acknowledged that Games was indebted to the "deliberate ambiguities and illogicalities" of the work of such
Surrealists as Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. But many of those works, he went on to say—
were pointless… [and] were aimed at defying the canons of reason to shake our complacency. In the art of Abram Games the very puzzlement caused by such arresting images is given an added purpose. We attend because we are momentarily baffled, and thus we are ready to seek for the message, which we will remember all the better for having discovered it in such a flash of recognition.
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| Abram Games, WWII-era poster |
