Naomi Games & Brian Webb
Abram Games
DESIGN
Antique Collectors’ Club
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Design Abram Games
‘A child learns by making mistakes, I like to make my own. There is no learning without mistakes, and mature men are those who make them, recognise them and learn from them. I am a designer who has always worked entirely alone in graphic design. I enjoy the craftsmanship.’ In the year the First World War began, five future friends – Tom Eckersley, F H K Henrion, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Paul Rand and Abram Games – were born. 1914 was to be a good vintage for poster designers. As he entered life to the sound of the ‘Bow bells’, Abram Games considered himself a ‘true’ cockney. He belonged to a close Jewish family, and what his Eastern European émigré parents lacked financially, they made up for in encouragement. His father, Joseph, would instil in his three children the Hebrew proverb, ‘Tov shem tov mi shemen tov’ (‘A good name is better than good oil’). Abram was proud of his name and the inheritance of a short, left, ‘Games thumb’, which was, he was constantly reminded, a sign of stubbornness and determination. As a young schoolboy, Games would learn about studio life from Joseph, who worked assiduously as a photographer in the East End of London. His mother, Sarah, ambitious, and sometimes frustrated at living above the ‘shop’, was prone to chanting ‘the Gameses make poor businessmen’. At the age of eleven, Abram’s school report stated that his drawing skills were weak, but he already knew that he was going to be an artist, perhaps even a poster designer, and nothing was going to deter him. When later interviewed by the Society of Industrial Artists in 1960, he remarked, ‘I am not an artist. I am a graphic thinker. I am bad at drawing. What I lack in natural talent, I make up for in solid hard work; I have to work twice as hard as the next man does, I always have done. I decided right at the beginning that even if I couldn’t draw, I could think and see. If you can see, if
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Design – Abram Games
you can observe, you can comment. Being “bad at drawing” merely means more of a struggle, harder slogging, and a fuller waste-paper basket. I find it very difficult.’ However, he considered a difficulty as an opportunity. It was the challenge that most interested him. After two disillusioned terms spent at St Martin’s School of Art, which his parents paid for as he had failed to win a scholarship, Games abandoned the idea of any further formal art training and decided to learn as he earned. He resolved to be disciplined and tough on himself, realising early on that being skilled at drawing would be his key to success. He attended life drawing classes, and visited the Royal College of Surgeons to perfect his knowledge of anatomy. Evidence of this fascination is prevalent throughout his work and the prolific employment of the face or hands in both the abstract and representational to convey emotions and gestures contributed to the success of his designs. Meanwhile, Joseph taught his apprentice son the value of studio experience and technique. He patiently demonstrated how to retouch and add colour to monochrome photographs using an airbrush. When his father gave him one on his fourteenth birthday, the gift would have a profound effect on Abram’s style of design and his future career. He was developing extraordinary manual skill, using the airbrush to create subtlety of effect and mood. ‘It’s like a third hand to him,’ a colleague noted. ‘He uses it like a pencil,’ David Gentleman observed, and Henrion joked that he was born with one in his mouth. In 1984, Abram prophesied the arrival of a computer-controlled airbrush. Saving up to buy each new tool of his trade, he made a two-tier drawing instrument case from two riveted metal pencil boxes and therewith diligently cared for his ruling pens, compasses, dividers, rolling parallel rulers, brushes and airbrushes, which he treasured all his life. When he bought himself an easel for thirty shillings, he added a device to make the board swivel so that he could work at any desired angle. He acquired the habit of always having an impeccably ordered studio, advising that: ‘A tidy workplace makes for a tidy mind.’ During the 1930s, Games reflected on each new poster that appeared on the street hoardings and in railway stations. New ones were displayed every two or three weeks and were discussed by the public.
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Design – Abram Games
London County Council, 1935, poster competition entry to encourage evening class attendance. Games, himself an evening class student at St Martin’s School of Art, won the first prize of twenty guineas.
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Design – Abram Games
Unpublished poster, 1935–6. Other portfolio projects for Truman’s beers, airmail letters, Danish eggs, Odol toothpaste and the evening classes poster (see page 7) were featured in Art and Industry, 1937.
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Design – Abram Games
In 1948, Games won a limited entry competition to design a symbol for the 1951 Festival of Britain. He also designed the official Festival Guide cover, which was printed in seven different colourways for other Festival exhibitions in the United Kingdom.
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London Olympic Games postage stamp, 1948
Festival of Britain postage stamp, 1951
(Rejected) Coronation postage stamp, 1953
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Monument, 1970, opposite, and Horseguard, 1963, above left, posters for London Transport. Carfree, Carefree, 1967, above right, was commissioned by the British Bus and Coach Council.
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Pritchard Services Group plc, 1973
Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds (GKN plc), 1968
Greater London Association for the Disabled, 1968
British Aluminium, 1961
Anglo-Jewish Tercentenary, 1954
Queen’s Award to Industry, 1965
World Jewish Congress, 1984
Advance Laundries Ltd, 1955
European Diabetes Union, 1990
Booth International Ltd, 1973
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SHEMOT: the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain, 1993
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Postage stamp designs for the Royal Mail, commemorating the death of Winston Churchill, 1965. Games’s designs, based on Yousuf Karsh’s 1941 photograph appearing from Churchill’s famous ‘V for Victory’, were rejected in favour of David Gentleman’s proposals using the same photograph.
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Judaism was central to Abram Games’s life. At first glance this prayer book print for the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain, 1977, is illegible, but it is meant to be. Hold the page flat at eye level to read the text from the Bible: Jeremiah 29:12–14.
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Design – Abram Games
Four of eleven New Year cover designs from 1965 to 1991 for the Jewish Chronicle, which held an annual cover design competition after 1992
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