Peter J Wright after Abram Games (1914 – 1996)
Festival of Britain Logo (1951)
Gouache
21 x 13 cm
A gouache painting of Abram Games’ fantastic Art Deco Modern design for the logo advertising the Festival of Britain. Games’ design, called the Festival Star, includes a modernist Britannia in profile with bunting below, all set on the four points of the compass and in the Union Jack colours of red, white, and blue. Games was one of twelve artists invited to submit designs to the Arts Council and the Council of Industrial Design in 1948.
The Festival of Britain was a national exhibition and fair that reached millions of visitors throughout the United Kingdom in the summer of 1951. It was devised as a celebration of a hundred years since the Great Exhibition of 1851, but focused entirely on Britain and its achievements rather than adopting the international outlook of the Great Exhibition. The Festival’s purpose was to highlight and celebrate how far Britain had come in the wake of the Second World War’s devastation.
Abram Games OBE RDI was a celebrated British graphic artist. His parents were Eastern European Jews and changed their family name from Gamse to Games after moving to Britain. Games studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London but left after two terms; aged 21, he won a poster competition for the London County Council and then began to work as a freelance poster designer. In 1937 the journal Art and Industry featured him in an article and this resulted inseveral high-profile graphic design commissions from the General Post Office, London Transport, Royal Dutch Shell, and more. He also designed stamps for the Israeli Post Office, covers for The Jewish Chronicle and synagogue prayer book prints, and designed several posters promoting Jewish organisations and initiatives.
Condition: generally very good.
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