Games, Abram (1914–1996)

Abstract

Abram Games belonged to the golden age of British graphic design and as a freelance commercial artist he produced posters for clients including Shell, London Transport, BEA, Guinness, the Royal Shakespeare Company, London Zoo, the Metropolitan Police, The Times, and The Financial Times. His career spanned six decades and saw commercial art develop into the discipline of graphic design. His career is a collection of work done by a man of tireless invention and is a major contribution to British modernism. The force of his design came partly from the Bauhaus with its geometric directness, but Games also learned from a completely different strand of modern art, surrealism, when he fused different objects. Games secured his reputation through a series of stunning wartime propaganda posters for the War Office, of which, Join the ATS (1941) and Your Talk May Kill Your Comrades (1942) are the most famous.