Abram Games and John Piper: Giants of British design

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Veronica Davies reviews two books that explore the creation of ‘a particularly British visual culture’ in the 20th century

Two recent volumes from the Antique Collectors’ Club offer their readers an excellent insight into the work of two key designers from the mid-20th century, Abram Games and John Piper.  Both, in their distinctive ways, had a significant impact on British design during their long working lives.

Abram Games (1914–96) was a poster designer whose output spanned six decades, and who is especially renowned for his public information posters from the Second World War (1939–45) and his design work for the Festival of Britain  in 1951. Games’ daughter, Naomi Games, tells the story of how as a young man from a Jewish family in the East End of London, this ‘graphic thinker’, who considered himself ‘bad at drawing’, abandoned formal art training in favour of learning from his photographer father the skills with an airbrush that were to stand him in such good stead later on. 

It took some years for his designs – considered ‘ten years ahead of the public’ in the mid-1930s – to be recognized by forward-thinking publicity staff at Britain’s General Post Office and Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, and he was establishing a freelance career when war broke out.  Serving in the Infantry, Games was diverted in 1941 to poster design  duties for government departments, producing images that have since become icons of the period, such as the Join the ATS ‘blonde bombshell’, Grow Your Own Food and Your Britain: Fight for it Now.  His post-war work included designing the symbol for the Festival of Britain, and a wide variety of advertising posters and logos, ranging from Guinness to the Financial Times, as well as for many public bodies such as London Transport, the BBC and the Royal Shakespeare Company.  Readers may be interested to know that the UK’s National Army Museum has recently acquired from Naomi Games a collection of signed originals of some of her father’s wartime posters, and these can be seen on the museum’s website.

John Piper (1903–92) was a key figure in British modern art from the 1930s onwards. Throughout his long career, Piper contributed design work of many kinds that helped define and shape a particularly British visual culture.  This ranged across a broad spectrum of commissions: book illustration, textile and tapestry designs, ceramics, theatre sets and even firework displays where, according to Peyton Skipwith, ‘Piper the polymath painter and designer finally achieved a kind of apotheosis’.  Fascinated by the mediaeval stained glass  in the English country churches he had visited since his youth, Piper also designed over 60 stained glass windows, including the Baptistery Window in Coventry Cathedral, ‘the greatest of all Piper’s windows’.

The look and feel of the two book covers evoke the standards of the period in which Games and Piper were in their prime, using as motifs Games’ 1951 Festival of Britain logo and Piper’s 1954 illustration for Edwin Muir’s poem Prometheus.  These are in all ways books that demonstrate a very high quality of production and design themselves, and in this way, too, do full justice to these well-chosen selections of the work of these two important figures in British design.

Abram Games Design by Naomi Games and Brian Webb is published by Antique Collectors’ Club, 2013. 96 pp. fully illustrated, £12.50. ISBN 978-1-85149-677-8

John Piper Design by Brian Webb and Peyton Skipwith is published by Antique Collectors’ Club, 2013. 96 pp. 100 colour & 20 mono Illus, £12.50, hbk. ISBN978-1-85149-728-7