23 Facts About Abram Games

Abram Games's work is recognised for its "striking colour, bold graphic ideas, and beautifully integrated typography".

Abram Games left Hackney Downs School at the age of 16 and, in 1930, went to Saint Martin's School of Art in London.

Disillusioned by the teaching at Saint Martin's and worried about the expense of studying there, Abram Games left after two terms.

However, Abram Games was determined to establish himself as a poster artist so while working as a "studio boy" for the commercial design firm Askew-Young in London between 1932 and 1936, he attended night classes in life drawing.

Abram Games was fired from this position due to his jumping over four chairs as a prank.

At the start of World War Two, Abram Games was conscripted into the British Army.

Abram Games served until 1941 when he was approached by the Public Relations Department of the War Office who were looking for a graphic designer to produce a recruitment poster for the Royal Armoured Corps.

Abram Games was allowed a great deal of artistic freedom which enabled him to produce many striking images, often with surrealist elements.

Abram Games had wanted to challenge the rather drab image of the ATS but the authorities feared that the glamorous image he had produced would encourage young women to join the ATS for the "wrong reasons" and the poster was quickly withdrawn.

The design Abram Games replaced it with was criticised by Winston Churchill as being too "Soviet".

Abram Games used the photographic techniques he had learnt from his father in that and other posters such as He Talked.

Later in the War, Churchill ordered a poster Abram Games had produced to be taken off the wall of the Poster Design in Wartime Britain exhibition at Harrods in 1943.

In 1946, Abram Games resumed his freelance practice and worked for clients such as Royal Dutch Shell, the Financial Times, Guinness, British Airways, London Transport and El Al.

Abram Games designed stamps for Britain, Ireland, Israel, Jersey and Portugal.

Between 1946 and 1953, Abram Games was a visiting lecturer in graphic design at London's Royal College of Art and in 1958, was awarded the OBE for services to graphic design.

Abram Games designed the tile motif of a swan on the Victoria line platforms at Stockwell tube station in the late 1960s.

Abram Games had been among the first in Britain to see evidence of the atrocities committed at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, when photographs taken there by British troops arrived at the War Office in 1945.

Abram Games, who was Jewish, spent some time in Israel in the 1950s where, among other activities, he designed stamps for the Israeli Post Office, including for the 1953 Conquest of the Desert exhibition and taught a course in postage-stamp design.

Abram Games designed covers for The Jewish Chronicle and prayer book prints for the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain.

In 1960, Abram Games designed the poster known as Freedom from Hunger for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Purportedly, if a client rejected a proposed design, Abram Games would resign and suggest that the client commission someone else.

In October 1945, Abram Games married Marianne Salfeld, the daughter of German orthodox Jewish emigres, and initially lived with her father in Surbiton, Surrey.

Marianne died in 1988; Abram Games died in London on 27 August 1996.