Abram Games: Maximum Meaning From Minimum Means
Until January 13; Glasgow School of Art

Abram Games fought the Second World War armed only with his trusty airbrush. Joining up in 1941, the young Londoner was swiftly made Official War Office Poster Designer – just because, he would often joke, his was the first name to appear alphabetically in the army roll as a poster artist.

Over the next 50 years, Games’s career flourished, his posters collected by museums across the world. Now a touring exhibition from London’s Design Museum brings a collection of Games’s best designs to Glasgow School of Art.

Despite the European revolution in poster art during the interwar years, strongly linked to Constructivism in the USSR and to bauhaus and Dada in Germany, the artform in Britain, with a few exceptions, was still relatively uninspired. Photomontage had found its way into the medium, but whether the figures were photographed or lavishly painted, they tended to remain predictably illustrative.

Abram Games was one of a generation of younger artists who aimed to revolutionise the poster. Learning from the Soviets and the bauhaus designers, he would make the lettering an inextricable part of the image, dispensing with the need for screeds of explanatory text. Inspired by the Surrealists, he would become famous for combining disparate objects to create a striking new pictorial logic.

In 1942, for example, Games combined a spade with a ship, in a ploughed field which doubled up as a rippling ocean. The point of the poster? Use Spades Not Ships: Grow Your Own Food. The design is elegant and conveys everything you need to know in one concise statement. It’s a far cry from the kind of poster people were used to, of robust bands of smiling women hard at work in the fields.

“Maximum meaning from minimum means” was Games’s motto, and in pursuit of this he would always work out his designs at the size of a postage stamp. Posters looked small from a distance, he argued, so his compositions were bold and uncluttered. Perhaps the most extreme example is the Guinness poster of 1956, where a simple letter G contains a smiley face and a pint.

His Guinness poster was one of Games’s own favourites, along with another very simple but effective image, Freedom From Hunger, in which a sheaf of wheat suggests the rib-cage of an emaciated child. With a few short strokes of the brush, Games brought together the problem and the solution in one high-impact symbol.

It’s hard to appreciate, from today’s perspective, the revolutionary nature of these designs, perhaps because there’s so much in them that forms the foundations of 21st century advertising techniques. The now very dated look of the posters is partly due to Games’s devotion to his airbrush, a tool with which he was so adept that he occasionally signed his chequebook with it.

Games declined to incorporate photographs, preferring to retain total control over the images by creating them himself. His famous “blonde bombshell” recruitment poster used the airbrush to great effect to give his pouting femme fatale a soft-focus air of modernity. The government was not so impressed, ordering the replacement of the poster with one more likely to attract the “right sort” of woman into the army.

For me, poster art has never surpassed the revolutionary excitement of the interwar years in Europe, and for all his innovations, Games could never match up. But there is one very different thing in the show which takes you by surprise: the Cona coffee-maker. Having complained about its clumsy 19th century design, Games was invited to reshape the machine. His version, still in production today, is sleek, elegant, and seductively simple.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 18.12.05