Games in posters

5:39pm Wednesday 20th August 2008

TO coincide with the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the build up to London 2012, the V&A Museum of Childhood’s summer exhibition, A Century of Olympic Posters is the first to bring together a large range of Olympic Games posters from the 1900 Paris Games to the present day.

Drawn mainly from the V&A’s collection of prints and posters, the exhibition will display more than 100 Olympic posters, including works by leading artists such as David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Andy Warhol and Victor Vasarely.

As a four-yearly design challenge the posters provide fascinating snapshots of the changing artistic, political and social contexts in which they were created.

The exhibition explores how the posters were used to convey messages to an international audience about the look and feel of individual Games through eye-catching and memorable imagery.

For the 1948 Games, as war-torn London looked towards a brighter future, the poster design projected a powerful image of the city combining an image of the marble statue of ‘Discobolus’ (evoking the ancient Games) with a view of the Houses of Parliament.

Other highlights on display include the Op Art poster for the 1968 Games in Mexico City which cleverly captures both the mood and artistic style of the 1960s as well as expressing the pattern-making imagery of pre-Hispanic Mexican cultures; and The Start of the Sprinters’ Dash poster by Yusaku Kamekura for Tokyo 1964, which was the first to use the medium of photography to capture the drama of modern day sportsmen in competition. In addition to the posters will be examples of the original programmes of events, a ticket from the Paris 1900 Games and an Olympic torch from London 1948.

An extra display at the Museum of Childhood will be a selection of official Olympic mascots dating from the 1960s to the present day.

The exhibition runs at the Museum of Childhood Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9PA until September 7. Tel: 020 8983 5200.

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