A dying art - Urdu calligraphy in Hyderabad’s Chatta Bazaar

“Please wait here and I will be back soon,” said Abdul Khaleel, one of the last Urdu calligraphers of Hyderabad’s Chatta Bazaar. I had just handed him a large format copy of the photograph I'd taken two days earlier. I’d noticed him as I passed through a narrow, traffic blocked alley, as he sat anticipating customers. He agreed to be photographed and we waited patiently for a gap in the traffic before I could get the shot.   

Chatta (sometimes written as “Katta" ) Bazaar is the home of Khattati, or Urdu calligraphy. It is a dying art, thought to have been brought to Hyderabad by the Qutb Shahi dynasty, who ruled from 1518 to 1687, and were responsible for much of the city’s built heritage. The practitioners of the art were known as Khattats or Kaatibs, the words from which this quarter of the city draws its name.

I had come to the bazaar to see traditional Urdu calligraphers but found that very few still worked by hand. After the computerisation of Urdu text in the 1990s, demand for hand-written work decreased, with customers opting instead for digital prints. This has resulted in many calligraphers losing their business or having to use their skills elsewhere. Abdul’s experience is an example of this. He previously worked for the Siasat Daily, an Urdu newspaper. Before computerisation, the blocks used to print the newspaper had been made from handwritten text, but technological advances meant that Abdul and many others were no longer needed and had to find other ways to make a living. This problem is not peculiar to Hyderabad as according to a 2023 article in New Lines Magazine, Delhi’s Urdu bazaar only had one working calligrapher.

“I have fewer customers these days and young people don’t want to learn the skills."

“I have been working in my shop for about 40 years now,” said Abdul, “Customers come on special occasions, particularly weddings. I charge 200-300 rupees (about £2-3) for a handwritten invitation and the customers then take it to one of the nearby printing presses for copying. There are many such shops in the bazaar. Sometimes Urdu schools and madrassas (Islamic religious education institutions) also come to me.” He was not optimistic about the future of his craft. He said, “I have fewer customers these days and young people do not want to learn the skills." He explained that there are over 200 fonts in Urdu calligraphy, and that it can take years to learn them all.

I wanted to give him a copy of the photograph and a couple of days later, I returned to the bazar to look for him. The shutters were up, but he was nowhere to be seen. Luckily, his mobile number is displayed in the shop and my guide and interpreter, Madhu, called him to tell him we were there. A few minutes later, Abdul appeared, “I was at the afternoon prayer,” he said. I handed him the photograph and after studying it for a few seconds, he touched his heart and thanked me. “I’ve been photographed before,” he said, “but they don’t usually bring a picture back.”

Abdul insisted we accompany him to a small tea shop where he ordered masala chai for the three of us. The other customers tucked into fried snacks and mutton dishes, occasionally looking over at us, perhaps wondering what we were doing in a small neighbourhood eating place. After a few minutes, Abdul pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and said, “Write your full name in English.” I did as he asked and returned the paper to him. He set off in the direction of his shop,  reappeared a short time later, and handed me another piece of paper with my name beautifully transcribed in Urdu letters.

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Picture Post 72 - Beautiful Watercolours From Myanmar

Sai Pyae Sone Aye is one of Myanmar's leading watercolourists. Born in Hkamti in the country's Sagaing region, he began painting at a very young age, receiving many prizes for his work. His original ambition was to be a cartoonist but over time he became interested in watercolours and began studying the format in 2014. 

His work includes both rural and urban landscapes of his stunningly beautiful but troubled country, with a number of recurring themes. These include the river Ayeyarwady, the iconic Shwedagon and Sule pagodas in Yangon and street scenes featuring the crumbling red brick buildings of the colonial period. More recently he has begun to produce portraits. Regular readers will know that I have a special affection for Myanmar and Sai's paintings perfectly capture many of the things I love about the place and I must admit to being the proud owner of two of his works. Sai identifies Khin Maung Than and Myint Naing as sources of inspiration for his work. 

Than is a particularly interesting character. He was born in Wetlet, Shwebo in 1942 into a family with artistic talents - his father was a goldsmith. He studied at Myoma School until grade seven before going on to the Mandalay Fine Arts School in the 1950's. He initially worked in commercial arts, producing film posters and graphic items and illustrating a number of novels and other books for high profile authors. He moved to a more fine arts approach in the 1990's and his work has been exhibited overseas a number of times.

Sai has had significant success both in Myanmar and internationally. His works have been exhibited in prestigious hotels in Yangon as well as in private galleries in the city. In 2019 he was selected to represent Myanmar at the International Triennial Watercolour and Spirit exhibition in Varna, Bulgaria. His works are available for sale. Enquiries should be directed to him through his website. 

All of the  pictures featured in this post are Sai's work and are currently available for sale at time of writing.

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The Ahuja Family And Early Burmese Photography.

From 1824 to 1937, Burma (today's Myanmar) was ruled as part of British India. It was then governed as a separate entity until independence in 1948. During the colonial period, many Indians came to live, work and establish businesses in the country. It is estimated that there are over 900,000 people of Indian ethnicity living in Myanmar today, many of them the descendants of those who came in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Ahuja family arrived in Rangoon (now Yangon) in 1885 when D.A. Ahuja acquired the Kundandass and Co. photographic studio. There is a division of opinion about where the family came from. In his excellent book, Burmese Photographers, Lukas Birk suggests they came from Shikapur, Sindh in what is now Pakistan but at least one other source refers to them as Punjabis. 

1901 was an important year for the business. In addition to changing its name to the D.A. Ahuja Studio, our man published a guide to "Photography in Burmese for Amateur Photographers" and his nephew Tickamdas Naraindas Ahuja (T.N.) joined him from India. The studio thrived, attracting customers from the British community as well as from local families who came to be photographed or to buy cameras and photographic paper imported from India. The success of the business is demonstrated through the studio being located on the first floor of a building at 47 Sule Pagoda Road, in the heart of downtown Yangon. There is anecdotal evidence of the business surviving there until the 1960's.

Around 1906, D.A. acquired a number of pictures taken by German photographer Philip Adolphe Klier. The collection included architectural and highly stylised ethnographic pictures taken in different parts of Burma. Ahuja began publishing the pictures as postcards but there seems to have been some problem about how he acquired these works and in 1907, Klier took successful legal action against him. Losing the legal battle was only a temporary setback as in 1909 Ahuja purchased the archive of Italian photographer Felice Beato and also became the legal owner of Watts and Skeen, a studio established by Frederick Skeen in 1887. The Skeen family also had a photographic business in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Beato's archive included landscape works, stylised portraits and also war photography from Japan, China and the Middle East. Klier died in 1911 and from 1914, Ahuja resumed producing some of his pictures as postcards. He was to publish 600 cards over the next 20 years, some of which can be found at card sales or occasionally on eBay. The cards were sent to Germany to be chromo-lithographed, ensuring the best quality finishes.

The postcards cover a wide range of subjects. There are several studio shots of elegant women, slightly stiff looking family groups, important monuments, snake charmers and dancers. There is also at least one card showing prisoners in Rangoon jail queueing to collect their food which whilst fascinating is an unusual image to send to the family back home.

D.A.'s nephew, T.N. opened his own studio in 1916 with a shop at 86 Phayre Street (now Pansodan Road) where he operated as an agent for Kodak products. There is some evidence that he also served as magistrate. Business was interrupted in 1942 when the family fled before the arrival of the Japanese but they quickly returned to reopen the studio at the end of the war. In 1948 T.N.'s son, R.A. Ahuja opened another studio at 386 Dalhousie Road (now Maha Bandoola Road). The store became the sole agent in Burma for the sale of Gevaert products and operated until 2007. R.A. the last remaining member of the Ahuja family in Burma died in 2014, bringing almost 130 years of their presence in the country to an end. The date of D.A.'s death is unknown.

The images included in this post are from reprints of the cards I purchased from the Yangon Heritage Trust at 22-24 Pansodan Road in 2017. The Trust is a great source of information on Yangon's built heritage. As well as selling books, maps and postcards, it stages occasional exhibitions and guided walks.  I have a habit of buying postcards on my travels and then putting them "somewhere safe" when I get home. During the lockdown I have been sorting through my collection and rediscovered my Ahuja cards. I also turned back to the already mentioned  excellent book by Lukas Birk which has a short section on the Ahujas.  Birk is an accomplished traveller and photographer whose projects have included research into the now almost disappeared box cameras of Kabul. 

D.N. Ahuja also produced postcards featuring images from India, some of which may have been his won work. You can see some of them on the Paper Jewels website.

It is not possible to confirm which of the images featured in this post are the work of the Ahuja family or are from other photographer's archives.

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You can see more pictures from Myanmar here.

Street art and selfies - Hong Kong Stories 1.

Graffiti was once considered to be vandalism. Re-invented as street art, this now respectable genre has brought international recognition for its leading practitioners and cities such as London, Paris and New York now commission work for their streets. Hong Kong also makes use of high quality street art to revitalise neighbourhoods and to attract visitors. This includes a specific programme known as HK Walls that promotes and encourages locally based artists and brings their work to new and wider audiences.

Hong Kong's best known street art is located on the corner of Graham and Hollywood roads and was commissioned by the lifestyle store, GOD (Goods of Desire). Locally based artist Alex Croft was responsible for the piece which represents the Walled City, a huge, informal housing structure that was once home to 33,000 people, over 1,000 businesses and covered 6.4 acres. Demolished in 1994, it was immortalised in the photographers Ian Lambot and Greg Girard's book, City of Darkness. The Walled City was perhaps the most well known example of the tong lau - tenement buildings, usually with commercial use at ground floor level and residential units above. An official tong lau included shared bathrooms and kitchens with rent, electricity and water charges paid on a monthly basis. Once widespread, many of these structures were demolished in the 1960's making way for more luxurious, private developments. Others collapsed due to poor construction and or maintenance, including a fifty years old five story tong lau that collapsed in 2010 killing four people. Today only a handful of these buildings remain.

But back to the street art. I recently visited Graham Street on a weekday morning and found dozens of tourists and locals taking selfies and then immediately posting them to social media. There were also small groups of young women, elegantly dressed taking turns to pose for a series of shots, sharing hats and other accessories and taking it in turns to photograph each other. This is followed by much checking and discussion of the shots before choosing which ones to share on social media.They had clearly spent time preparing for this as they went through a series of poses that would fit the pages of a fashion magazine. The lives of these young women and the tourists could not be more different to those of the former inhabitants of the Walled City and I wondered how many of them understand the significance of the work and what it relates to.

Elegant as these women were, my favourite selfie-takers were a small family group consisting of two parents and two little boys. The father held a selfie stick as they posed for a group photo. Mum smiled. Dad looked serious - trying to make sure they had a good picture. The older boy raised a hand of greeting at the camera whilst the younger one seemed a little agitated, perhaps bored and ready to move on. I had noticed the boys a few minutes earlier when their parents positioned them against the wall for another picture. Two young people stood a step away from them, one engrossed with the art the other ready to leave having taken her selfie, her sole purpose for being there. Perhaps art, like  most things, means different things to different people.

Picture Post 45 - A drawing by Josef Budko

I bought this drawing of a young Maghrebi Jew in one of my favourite Jerusalem shops - Trionfo in Dorot Rishonim that runs off the very busy Ben Yehuda pedestrian street. I have found many little treasures there over the years including books, postcards and posters, many of them related to the Bezalel School of Art and its golden era in the first few decades of the twentieth century. This simple pencil drawing on tissue paper is my latest acquisition, its delicate pencil lines capturing beautifully the expression of a child in contemplation.

Budko was born in Plonsk, Poland in 1888 and studied at the Vilnius School of Art (now in Lithuania), before moving on to Berlin in 1909. In the following year he began to study engraving at the educational wing of the Berlin Arts and Crafts Museum under the direction of another great artist - Hermann Struck. In the 1920's he began to shift his focus from crafts to painting. He emigrated to Eretz Israel in 1934 and spent his first few months at Kibbutz Ein Harod where he produced a number of prints focusing on the theme of Halutzim (the pioneers). There is a significant museum at Ein Harod which holds some of his work.

Moving on to Jerusalem he found the time to experiment with colour to capture the strong light and mood of the landscapes surrounding the city as well as working as the director of the Bezalel School for Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem. He held this post until his death in 1940. Budko also produced a significant portfolio of graphic material including woodcuts, etchings and drypoint works and illustrated the work of several stellar writers. Examples of this include Heinrich Heine's Psalms of 1919, Bialik's Babylonian Talmud (1924) and works of Sholem Asch, David Frischmann and Sholem Aleichem. He often integrated Jewish symbolism into his work and made use of Hebrew letters in his illustrations,  recalling his early life Eastern Europe, drawing on his experiences of that world to depict figures from the shtetl.  

Josef Budko does not have the profile that some of his Bezalel colleagues and contemporaries enjoy today but it is possible to see some of his work in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Jewish Museum in Berlin is home to one of my favourite works of his - Two Women. 

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Picture Post 42 - Boris Anrep's mosaics at the National Gallery

It's good to look up when strolling through cities as often the  most interesting sights are above street level. When entering London's National Gallery in Trafalger Square you should do the opposite and look down. Every day thousands of visitors walk across some of London's most beautiful mosaics - the work of Russian emigree Boris Vasilyevich Anrep, born in St. Petersburg in 1883 and who arrived in the United Kingdom in 1910.

The National Gallery commissioned Anrep to produce and lay two mosaic floors in the vestibule of its main hall based on the themes The Labours of Life and The Pleasures of Life. He completed this task between 1928 and 1933. The Gallery must have liked the results as in 1952, he was commissioned to produce a third mosaic entitled The Modern Virtues.  

Anrep was associated with the Bloomsbury Group and a number of its members appear as characters in his work as did a number of other prominent people of the time. Examples of this include Winston Churchill as Defiance and Great Garbo is the muse Melopeme, whilst in the pictures featured here, we can see ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn as Delectation, poet Edith Sitwell as the Sixth Sense and my favourite astronomer Fred Hoyle as Pursuit. I particularly like Pursuit with its image of a young Hoyle, climbing his way up towards the stars, wearing glasses that would make him extremely fashionable today and carrying what looks a little like a laptop! Anrep was clearly forward thinking.

Originally studying to be a lawyer, he abandoned this for art and studied in Paris before enrolling at the Glasgow School of Art for the year 1910-11. He met British artist Augustus John whilst in Paris and soon  became familiar with other British artists including Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. His Russian background also helped open doors for him in London and in 1912 he was asked to take charge of the Russian section in Roger Fry's second post-impressionist exhibition. Exhibitors in this section included Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov and Nicholas Roerich. He also maintained a life long friendship with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Akhmatova is the subject of the current exhibition at London's Pushkin House, part of which examines her links with Anrep.

It is possible to see more of Anrep's work in London by visiting Westminster Cathedral in Victoria where he designed the mosaics in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel or Saint Sophia's Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Bayswater. He also completed commissions at the Church of Christ the King in Mullingar, Ireland. Its free to see the mosaics in the National Gallery, but remember to look down!

Picture post 40 - iconic art nouveau in Vienna

Vienna boasts many architectural treasures. The city is especially well known for its art nouveau buildings, also reffered to as the jugendstil or secessionist style. One of my favourites of this genre is the Engel Apotheke (Angel Pharmacy) at Bognerstrasse 9 in the city centre. The building itself is unremarkable, but the facade is decorated in stunning art nouveau style, featuring two glass mosaic angels that give the pharmacy its name.

The angels, dressed in vibrant purple and gold dresses, stand on stone pedestals raising healing potions with the snake of aesclepius, the ancient Greek god of medicine wound around their arms,  signifying the purpose of the store. The golden theme is repeated in the ringlets of both figures and in the sunflower freeze embedded in the wall above the large upper level windows. These windows are also decorated with a leaf freeze and wrought iron bars.  

Built between 1901 and 1902, the building, including its facade, was designed by Oskar Laske, a pupil of the great Otto Wagner. His decorative portal which spreads over the two lower levels of the pharmacy was intended to attract customers. It almost certainly did in 1901 when it would have been the height of modernity at a time when Klimt, Wagner, Hoffman and many others were at work in the city. Today it attracts art and architectural enthusiasts and historians, tourists and people needing prescriptions! 

Laske was involved in designing at least one other building of note in this style - the Nachtlicht, a cabaret where actors, dancers and musicians rubbed shoulders with the likes of architect and designer Adolf Loos and writers Karl Kraus and Peter Altenberg. I haven't been able to locate any pictures of Laske's work there and the club ran for only one year from 1906-7 before closing, upstaged by the legendary Cabaret Fledermaus. He went on to concentrate on painting rather than architecture, unsurprising given the beauty of his work at the Engel Apotheke. He worked primarily in water colours, recording his travels in Europe and North Africa, as well as being a book illustrator and graphic artist. Born in Czernowitz in 1874, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and today part of the Ukraine, he served in the First World War and died in Vienna in 1951.

If you are visiting Vienna and go to view this lovely facade, I also recommend a visit to the shop next door - Zum Schwarzen Kameel,  (The Black Camel) an elegant patisserie selling delicious Viennese sweets, cakes and biscuits. Believe me, I know about these things. There has been a restaurant and shop there since the seventeenth century but the current building dates from 1901 and also has some art nouveau features.

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Bolt - return of a banned ballet at London's GRAD gallery

Costume design for a drunkard

The GRAD gallery in London's Little Portland Street is continuing its excellent record of exhibiting Russian art from the Soviet period with its current show The Bolt, featuring Tatiana Bruni's costume designs for Shostakovich's ballet of the same name. The ballet was performed just once before being banned by the Soviet authorities, anxious about anything that might not fit their view of the world and deeply suspicious of artists generally.

The Bolt premiered on the 8th April 1931 at the Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet in that was then Leningrad and is now St. Petersburg. Choreographed by Fyodor Lopukhov, it tells the story of  Lenka Gulba (which is Russian for lazy idler), who with the help of an anti-Soviet priest attempts to sabotage the work of a Soviet factory by placing a bolt in the machinery. The feckless Lenka is foiled by a group of young communists from the Komsomol. You might wonder why the Soviets didn't like this tale of young socialists saving the day. It seems the "good" characters were deemed too boring and the baddies too interesting - the lazy worker, bourgeois women and drunkards being too attractive for the censors. It was not only the story that bombed with the authorities, they didn't like the score - too western and they didn't like the choreography either, describing it as "grotesque". The opening night's audience was divided with both applause and catcalls throughout. Well you can't win 'em all. 

Shostakovich attracted much official criticism during his career, his 1948 From Jewish Folk Poetry song cycle not being performed until 1955 due to it incurring displeasure during a period of state-sponsored anti-semitism. He also produced another ballet with Lopukhov - The Bright Stream - in 1935. If the authorities didn't like The Bolt, they hated Bright Stream. The librettist ended up in Siberia, Lopukhov lay low in Tashkent and Shostakovich was shaken enough to cancel the premiere of another new piece. Still, it could have been worse as thousands of artists of all kinds were executed during Stalin's reign - the theatre suffering particularly badly. Of course, this makes the stunning achievements of artists working under the former Soviet regime even more impressive.

Costume design for a friend of Kozelkov

Costume design for a petit-bourgeois woman

But back to the exhibition and Tatiana Bruni's designs which are on loan from the St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music. Wonderful examples of the Soviet avant-garde period, they are extremely stylised, colourful, humorous and leave the viewer in no doubt about the inclinations of the characters they were designed for. The petit-bourgeios woman's costume is frivolous, fussy and impractical. The costume for the young communist woman is serious, sporting and red. Kozelkov's female friend is dressed in a revealing outfit held together by a huge pink bow denoting frivolity and perhaps loose morals whilst the drunkard has patched clothes and shoes on the verge of collapse, showing the wasteful, disorganised nature of the character. Perhaps the most inventive costumes are those for the actors playing the parts of the American navy and the Japanese navy, with ships around their waists, "capitalist" style shoes and trousers and in the case of the US navy, a torpedo for a cigarette!

Bruni faired rather better than her colleagues involved in the production of The Bolt, going on to design for many other ballets as well as opera and drama, producing costumes and other works for more than 200 different productions working in the Soviet Union for several decades. The Bolt did not return to the stage until 2005 when the Bolshoi Ballet performed it in Moscow. You can see clips from the ballet in the exhibition at the GRAD and some of the costumes themselves in addition to Bruni's designs. The score seems very modern and accessible and the titles of some of the pieces are irresistible. I am particularly taken by "The Dance of the Women in Shabby Coats" and "The Installation of the Machines Pantomime", both of which might lead one to believe that Shostakovich might just have been   having a very risky laugh at the authorities.

Costume design for the American navy

Costume design for a Komosomolka

In the years London has seen some superb exhibitions of Russian art from the Soviet period at the GRAD, at the Pushkin House and also at the  Victoria and Albert Museum where until March 15th, you can still see Russian a vant-garde theatre - war, revolution and design - much recommended. The Bolt runs at the GRAD until February 28th - don't miss it. And it's free too.

A clip from The Bolt...

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Abram Games - graphic design genius at London's Jewish Museum

London's Jewish Museum in Camden is currently staging an exhibition on the life and work of graphic designer Abram Games. Born in 1914 in Whitechapel to Russian Jewish immigrants, Joseph and Sarah Gamse (not Games), he was to become one of the most influential graphic designers of the 20th century.

Zoo/ tiger for London Transport, 1975. Lithograph.

Joseph Gamse worked as a photographic processor in his studio below the family flat in Hackney's Lower Clapton Road. The young Abram (at that time called Abraham) used his father's artists materials to entertain  himself. Only an average school student he failed the 11 plus examination in 1925 before Sarah persuaded his father to pay for him to attend Hackney Downs boys school which had a reputation for helping working class boys achieve in medicine, business, laws and other professions. It also produced artists Leon Kossof, playwright Harold Pinter and actor Stephen Berkoff. Our hero appears to have not done too well at Hackney Downs - one report describing his drawing as "weak", his writing as 'poor" and his general demeanour as "lazy and indifferent". The formidable Sarah visited the school to put the head teacher right on this!

In 1926 Abraham changed his named by deed poll from "Gamse" to the more English sounding "Games" and adopted Abram rather than Abraham as his forename. He had a desire to attend art school but failed to secure a scholarship and so, somewhat reluctantly, his parents paid for him to attend St. Martin's School of Art. He left St. Martin's after two terms, doubting his ability and disillusioned with his fellow students and teachers. 

Evening classes, 1935. Lithograph.

Abram worked for his father by day and by night designed cards for tradesmen and posters for his own portfolio. In 1932 he took a job at Askew Yonge,  a commercial art studio to supplement the family income. He also began to enter poster design competitions, taking second place (and three guineas) in the Health and Cleanliness Council poster competition and winning the London County Council (LCC) Evening Classes competition - and a very welcome twenty pounds. His winning design attracted some criticism from the press for being "too Germanic" and even "monstrous". There is something menacing about the figure with receding forehead and the L of LCC being used as a finger against his cheek, indicating thought, but I rather like it. It is certainly of its time, shows strong European influences and was probably way ahead of anything a staid local authority would commission in 1932 - but he won.

Rebellious and disruptive at work he had several disagreements with his employers including about who owned the copyright on work completed in his own time he was dismissed from Askew Yonge in 1936. He spent the next several months touting his portfolio around several agencies before securing work with London Transport following an article on his work in Art and Industry magazine. His relationship with London Transport was to go on until 1975 and included perhaps his most well known work - the poster for London Zoo featured at this top of this post. His first poster for the company was A Train Every 90 Seconds, published in 1937 in simple black, red and white and very much in the then contemporary modernist style, making use of the underground symbol with a dark swirl indicating the train coming in to the station. 

Poster for London Transport, 1937. Lithograph

In June 1940, Abram was conscripted into the army, training for three months before being placed in the Hertfordshire Regiment. Spotted drawing caricatures of officers during a Christmas show, he was given work as a draughtsman, producing maps and plans. Living in barracks in 1941 and concerned about the lack of health and hygiene information he produced a series of instructional posters encouraging servicemen (and women) to be more health conscious. This led to his producing a poster to support recruitment to the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). The poster showed an extremely glamorous young woman - blonde with bright red lipstick and pencilled in eyebrows, face half in shadow looking into the distance above the simple message "Join the ATS". This image became the subject of controversy. Referred to as "the blonde bombshell", it was deemed too daring and in October 1941 Parliament demanded it not be reprinted, ironic given that the purpose of the campaign was to dispel the dowdy image of the ATS and attract more women to the service. Amusingly, the Conservative MP, Thelma Cazalet Keir was one of the strongest objectors saying "Women should be attracted into the army by patriotism, not glamour! This poster is better suited to advertise beauty products". 

Another significant Games war-time poster was Serve as a soldier vote as a citizen, produced in 1944, encouraging soldiers to register for the vote, doing their democratic as well wartime duty. The design shows the future of the country in the hands of servicemen and women holding the voting pencil which forms the tower of Big Ben at the Houses of Parliament. The red, white and blue clouds, references to the national flag emphasise the patriotic duty of voting.

ATS, 1941. Lithograph.

Serve as a soldier,vote as a citizen, 1944. Lithograph.

After the war, Games returned to civilian life, working as a freelance designer and lecturing in graphic design at the Royal College of Art. In 1945, he met and married Marianne Salfeld, grand daughter of the former Chief Rabbi of Hesse. Together with her family, Marianne had left Germany in 1937. Their first child, Daniel was born in 1946 and shortly before the birth of their second child, Sophie in 1948, the family moved to a house in Golders Green. This was to be Abram's home and workplace for the rest of his life

Games' postwar years were very busy. He was involved in a number of Jewish charities and organisations and produced several works aimed at raising awareness of the plight of Jewish refugees in Europe. One of the most haunting is reproduced below - Give clothing for liberated Jewry, for the British Jewish Relief Committee. The large sunken eye of the figure looks directly at the viewer whilst the red and black background may be intended as a reference to the furnaces of the death camps.

Despite the events of the War, anti-semitsim was still prevalent and the then British government at first refused to make provision for Jewish refugees, saying they were the responsibility of their "own" governments in Europe. Those governments were often the same people who had often at best stood back and ignored the events of the war and at worst actively participated in the Holocaust. Games was outspoken in his opposition to anti-semitism, demonstrated by his actions when seeing a nazi flag flying from a building in Swiss Cottage in 1948.  Leaping from the bus he was on at the time he climbed to the first floor of the building and tore the flag down. 

His interest in Jewish issues included support for the young state of Israel re-established in 1948. The Israel Philatelic Department held a competition to design a stamp to commemorate Independence Day in 1950. Games won the competition, visited the country instead of accepting prize money and was invited to design a stamp for the Maccabiah Games during his stay. He was no newcomer to stamp design having been responsible for one of the stamps  produced to celebrate the 1948 London Olympic Games. He went on to design another six Israeli stamps and back home continued his work with Jewish organisations large and small.

Give clothing for liberated Jewry, 1945. Lithograph.

Perhaps his finest moment came when his proposal for the emblem for the 1951 Festival of Britain was accepted and was used not only on posters and printed materials but also on items as diverse as chocolate, soap, toilet paper and mousetraps, not to mention being sown into floor beds and drawn into chalk hills. He said that his design was influenced by his wife hanging out the family washing - note the red, white and blue bunting hanging on the line beneath the main symbol! The Festival was intended to showcase the nation's achievements and drive for economic recovery following the Second World War and his design was seen by the millions of visitors. It lives on now in exhibitions such as that at the Jewish Museum and in the many books produced on his life and work. 

Perhaps due to having spent his early years seeing the poverty of Whitechapel, he was a lifelong socialist, demonstrated by his work to promote health care and education. He was also deeply influenced by his Judaism witnessed by his work for Jewish charities and organisations. Artistically, he was impressed by the designs of the Bauhaus in Germany, the de Stijl movement in the Netherlands  and work originating in the Soviet Union from the likes of Kandinsky and El Lissitzky. Like many creative people of his generation he was not limited to one medium. As well as posters, publicity and stamps he also designed a number of book covers for Penguin paperbacks and tried his hand at inventions related to the printing process and to improving coffee makers (!). Examples of these, family photographs, school reports, letters and many other posters can be seen in the current exhibition which runs until 4th January 2015. I was especially moved by his final letter to his grandson written shortly before his death in 1996 in which his love for both art and family is clear and touching. Oh, and if you use Stockwell Station you may well have seen or even stood beside one of his designs - the Swan - a blue and white ceramic work on the platform of the Victoria Line - which will be the subject of a future Picture Post. 

Festival of Britain, 1948. Lithograph.

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Nahum Gutman and a newspaper for children

One of my favourite Jerusalem experiences is browsing in a tiny book shop called Trionfo in Dorot Rishonim Street. Located just off the busy pedestrianised Ben Yehuda Street, Dorot Rishonim is also home to a great new hotel - the Arthur, a good new kosher humous restaurant - Abu YoYo and a small bar called Birman that has either live music or dancing every night. I discovered Birman on my most recent visit when I heard music floating up from the street to my room in the Arthur before going along to enjoy a local quartet play some very cool versions of jazz standards the next night before watching some great swing dancers the night after. All for free!

The music (and the humous) were both great but back to Trionfo. Thanks to owner Abraham Madeisker, I have become the proud possessor of works by various Bezalel artists including Zev Raban's illustrated books and playing cards and books illustrated by another early giant of the Israeli art scene - E. M. Lilien. This time was no exception and I came away with two copies of the children's supplement from the former Davar newspaper, Davar l'yeledim (דבר לילדים) - or Davar for children.

Enormously popular with Israeli children at the time, it was filled with stories, quizzes, crosswords and articles on many different subjects. The copies I purchased include pieces on the Gilboa region, summer in the desert and a regular item called "letter from the camps" with news about the activities of children living in Ma'abarot refugee camps set up to absorb Jews forced out of North Africa and the Arab Middle East in the 1950's. In some parts the text is dense and the technology at the time was very different to that available for modern magazine production but the illustrations are charming and it is easy to see why this publication would have engaged so many children.

Davar was the official newspaper of the Histadrut or Labour federation. Founded in 1925 by Berl Katznelson, it was the most important newspaper of the labour movement.  Katznelson wanted Davar (which means "word") to be informative and educational and to "quench the worker's thirst for knowledge and thought". Despite Katznelson's initial hopes that the newspaper would be free of control by any political party, it became the organ of Mapai, the ruling party throughout the 1940's, 50's and 60's whilst two of its editors rose to the very pinnacle of politics, Moshe Sharrett and Zalman Shazar eventually becoming Prime Minister and President respectively.  Despite its early popularity, it struggled from the 1970s onwards, amalgamating with a other newspaper in 1971, changing its name to Davar Rishon in 1995 and finally closing in 1996.

Most of the illustrations in Davar l'yeledim were the work of famed Israeli artist Nahum Gutman. Born in 1898 in Teleneshty, Bessarabia (in today's Moldova), his family moved to Odessa in 1903 before making aliya to Eretz Israel in 1905. Gutman's family were amongst the first residents of Tel Aviv having initially lived in the Neve Shalom neighbourhood. He studied art at the Bezalel and in the 1920's spent some time working and exhibiting in Paris and Berlin. Returning to Eretz Israel in 1931, his work was inspired by the country's landscapes and people and included mosaics, stage sets and sculpture as well as painting and book illustration. Many of his works can be seen at Beit Gutman in Tel Aviv's Neveh Tzedek which acts as a museum to his life and work.

Gutman had an affinity with young people, writing and illustrating several children's books, but it was his work for Davar l'yeledim that endeared him to more than one generation of Israeli children. In a Beit Gutman publication, his son, Hemi remembers the weekly delivery of what was referred to as "the stuff" to their home - an envelope containing manuscripts for the next edition of the newspaper and for which the artist had three days to prepare the illustrations for stories and poems. He remembers feeling privileged that he knew what happened in each serial an entire week before everyone else! He also remembers that his father would "…address each child in a genuine, friendly way, whether it was on the street, on the bus, or in a crowd of a hundred kids who regarded him as a walking wonder". He also remembers feeling jealous of this affection saying that "during those encounters, all the empathy, the jokes and the witticisms that had always been mine alone were generously and profusely handed out to all the children…"

In today's technological age where the opportunities for interaction are endless but much less personal, Gutman's approach and Davar l'yeledim may seem quaint but together they instilled many children with a love of reading, many of whom retain fond memories of the weekly episode of their favourite serials. 

Picture post 26 - Akko's Tunisian synagogue

Akko in northern Israel attracts many visitors who come to see the museums, mosques, ancient synagogue, fortress and sea walls in the old city. Fewer people know about the Or Torah synagogue in Kaplan Street in the modern part of the city. Also known as the Tunisian synagogue it is a work of art with every interior surface (and much of the exterior too) being covered with beautiful mosaics.

Spread across four floors and having taken 54 years to complete, the synagogue walls feature images from the history of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, from the Bible to more recent times, as well as native flora and fauna. The lower floor depicts birds and animals as well as menorahs, shofars and harps. The musical theme is continued on the exterior with metal representations of various instruments. The main prayer hall has seven torah arks, a dome decorated with symbols of the twelve tribes of Israel and zodiac signs copied from the floors of ancient synagogues. The women's gallery is illustrated with scenes from the lives of the matriarchs and other women from the Bible. The mosaics are made of coloured stone collected the length and breadth of Israel from the Golan to Eilat.  There are also 140 stained glass windows in the building.

The mosaics were made at Kibbutz Eilon, just one mile from the border with Lebanon. Mosaic production is a speciality of the kibbutz which also practices agriculture and hosts a world famous violin school every year for 50 young musicians from around the world.

This unique building was a labour of love, completed  by Zion Badash, a Holocaust survivor from Tunisia. It is not widely known that the Holocaust was also played out in the former French colonies of North Africa. The German occupiers and collaborationist French administrations implemented anti-Jewish legislation often with the enthusiastic support of many in the local population. This included establishing labour camps locally as well transporting Jews to death camps in Europe.

In 1948 there were approximately 105,000 Jews in Tunisia. Following Tunisian independence in 1956, many left either for Israel or France, pushed by new anti-Jewish policies. 1967 saw a number of anti-Semitic attacks on the community which accelerated emigration and today about 1,000 - 1,500 Jews remain, mainly on the island of Djerba with a smaller number in Tunis. Martin Gilbert's book In Ishmael's House examines the experience of the Jews in North Africa in detail. 

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