PRODUCTIVE ARTS
JULY 2018

Sixty (60) posters designed by David King

Offered for sale as a collection

Offered here are 60 posters designed by the great David King (1943-2016) of London, England. King was well-known as an artist, designer, editor, photographer, photo historian and archivist, who has been described as “one of the most significant artistic-intellectual personalities of our time”.
This collection features political and cultural posters King produced in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, following his ten-year (1965-1975) career as art editor of the then ground-breaking Sunday Times [of London] Color Magazine. 

King’s style -- described by one commentator as "an easily recognizable mix of explosive sans serif typography, solid planes of vivid color and emphatic rules," -- is seen by some as a modern channeling of the graphic language of 1920s Russian Constructivism and photomontage.
Please visit our website for other offerings of Russian and Soviet Posters, Periodicals and Collections.
King was one of the last hand-made graphic artists. There was no time and no money for his political graphics which expressed fluid conditions as they occurred. He cut and pasted images and created the original camera-ready art. It was all black and white photolithography. King then would instruct the printer on where the colors were to be on the design. King’s poster work presaged the birth of computer-aided graphic techniques for commercial and political messages that are popularized today by mass media artists like Shepard Fairey. 
King’s poster designs are a visual history of the global political radicalization of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa and the Anti-Nazi League in Britain. King’s poster art came at the end of an era when printed posters were the primary means of communicating political and social messages in “real time”.

King continued his style of graphic design in his important publications on the Russian Revolution and the early years of Soviet rule. Notable books by King are: the catalog for the first exhibition in the West of the photography of Alexander Rodchenko (Museum of Modern Art Oxford, England, 1979); The Commissar Vanishes (1997, rev. 2014); Ordinary Citizens (2003); Red Star Over Russia (2009); Russian Revolutionary Posters (2012) and John Heartfield: Laughter is a Devastating Weapon (2015).
(c) PRODUCTIVE ARTS 2018