Jacob Lawrence, Olympic Games Munich Poster, 1972, Screen Print

Olympic Games Munich 1972 Limited Edition Poster entitled 'Five Black Athletes in a Relay Race' signed and numbered by Jacob Lawrence
Dimensions:
Sheet Size: Length 109.5 × 69.5 cm
Image Size: Length: 87 × 64 cm
Edition Size: 200
Edition Number: 24 marked in pencil by Jacob Lawrence
Signed: Jacob Lawrence 71 in pencil by Jacob Lawrence
Serigraph – Screenprint
Printed words on the left hand corner of the sheet read as follows:
© Edition Olympia 1972 Gmbh 1971
Dietz Officin Lengmoos

Bold colours fresh and vibrant as when originally issued
Overall condition: Very good for age
A minor tear at the top edge has been repaired and the poster has been given a conservation wash by one of UK’s leading paper conservators, in the main, to remove soluble pollutants, which if left untreated in a poster, in particular, one printed more than 50 years ago would accelerate its degradation. This first class conservational treatment will ensure that the poster would retain its present condition if professionally framed with museum-quality glass and not exposed to direct sunlight or put into long-term storage following the specialist guidelines for the storage of posters and prints.
Jacob Lawrence was one of a number of artists who were invited to design posters for the 1972 Olympic Games held in Munich. He was first non-white artist to commissioned by an Olympic Games Committee.
Lawrence created an image to commemorate the involvement of black athletes in the Olympic Games, as track was the field in which they had traditionally excelled.
This striking poster depicts five black runners with grimacing faces take giant strides around a large, curving track as they head toward the finish line.
They hold batons in their hands to show that they are competing in a relay race.

Each athlete is shown with his arms, legs, and head in a slightly different position, one has his head back and his right leg stretched forward, almost straight.
Lawrence used bold colours to depict the runners stylised faces and legs as well as the repeated shapes of the track.
He combined the flat, simplified shapes and empty spaces of modernism with silhouetted figures and the rhythmic patterns and colours of Harlem scenes. He labelled his pictorial style 'dynamic cubism'
Lawrence poster embraces several themes:
a) the intensity of competition in a relay race with invariably dramatic endings;
b) memories of the African American athlete, Jesse Owens' four gold medals, including one as a member of the 400-metre relay team, won at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin in the face of Nazi claims
of racial superiority; and
c) the determination of African Americans to compete on the world stage after centuries of discrimination in their home-country.


Biographical Details
Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlanta City, New Jersey, in 1917 as his family travelled north, part of the Great Migration of people from the South. After his parents split up, his mother moved the family to Harlem where a movement known as the Harlem Renaissance was flourishing. Lawrence studied painting the Harlem Art Workshop and received much encouragement from African American artists, Augusta Savage and Charles Alston and art critic, Alain Locke.
He received national recognition at the age of twenty-three with The Migration of the Negro, an exhibition of sixty paintings about the Great Migration. This series was so admired that both the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., wanted to buy them. Eventually, it was divided between the two museums.
During World War II, Lawrence was drafted into the U.S. Coast Guard, where he served on the first integrated ship and was promoted to a rank higher than the steward's mate. After the war, his career included commissions for murals and a Time magazine cover; teaching positions at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the University of Washington in Seattle.
Among the awards Lawrence received in his distinguished artistic career were the following:
Spingarn Medal (1970), the Us National Medal of Arts (1990), Algur H Meadows Award for Excellence (1996); and The Washington Medal of Art (1998).
The 1972 Munich poster comes from his original 1971 painting which now hangs in the Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, Washington).

There were two serigraph versions printed, a limited edition of 200 serigraphs/screenprints on heavy paper, hand-signed and numbered by the artist, and a limited edition serigraph of 4,000 copies again on a heavy paper (heavier than the standard poster paper).

Our Comments

This poster is a museum-piece with several strong historical connotations. It is a must for collectors of iconic posters, in general and Olympic Games posters, in particular.

We confidently maintain that it also ranks as an item of alternative investment.