25 April 2023

1976 Haifa Olympiad Artwork

In a recent post for the long running series 'Top eBay Chess Items', the one titled Poster Perfect Chess Art (March 2023), I gave myself a couple of follow-up actions:-

Vasarely produced other chess related works. Cataloging them would make a good rainy day project. Add to that catalog the 1976 series of Olympiad posters.

I searched my database of chess images, most of them taken from eBay, and discovered that there were ten different posters for the 1976 Olympiad. All ten are shown below in alphabetical order by artist. The thumbnails aren't particularly good, but they show clearly the underlying artwork.


Top row: Yaacov Agam, Otmar Alt, Arman, Samuel Bak, Moshe Castel • Bottom row: Jean David, Allan Davie, Raffi Kaiser, Carl Korab, Victor Vasarely

Just like the images I found, their descriptions were of varying quality. Copied here is the description from an Agam poster listed on eBay in 2000:-

To celebrate the Chess Olympiad for Men and Women held in Haifa, Israel in October-November 1976, a series of 10 images were created by 10 different internationally known artists. Artist Yaacov Agam was one of the artists selected and this poster is his.

Mr. Agam is one of the most esteemed, perhaps the most esteemed, living artist. The image is a serigraph poster (only the posters by artists Agam, Arman, and Vasarely among the 10 in the series were done as serigraphs). The image size of the poster is 27" high by 17" wide; the full paper size is 35" by 22". The image and the poster are very unique and assumed to be quite rare.

I carried out this exercise with the hope of locating a web site with high quality images of all ten posters/prints. After a brief search, I ended up empty handed. Maybe something will turn up later.

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