Stop Nuclear Suicide
Artist
Henri Kay Henrion
Date1963
MediumOffset Lithograph
Dimensions29 3/4 x 20 1/4 in. (75.6 x 51.4 cm)
ClassificationsPoster
Credit LinePioster House Permanent Collection
Object numberPH.7500
DescriptionBorn in Germany, Frederick Henrion lived in Paris before moving to England in 1936. Although he was interned there as an enemy alien during World War II, he managed to produce propaganda posters for both the British and the American governments. After the war, he became a pioneer in the emerging field of corporate-identity design. This poster is for the West Midlands branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a British organization dedicated to fighting nuclear proliferation. Its logo at the lower left (popularly known today as the peace sign) was designed in 1958 by Gerald Holtom at the time of the first Aldermaston march, one of a series of antinuclear demonstrations in the U.K. at the site of its Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. Holtom explained the genesis of the peace sign: “I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and drew a circle around it.” The symbol also incorporates the semaphore for N(uclear) and D(isarmament), and was deliberately never trademarked, allowing it to gain global recognition during the subsequent decades.On View
Not on view
