Description:
Festive book weeks are nationally organised cultural events, which are held since 1929 in Hungary. The first event took place in Budapest, but later numerous other cities started to participate. The aim is to gain bigger and bigger popularity for reading books, and familiarize the earlier and contemporary books with audience.
This artwork was created in 1966 for the event as a book cover design. It is a painted and paper collage work with a strongly stylized flower in front of an averted newspaper-cut in the shape of a book. The black background gives a strong contrast and the title appears in bright blue above.
The design was created by Ivan Varadi. There is hardly any information about him, but observing this work, we can see that he used stiff elements and a simplified, but expressive character to the design. These features can remind us of the political poster style in Hungarian poster art between 1945 and 1949, by the use of well-known symbols and a powerful, compact nature of the graphics.
