David King, The Commissar Vanishes
A dizzying journey through the paranoia of the Soviet regime in the 1930s and ’40s.
David King (1943-2016) was a designer of exceptional vision and his achievement and legacy as a new kind of graphic author, working with his unparalleled private archive, deserve to be widely known and discussed.1
David King was sent on a work trip to the Soviet Union to look for photos of Lenin in 1970. That research led to an obsession with the erasure of Leon Trotsky from the Soviet popular memory.2
Throughout his life, King blended political activism with his graphic design work, creating anti-Apartheid and anti-Nazi posters, covers for books on Communist history, album artwork for The Who and Jimi Hendrix, catalogues on Russian art and society for the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, and typographic covers for the left-wing magazine City Limits.3
Rick Poynor and Simon Esterson, Website: David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian.
Josh MacPhee (2017) “David King and the Ghosts in the Image Factory,” Lapham’s Quarterly (December, 20).
Rick Poynor (2020). David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian. Yale University Press, 2020.