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Students Annual contest
Mistakes will always come back and bite you.
The JNF poster "The Vision of the Negev" was displayed in an exhibition of JNF posters at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque in 2015 with the caption "Unknown artist". A year later, this poster was included in the book "Shamir Brothers - Designers who became an icon" and the following year in the exhibition "What a Wonderful Country" of Shamir posters in the Kfar Saba Municipal Gallery. In the Palphot calendar for 2017-2018, this poster was attributed to Franz Kraus.
Which version is correct? It was difficult to discern any artist signature in the poster and, therefore, it was not included on the Shamir-brothers website. During the preparation of the Shamir Brothers book, the Zionist Archive sent 80 posters by Shamir to the Elul studio, including "The Vision of the Negev."
The curator of "What a Wonderful Country" Meira Perr-Lehamann ordered scans of posters from the Elul studio based on the Shamir book, including "The Vision of the Negev". The editor of Palphot's calendar, Miryam Dorftzaon, received this poster from the same archive that sent the Shamir posters to the Elul studio, but this time the Zionist Archives attributed this poster to Franz Kraus. She placed the poster on the front cover of her calendar.
I described the dilemma of an unsigned poster in my talk at the gallery in Kfar Saba. Two days later, a person who was present at the gallery, Benny Dolinsky, claimed that he found Kraus's signature in the lower left corner of the poster and brought this to the attention of the curator. The signature was in the negative in thin, broken letters.
I was sorry that the poster had accidentally filtered into the book and the exhibition, and I am more than happy to give Kraus the credit for an excellent poster.
Yoram E. Shamir, August 2017