While the role of the poster in the digital age has dwindled to borderline irrelevance, just decades previously, the medium was a venerable one. And perhaps nowhere was the art more respected than in Communist Poland, where a hoard of designers over the span of roughly 30 years made monumental contributions to the history of graphic design. Polish culture has always been shaped by resistance, considering Poland’s modern history has been characterised by threats of national erasure at the hands of multiple totalitarian regimes. After World War 2, the people of Poland saw one dictator swapped for another, as their governance switched from Nazi to Soviet rule. In the wake of the Stalinist regime and its sobering effect on aesthetics, Polish designers maximised their artistic liberties in poster design. When rigorous censorship put an end to “Fine Arts” (in the Soviet’s view, art for art’s sake was the pinnacle of bourgeois fluff), the poster became a medium that awarded freedom of expression and interpretation while retaining social utility.
Polish artists used painterly gestures, vibrant colours, and the power of wit and metaphor to create artworks which contradicted the imposed dogma of social rationalism. The result was a graphic renaissance referred to by historians as the Polish School of Posters — not precisely a school (with a manifesto or defined style) but rather a phenomena, consisting of hoards of clever works created between the ‘50s and ‘80s that embraced the legacies of Expressionism, Surrealism and Dada. Marisuz Knorowski, the lead curator of the Poland’s first and most respected poster museum (Muzeum Palaktu) in Wilanów describes the term, “We are talking about thousands of works, several prominent artists and at least three generations. It’s usually believed that the poster in Poland was a substitute for painting. However the most important property is the poetics, unusual for the traditional or orthodox poster, which are characterised by a romantic imagination, a close similarity to the Surreal worldview in articulating the content and meaning of the message. Almost absent is the so-called engineering design, strict rules of composition based on geometry, all that we define as graphism itself”.
Stalin famously said that imposing communism on Poland was as absurd as placing a saddle on a cow. The Poles’ persistent efforts to protect and preserve their cultural legacy was the essential ingredient in these artistically prolific decades. When Soviets attempted to erase the cultural heritage of the nations in the Eastern Bloc, the Polish poster became a small beacon of resistance — something that reflected attitudes and outlooks which were undeniably Polish. Posters advertising theatre, film, music, dance, sporting events, exhibitions and virtually any all public programs were produced in small numbers to meet local demands. Bright, painterly and allegorical works covered Poland’s grey streets, offering citizens works which invited conceptual investigation. In place of Soviet propaganda, there was Polish flair and imagination plastered across austere landscapes. Knorowski explains, “There was a widely held opinion that throughout the Eastern Bloc, Poland has the widest autonomy, especially in the field of culture. There was a lot of repression and freedom was drastically limited, but there was always a typical Polish spirit of contrariness, insubordination, non-compliance, and anarchy”.
Two professors at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts are credited as “forefathers” of the school: Henryk Tomaszewski and Jozef Mroszczak. The duo were widely different in their artistry, pedagogy, and temperament (the two were known as l’enfant terrible and kind ambassador, respectively), but shared a dedication in training the subsequent generation of Polish poster designers. Both advocated for their students to create their own kind of artistic language, to expand the realm of discourse through image alone. Clever combinations of type and form awarded postern designers the unofficial position of critic, particularly in the case of film posters. In this regard, lack of privatised industry awarded designers more leniency in regard to their expression. Poster designers were able to totally disregard the demands or expectations of studio driven promotion. Polish film posters were widely different than those in the West in that they didn’t meet representational constraints; the imagery is inspired by the artist’s interpretation, rather than taken directly from stills. Devoid of star headshots and commercial connections, posters promoted and commemorated Polish ways of seeing.
The imaginative and fantastical works of the artists of the Poster School (such as Jan Lenica, Waldemar Świerzy, Wojciech Fangor) challenged Western viewpoints of Eastern Bloc culture and set a new precedent for inventive approaches to the medium. When Polish posters were discovered by designers and collectors across the globe, they saw expressive and inventive works which counteracted Eastern aesthetic expectations — the painterly quality of the posters amplified their social significance and suggested posters should be much more than a means to an end. “I am deeply convinced that the Polish poster culture dew the attention of the entire society of graphic designers because it raised the poster to the rank of an autonomous work of art, understood as an author’s creation… a kind of invented code, which for the recipient was an intellectual adventure, a bit of an allusion to other dimensions of reality, because the real one was very oppressive”, Knorowski explains of the school’s impact. The Poles’ graphic treasures shine ever more valuable today, as capitalist agendas further dictate globalised visual languages.
Any Berliners eager to see these wonders in the flesh can visit Pigasus Polish Poster Gallery in Prenzlauer Berg. Their current exhibition includes numerous posters for British Films from the last 50 years.
