Polish Posters

“From the end of the 1940s, a few graphic designers, Lipinski, Trepkowski, Tomaszewski, and others, chose the beautiful poster as a medium for popular education in the languages ​​of art, and the symbolic poster to provoke intellectual reflection…”

Jan Lenica 

The Golden Age of Polish Posters

More than thirty years ago, the implosion of communism in Europe surprised everyone, from the man in the street to political leaders. While the manipulation of information in communist countries was a rule, if not a habit, we, for our part, were subjected to information that caricatured regimes subservient to Moscow, "the evil empire," as Reagan called it in his time, reducing them to a series of clichés, basic and often inaccurate...

Strangely, after the disappearance of communism, these clichés die hard, and I have the impression that history is tinkering with the truth a little. One of these clichés was that art responded to directives issued by the Party and had to follow a defined and controlled aesthetic line. The reality could be very different depending on the country.

Regarding Poland, it is perhaps worth noting that this country was wiped off the map for over 120 years, carved up by Germany and Russia, surviving only through its culture, language, and religion. Poland as a country was not recreated until 1918. This perhaps explains the importance of literature and culture in this country and the aura of those who create it...

It is in this context that we must consider the "Polish Poster." Since the beginning of the 20th century, the "Polish Poster" has always existed, but when we talk about it as an artistic movement, we are referring to the period 1955-1985. It was then one of the high points in the history of world graphic design, one of the essential benchmarks for all young graphic designers of the time. This movement developed with a creativity, a fantasy, an invention, and therefore with a freedom unknown elsewhere... Talking about creative freedom in a communist country of the time does not fit well with the Manichean idea that people had of communism, but the facts are there: this creative freedom existed in Poland and nowhere else.

Attempting to explain the phenomenon, I said that economic censorship was far more restrictive than political censorship. Because in this state economy, communication codes escaped commercial logic, and one only had to compare the posters produced for the same film in Warsaw and in the West to understand that the respective artists did not have the same constraints. One might have assumed that similar movements could develop in other communist countries. This was not the case; Poland was an exception.

As always, this movement was born from the meeting of young artists eager to impose their conceptions of the image by adapting to the particularities of the place and the time. "The Polish Poster" is therefore the story of the takeover of this group of artists within the existing commissions and structures and of their success in imposing and developing their original communications, outside the conventions respected in the West and the communist aesthetic defined in Moscow... We wrongly speak of a style of "The Polish Poster," the only common point of the artists of this movement was their creative freedom, their ease in freeing themselves from codes, typographic or graphic. This freedom means that forty years later, Tomaszewski's posters remain surprisingly contemporary. Each developed their own particular language. Lenica's style could not be confused with that of Swierzy, that of Starowieyski with that of Cieslewicz... to name but a few. Another peculiarity, the "Polish Poster" was above all a street phenomenon, because if history will only remember a dozen names, perhaps fewer, it is important to know that all the posters, the good ones as well as the less good ones, reflected this difference, this freedom, this creativity.

What struck the foreigner arriving in Warsaw was the colorful luxuriance of the posters, contrasting with the grayness of the architecture... It took a certain amount of time to overcome this general impression and establish a hierarchy of values; the medium, which had become rewarding, attracted the best creators, establishing competition and emulation. The Polish state, aware of the success of Polish posters worldwide, fostered the creation of the first international poster biennial, a benchmark for the forty or so similar events that currently exist around the world, as well as the first contemporary poster museum, the Wilanów Museum...

Like any artistic movement, the Polish poster movement is part of time and space, with its periods of development, fullness, and slow degeneration, just like the political system whose absurdity heralded its impending collapse. When communism imploded, state structures were shattered, especially the poster production structure. "Polish Posters" were already a shadow of their former selves. Not that the great artists who had grown old were not producing quality works, but the inspiration, the utopia had disappeared, and the poster no longer represented anything for young talents....

Almost all the big players have quietly left... Zamecznik, Mlodozeniec, Lenica, Tomaszewski... they belong to History... Today, "Polish Poster" and its players have long since ceased to be references for young graphic designers. History, quite unfairly, will only remember a few names and a few images, always the same ones: "Moore" by Tomaszewski, "Wozzeck" by Lenica... thus obscuring the others who made the reality and the strength of this movement, unless, on the contrary, this History shows that the work of Tomaszewski escapes the History of Graphic Design to simply enter that of Art, joining in this another emblematic figure of the poster, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec.

Alain Le Quernec

Présentation du musée Wilanów de Varsovie,

le premier musée de l’affiche au monde, inauguré en juin 68