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Polish Posters Triumphant: Fighting the Good Fight on Paper
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14655 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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11 / 1988 |
2,117 Words |
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Frank Fox
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Angry about pollution levels in his suburban Warsaw neighborhood, a poster artist constructs a huge, papier-mâché skull and dangles it from his ninth-story apartment window. The authorities receive reports that hundreds of children are drawing skulls in their classrooms; the artist is forced to remove the offending symbol of death.
Another time, the artist paints an enormous triptych and asks passers-by to watch him work from start to finish. They bring food and look on in fascination as the artist's creation takes shape. They even volunteer to pose for him. At the end of the day they stay where they are, silently contemplating their new surroundings--three walls filled with figures of naked men and women, torsos topped with birds' beaks and skulls, the unearthly procession marching past the artist's self-portrait.
This is a typical day in the busy life of Franciszek Starowieyski, whose sensual and scatological posters have made him one of the most controversial and admired poster artists in Poland. He personifies the credo of the Polish poster artist. His is the art of the street. He relishes confrontation. He seeks approval from many rather than fees from a few. It is all very Polish.
Hostile Environment
The American public (and this includes art collectors) has been late in learning to appreciate Polish poster art. Actually, for almost a century, European poster specialists have been following the development of this genre in Poland, a process that culminated in the widely copied airbrush technique pioneered by Tadeusz Gronowski in the 1920s and 1930s. World War II decimated the ranks of the artists, and when the occupation of one invader ended, another began. Yet even in the hostile environment of postwar Poland, the skills of poster artists revived, and the prewar generation of luminaries such as Gronowski Trepkowski, Tomaszewski, and Lipinski instructed and inspired a new generation of students.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Polish poster grew in influence as a nation hungry for visual representation of historical truths flocked to see the daring films of Andrzej Wajda. His work and that of other film directors, as well as various plays and music festivals, stimulated an interest in collecting the posters that advertised those productions and events. Indeed, by then the appreciation of these posters had become a worldwide phenomenon. Warsaw became the center for an international poster competition in 1966, and two years later the world's first museum devoted entirely to posters opened on the outskirts of Warsaw. During the intoxicating months of the birth of Solidarity, from the late 1970s to 1981, Polish cities were filled with more and more poster art until the entire country resembled one huge outdoor gallery. The creation of the unique Solidarnosc (Solidarity) poster by the Janiszewski brothers, the crimson N Trailing a Polish flag, inspired millions of Poles. Today, this poster is familiar to many throughout the world, and banners bearing this logo fly proudly (if illegally) whenever Poles confront their oppressors.
The crushing of Solidarity in December 1981 and the restrictions and shortages that followed challenged the Polish poster artist once again. The American public was fortunate to see the best of the Polish posters when, in 1978, the Smithsonian Institution and the Maryland Institute's College of
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