Jan Lenica, one of Poland's most distinguished artists and filmmakers makes his home in Paris, teaches in Berlin, and declares his independence from Western influence in several languages. "Das Leben im Western beeinflusst mich nicht," he informed me recently, adding: "Ich bin Wasserdicht. Nieprzymakalny. Waterproof." Since he is also fluent in French, he might have added, "Impermeable." But his protestations about being "waterproof" have two aspects.
At a time when ideas have too often been defined by geographical boundaries, walls, and barbed-wire fences, particularly in Eastern Europe, Lenica's universalism, originality, and independence as a thinker and an artist need to be acknowledged. He is, indeed, "the philosopher with a brush," as he has been described. But there is another aspect. His multilingual assertions also make it clear that beneath that calm, philosophical exterior, beneath the opaque layers of his brush strokes (especially his favorite, emerald green), there is a bottomless depth safe only for those who are "waterproof."
Born in Poznan, in western Poland, in 1928, Lenica is the son of a well-known artist ad musician, Alfred Lenica. He spent the war years in Krakow, where he was briefly imprisoned by the Germans in 1944. After the war, Lenica was well on his way to a musical career when he changed direction, instead going on to acquire degrees in architecture and engineering. Later he studied at the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he was an assistant to Henryk Tomaszewski, the dean of Polish poster artists.
In the early 1950s, Lenica, having established his credential as a gifted caricaturist at the satirical magazine Szpilki (Pins), entered the field of poster design. With Lenica, as with many other Polish artists, poster making was to be a first love, one to which they continue to return even after considerable success in other aspects of their art.
Rich symbolism
The fraternity of poster artists was, and still is, unique. Its independence flourished in spite of requirements to fulfill quotas for posters celebrating the International Day of the Child or May Day festivities. With a little foresight, the artist could design a poster filled with historical allusions, using colors and symbols familiar to most Poles. It was a skill honed through decades - indeed centuries - of foreign oppression. The imagery of rebellion was readily available in the vast treasury of Polish literature, drama, and poetry, to which could be added the pageantry and rich symbolism of the Catholic Church.
In a society of clandestine wartime presses, of defiant graffiti scrawled on walls during the long night of Nazi occupation, the confrontation with communist censors found the artist equal to the challenge. And a public whose eyes and ears were assaulted by misinformation and falsehoods, whose libraries and archives were stripped of truthful accounts, was ready to look at the walls of its reconstructed cities for images of artistic freedom, for the humor and even brazenness of the poster artist. Young people, particularly, identified with this street art, admired its practitioners as they mighty sports heroes, and eagerly awaited the pasting up of new images. As for the artists, those daring tightrope walkers of the visual arts, they happily competed with one
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