The Power Of Polish Posters

By Susan Hornik

In Poland a poster
is a fiery art and
a way to speak out

The Solidarity emblem, known worldwide, grew from a traditional expressive form but one now subject to control by the Party.

The Polish trade union Solidarity was born in August 1980 amid the waving of workers' banners and religious icons. For almost a year and a half its posters blanketed walls, kiosks and factory fences. Calls for "Strike!" and "On your knees!" were aimed at government officials, who watched and waited for the right time to strike back. In the process the white poster with the blood-red letters Solidarnosc (Solidarity) smeared across it became famous in its own right. It carried a new message, and a political one, but was also heir to a rich Polish poster tradition.

In Poland posters are both fine art and decorative fad. Galleries hang them alongside watercolors, oils and more traditional graphics. But their designers are not just respected artists who sign each piece; they are celebrities whose works are avidly discussed, collected and swapped. Poland holds citywide, national and international poster contests and has sent exhibits to such different locales as Paris, Moscow and Mexico City. (The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service sponsored a two-year American tour of Polish posters beginning in 1978.)

In 1968 a poster museum was founded outside Warsaw. Posters in Poland are personal statements on cultural topics—stage and screen, the circus, art shows and jazz festivals. In recent years they have become increasingly idiosyncratic and disparate, a "paper tower of Babel" according to one critic. But Solidarity sent an energizing jolt through the artistic world as well as through the rest of Polish society. The unassuming artist behind the now famous Solidarnosc logo is a young Gdansk designer, Jerzy Janiszewski (p. 90). He rearranged the white and red of Poland's flag in a symbolic gesture aimed at unifying a society of workers, intellectuals and farmers. It was a large idea conveyed with striking simplicity. Although a trained artist and an established poster maker, he dashed off his best-known work while caught up in the fervor of events surrounding him.

Unlike Janiszewski, the designers of most of the best Solidarity posters were enthusiastic amateurs. Szymon Bojko, the Polish art historian and poster authority, notes: "It was like the first period of the Russian Revolution. It was a spontaneous, naive explosion." What Solidarity posters lacked in esthetic quality, they made up for in raw strength. Emotionally loaded symbols were repeated over and over: a handshake, "V" for victory, the muscular arm of a farmer, clenched fists, anchors, crosses and milestone years in Polish history. The symbols reappeared on banners and buttons, T-shirts and beach hats.

Not to be outdone, the government struck back and brief poster wars flared sporadically. The toddler who commemorated Solidarity's first birthday reappeared in an official government version, holding a flaming stick. A banner across one corner warned: Don't play with fire!).

In 1981 Solidarity planned to print a poster commemorating Poland's independence on November 11, 1918. The poster was dominated by the number 1918, the "18" of which is actually a mirror image of 81, because in 1981 the event was officially celebrated for the first time in more than 40 years. The young designer says, "I meant it as the symbol of our second independence." As it turned out, the work of another young Polish artist would have been more appropriate. In 1980 Jan Sawka's "Car of the Year" won a first prize at the Eighth International Poster Biennale in Warsaw. It showed a steely blue tank rumbling down a biliously green city street. On December 13, 1981, tanks and armored personnel carriers rolled across Poland in a physical show of the force behind martial law. Militia ripped banners off gates and scraped away or whitewashed Solidarity posters and graffiti. Posters thrown up in defiance were torn down again and again. Within two weeks the word Solidarity was erased from kiosks and the gray walls of factories. Its symbols were obliterated, but not forgotten.

People often say that events in Poland are cyclical, and certainly the same can be said for its posters. Although almost always identified with cultural themes, modern Polish posters were born in a spontaneous flush of postwar exuberance aimed at rebuilding the devastated country. In decline by the Seventies, they once more burst to life in the odnowa (renewal) ushered in by Solidarity. Now, pessimists predict, the trauma of martial law may have dealt the movement its death blow. "I have a feeling," says art historian Bojko, "that I'm walking on graves."

Posters from art to politics

The "Polish School of Posters" flowered after the Second World War, but the poster movement is well rooted in the Polish past. In Poland posters originated in the studios of late-19th-century artists, so they were close to painting and consequently enriched by a steady stream of progressive art movements, from Jugendstil to Cubism and Constructivism.

At the end of World War II, Poland lay in ruins. During the six years of Nazi occupation six million Poles had been killed, an estimated 38 percent of the country's wealth destroyed, and many towns, including Warsaw, had become heaps of rubble. The new Communist authorities wanted to drum home their brand of politics and to whip up enthusiasm for new economic goals: "Electricity + Leninism = Modernization." With no television, few radios and a shortage of newspapers, they recognized the importance of posters as an immediate form of communication. Artists took advantage of the new state-supported system and began to explore the possibilities of the poster.

One artist recalls the enthusiasm of those days when Warsaw looked like a vast construction site: "There were fences everywhere, just waiting for us to cover them with posters." A great compression of composition took place; decorative elements were discarded and the language of posters greatly simplified. Henryk Tomaszewski and Tadeusz Trepkowski dominated the era. Trepkowski, the father of the postwar political poster, died in 1954. His 1952 anti-war poster is a classic (p. 89): a bombed-out building inside the silhouette of a descending bomb and the single word Nie! (No!). Although the propaganda value of posters was recognized, posters were officially viewed with "a certain disdain, as not real art," recalls one designer, 5o people were freer to experiment. The big boost came when some enterprising artists convinced the woman who selected the art used to advertise Polish films to allow them considerable artistic leeway in their designs. The posters that evolved are unlike most movie posters, for a scene is rarely shown. Rather, the artist tries to capture the essence of the film or use a visual metaphor to sum up his impression of it. This trend caught on and spread to other fields.

Posters became an outlet for individual artistic expression. By the mid-Fifties, artists were increasingly preoccupied with establishing their own artistic identities, developing their own styles and expressing their own visions. Critics regard the mid-Fifties through the early Seventies as the golden age of Polish posters.

As the Cold War ebbed, there was an influx of such Western trends as Surrealism, neo-Art Nouveau and Pop Art. Artists began experimenting with photographic techniques, collage, and knowledge gained from studies in optics. Rather than a coherent movement, it was a wildly diverse scene of painters and graphic designers working in their own ways. Some, such as Jozef Mroszczac, experimented constantly. His early simplicity gave way to an almost Day-Glo surrealism, frilly collages and a preoccupation with three-dimensionality. Others, like Jan Lenica with his swirling neo-Art Nouveau designs, found a unique voice early on. Maciej Urbaniec continued to paint mixed images: Mona Lisa as an acrobat and Boris Godunov wearing a crown of onion domes in flames.

Like all things Polish, posters are as fiercely individualistic as the personalities involved. Three poster makers who began working in the mid-Fifties at the start of the boom give a taste of the variety. Waldemar Swierzy is a poster maker par excellence, Franciszek Starowieyski a painter and Hubert Hilscher a graphic designer. Although Swierzy has also designed many book covers, posters are his métier. Surrounded by oils, icons and books in his rustic loft in Warsaw's reconstructed Old Town, he is philosophical about the special circumstances that enabled Polish posters to reach such heights. "After all," he jokes, "in a way posters are an archaic 19th-century art form, designed for strollers." Poland's very backwardness, few cars or superhighways, offered the slower pace needed to look and read. Swierzy has designed posters in almost every category: folksy travel vignettes and warnings not to play with matches. He has done a stately Othello, racing skiers, huge panting lips, chunky circus elephants and a dashing, slightly menacing gypsy (see cover). He uses symbols, metaphors and visual puns.

His wry sense of humor is rarely far from the surface. Swierzy's output is prodigious: he has more than 1,000 posters to his credit. His worldwide reputation brings in commissions from abroad and he has won awards in Paris, Milan and Lahti, Finland (site of a biennial poster competition), to mention only a few. His poster for Andrzej Wajda's Promised Land—a shadowy, top-hatted man wearing a broadly brushed white scarf that leaps out at the viewer—won the Hollywood Reporter award in 1975 for the best foreign film poster. But he is vague about his prizes and says the real test is the one "in the streets."

The prolific Swierzy is one of the few able to support himself solely by posters. Most of his colleagues also double as cartoonists, painters, set designers, typographers or architects. One of the painters, who also dabbles in scenery design, is the now middle-aged enfant terrible of Polish posters, Franciszek Starowieyski. He does theater and film posters almost exclusively, and they have proved an ideal forum for expressing his bizarre, idiosyncratic world view. Gone is his headband; his long black hair has been shorn; and his posters, once shocking, have been so imitated by younger artists that they are now almost the norm. But he still cultivates outrageousness. He calls the late Senator Joseph McCarthy "an American hero," did not support Solidarity ("Communism with a more humane face"), and once reputedly dubbed Warsaw's "Stalinist Gothic" Palace of Culture the most beautiful building in the city.

But there is another side. He is an unabashed elitist in the middle of a proletarian state. He claims he never reads books because "I don't want to be part of circulating thought." And he mixes Polish, French, German and passable English with frequent Latin phrases. Starowieyski is probably the most popular poster maker in Poland, especially among the educated young. It is a side of Poland seen in the grotesqueries of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird and is not far removed from the lust, greed and obsessions in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Polish villages. As with these two authors, irony and even sympathy lurk near the awful surfaces. Vanitas , vanitas is his refrain. Like many other painters who make posters, Starowieyski is retreating to his easel. The past couple of years he has been spending more time on his enormous oils. His project for a huge cycle of national posters has been scrapped. "I have never felt like a professional graphic designer," he insists. "I'm a painter who makes posters. Anyone can produce utility graphics but I want to tell people something."

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the graphic designer Hubert Hilscher (p. 96). He does posters and trademarks, lays out books and has been art and layout director of the arts magazine Projekt for the past 20 years. He says, "I don't do portraits or stage sets because I don't consider myself an artist. I practice an artistic craft."

As a student Hilscher had hoped to be an architect and his works incline toward geometry. Like many others of his era, he admired the spare, pure line of Swiss posters which was gradually adapted to the freer, more poetic Polish poster style. The trend is readily visible in his work.

Probably the most popular of all Polish posters are those done for the circus and Hilscher's whimsical beasts are among the best (p. 97). Beginning in 1962, the state circus commissioned leading poster artists to do an ongoing series of circus features—tigers or clowns or acrobats. Strictly speaking they are not advertisements, for they give no dates or details on shows. They are mainly for fun. But Hilscher remains a purist. He prefers traditional posters with ideas expressed economically. "I do not like narrative pictures," he says, decisively dismissing the latest vogue among younger artists.

By the Seventies a new generation was attacking the stylization of its elders. Subjective vision, free association and irrationalism abounded in the works of younger artists. Lettering was correspondingly erratic and sometimes almost illegible. Poster Museum curator Anna Rutkiewicz says, "Posters became so private that the basic function of passing on information was lost." Ironically, overintellectualism is the logical outcome of one of the poster movement's great strengths. Posters were not advertising in the Western sense and so artists were left to interpret freely. Their works did not have to be appealing or really even informative. They had become purely art. In retrospect, the decade of the Seventies was a watershed. Slapdash works appeared more often, and the atmosphere became more commercial. Artists criticized some agency officials who handed out commismany other painters who make posters, Starowieyski is retreating to his easel. The past couple of years he has been spending more time on his enormous oils. His project for a huge cycle of national posters has been scrapped. "I have never felt like a professional graphic designer," he insists. "I'm a painter who makes posters. Anyone can produce utility graphics but I want to tell people something."

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the graphic designer Hubert Hilscher (p. 96). He does posters and trademarks, lays out books and has been art and layout director of the arts magazine Projekt for the past 20 years. He says, "I don't do portraits or stage sets because I don't consider myself an artist. I practice an artistic craft."

By the Seventies a new generation was attacking the stylization of its elders. Subjective vision, free association and irrationalism abounded in the works of younger artists. Lettering was correspondingly erratic and sometimes almost illegible. Poster Museum curator Anna Rutkiewicz says, "Posters became so private that the basic function of passing on information was lost." Ironically, overintellectualism is the logical outcome of one of the poster movement's great strengths. Posters were not advertising in the Western sense and so artists were left to interpret freely. Their works did not have to be appealing or really even informative. They had become purely art. In retrospect, the decade of the Seventies was a watershed. Slapdash works appeared more often, and the atmosphere became more commercial. Artists criticized some agency officials who handed out commissions for being more interested in getting a job done "fast and flashy" than in quality products.

The malaise ended when Solidarity exploded onto center stage. Young designers especially, caught up in the whirlwind of events, reveled in "mountains of work." Posters, often rough but always energetic, were slapped up everywhere. The market was wide open and opportunities seemed unlimited. But the renewal was short and screeched to a halt when martial law was declared.

One of the least publicized victims of the crackdown was the Poster Museum housed in the rebuilt horse stables of the former royal summer residence, Wilanow, just outside Warsaw. Curator Rutkiewicz arrived to find soldiers ripping posters that advertised the current show off the kiosk outside the museum: "We were ordered closed and we had to stay closed until we changed shows." The offending exhibit, "Polish Social and Political Posters from 1944-81," was hastily replaced by a more innocuous one on cultural posters. Of more significance, the Ninth International Poster Biennale, due to take place in Warsaw, was cancelled. Held every two years since 1966 at the Zacheta, Warsaw's largest art gallery, it is undoubtedly the most important international poster competition. For the last biennial in 1980 more than 800 designers from 49 countries submitted works.

The organizing committee, made up primarily of artists and art authorities, pointed to the disruption of mail and communication as a major reason for its postponement. Privately one acknowledged: "We wanted to avoid a showdown with the government. We were afraid of censorship." A likely candidate for first prize was the grand-prize winner of the 1981 national biennial, Janiszewski's Solidarnosc, for as a winner it would have automatically gone on to the international competition. Swierzy, the committee's chairman, says "a huge celebration," a combined Ninth and Tenth Biennale, will be held in 1984. The overwhelming feeling, however, is that it is the end of an era. Artists are demoralized and isolated. Many relied on Western markets for their "bread and butter." As Starowieyski says with a wry smile, "You can't do art without a market." And Poland's economic situation is, of course, appalling: the local market for posters has disintegrated. The theater, music and art scene in general are equally demoralized and disrupted and, with its hard-currency problems, the government has stopped importing Western movies. All were previously major outlets for poster artists.

Getting art supplies is difficult even for big-name artists and virtually impossible for young ones. Last year, after being closed for weeks, the one good art store in Warsaw opened with what was rumored to be the last shipment of art supplies from the West. So many people showed up that a window was broken in the crush. The store promptly closed down for another week. When it again reopened, numbers were handed out to ease the lines, and shelves emptied in a couple of days.

The country's economic problems have hit young artists particularly hard. Many do not make it and go into other fields. Some hang on by designing book covers while waiting for bigger orders. Others found the best option was to leave, and have been working in the greener fields of Western Europe and the United States. Now, with "the war," as the Poles call martial law, artists caught outside are waiting to see what happens. Meanwhile, those left behind are only slowly coming out of the paralysis that has engulfed them since the crackdown. Says one, “In wartime the muses are silent.” Others wonder if their past work for Solidarity will make it hard for them to get those all-important commissions. Some of them vow they will never work for anyone else.