Polish poster design is one of the frequently unsung glories of the visual arts over the past century. Many Polish filmmakers, including Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica, started out as poster designers, and many other major Polish artists made memorable contributions to the form.
Their influence has been far-reaching – when I interviewed the Quay Brothers last year for their DVD Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003 (the same interview is on the US edition, Phantom Museums or, if you need French subtitles, on Frères Quay: Courts-métrages d’animation), they not only insisted on highlighting Polish poster art as one of their primary influences, but also treated me (and that was very much the operative word) to a guided tour of their own collection, some of which ended up on camera. Here’s what they had to say:
We arrived from our little village to the Philadelphia College of Art to study painting and drawing and we’d more or less chosen that over the idea that we could have been gymnasts. Our father was more or less saying “you have an opportunity to do one of two things: you can be gym teachers or artists”, and in the end we opted for trying to become artists. And on that day that we entered the doors of the college we saw this fabulous exhibition of Polish posters which was consummate in terms of the imagery that was assaulting us, the typography, the names which were unpronounceable, but in a way, on inspection and through the next year or so, we researched all these names of posters, names like Borowczyk, Lenica, Starowieyski, Cieslewicz, Tomaszewski and each one, for sure… through the research we realised that Lenica made animation films after having done posters, and Borowczyk made animation films and went on to make feature films, and it probably set a tiny star for us to maybe inherit.
At their suggestion, I ended up adding mini-biographies of many of the key Polish poster artists to the DVD booklet, which inevitably meant delving into their work myself – and they’re right: the range and quality is quite extraordinary. There are lots of examples available online – confusingly, two separate sites go by the names polishposter.com and polish-poster.com, each with loads of illustrations.
Here are a few direct links to work by some of the key designers to get you started (firstname and surname send you to different sites):
- Roman Cieslewicz
- Jan Lenica
- Jan Mlodozeniec
- Andrzej Pagowski
- Franciszek Starowieyski
- Waldemar Swierzy
- Henryk Tomaszewski
…but that’s just scratching the surface. Neither site highlights Walerian Borowczyk’s work as a poster designer , but Polishposter.com has a couple of examples.
Hi: A frind of mine is working on a site for his group on film posters of American westerns and I suggested he add european ones as well because those I’veseen, espeically the Belgium ones from th 50’s, are so beautiful. However, my favorite European film posters are Polish. They’re really terrific works of art. I looked through the works of the various artists you listed and I can’t tell which films are westerns. Do you have any examples of American wetern films from let’s say the 30’s through the presnt you could send me or list? Also, I’d ned to know something about the artists wand why you think Polish art posters are so much more impressionable than others from other countries..
Regards,
Bob Stein
Sacramento, California
You’d need to ask someone more specialist than me, but I’m guessing that there weren’t too many American westerns shown in the Eastern bloc countries during the period you mention – or at least not authentic American ones.
Italian Westerns had a following, largely because they were interpreted (rightly in some cases, optimistically in others) as Marxist critiques of American history, but the genuine articles would have been regarded with extreme suspicion – in much the same way that Soviet propaganda about ruddy-cheeked peasants singing about the joys of meeting production quotas while harvesting wheat in formation didn’t tend to cross the Atlantic.