Very Graphic: Polish Designers of the 20th Century

edited by Jacek Mrowczyk

Introduction - 'These (chapters) describe the graphic design of the period in the wider context of its material culture and the technological, social and political changes that abounded in Polish twentieth-century history'

*Against All Odds - Piotr Rypson (history of Polish graphic design between 1919-1949)

1900-1945 First Generations
(Piotr Rypson)

pg. 12 - Poland in the early twentieth-century was not featured on the map of Europe, being parceled into three partitions and subject to various political, economic, and cultural influences. 

The most liberal of these areas was the Austrian partition, and Krakow, the capital and seat of polish kings, served as the symbolic center of this supposedly non-existent country, with a significant part of Poland's artistic, literary and publishing activities being concentrated in that city.

'However, the Krakow and Warsaw publishing centers were insufficient for a more dynamic development of graphic design - what was needed were state-funded public service commissions and modern, capitalist advertising. These two driving forces were only launched a dozen or so years later, with the advent of the reborn Polish state.

pg. 13 - 'Poland reappeared on the map of Europe in 1918. The architects of the new state faced the mammoth task of merging three culturally different territories devastated by war, lying within borders that had undergone alterations and revisions by force of arms, ethnically very diverse and shaken by internal and external destabilizing forces.

pg. 17 - 'In the development of graphic design, a breakthrough came with the organisation of the Polish General Exhibition in Poznan, marking the tenth anniversary of Poland's regained statehood

1945-1980 Freedom Under Control
(Krzysztof Lenk)

pg. 136 - 'Poland spent the years 1945-1949 liquidating the remains of its military and civilian underground networks that answered to the London based government-in-exile and extending communist control over all areas of life.'

'Pre-war printing houses reopened; and new, large, state and party controlled publishing houses were established...[with the] Military Press specialising in political propaganda'

'The Czytelnik publishing house began mass production of books, magazines and newspapers. These publishers were an important source of assignments for graphic designers.'

'Cultural policy, relatively open in the early postwar years, introduced greater restrictions along with the escalation of the Cold War and in the years 1948-1949, the enforcement of a doctrine of socialist realism in art.'

'Private publishers were closed down, while theaters and cinemas were nationalised. An omnipotent board of censors controlled all means of communication, right down to the labels on canned foodstuffs.'

pg. 137 - 'The influence of "degenerate and formalistic Western art" was banned and domestic arts became a tool of political propaganda. Universities and academies sacked many outstanding scientists and artists for being critical of the new doctrine.'

The Party, for KC PZPR (1955)
Wlodzimierz Zakrzewski

'A special role at this time was played by the military's Front Poster Studio (Pracownia Plakatu Frontowego), headed by Wlodzimierz Zakrzewski, a painter educated in the USSR.'

'At the beginning of 1945, Tadeusz Trepkowski went to work in this studio and briefly, Henryk Tomaszewski. For the first time there arose a confrontation between two types of presentation in posters: realistic painting modeled on Soviet visual propaganda, as promoted by Zakrzewski and the party designers gathered around him, and the symbolic and metaphorical style represented by Trepkowski. This conflict lasted until the thaw in the mid-fifties.'

'The older generation of poster and book cover designers, who had pre-war careers and recognition behind them...were now joined by a group of younger artists who had made their debuts shortly before the outbreak of war'

1. Apache (1957), Wojciech Fangor
2. Hiroshima, My Love (1960), Stanislaw Zagorski

pg. 138 - 'In 1946, the deputy manager of Polish Film's ad department, Hanna Tomaszewska, invited the cooperation of a group of young designers and agreed to the artistic conditions they laid down...

Henryk Tomaszewski, Eryk Lipinski, Tadeusz Trepkowski and Wojciech Zamecznik opened a new chapter in the history of Polish film poster design.'

pg. 140 - 'In the field of culture, the first half of the fifties saw intense attempts at Russification and "alignment" to the model adopted in the USSR.'

'Attempts were made to create a uniform, centrally "approved" language of visual propaganda - a language of realistic presentation of content, comprehensible for the "man in the street". Information was to be communicated by means of aggressive and easily remembered political slogans, enhanced by illustration'

pg. 141 - 'In the second half of the fifties, the political poster evolved from an agressive attack against enemies of the state and attitudes hostile to the regime to include more celebratory functions, permitting a broader range of artistic solutions and a greater degree of individualism and decoration.'

'Around 1954, a new language for Polish movie, theater and exhibition posters crystalized, well grounded in expressionist painting, free of the literal representation characteristic of political and commercial posters, later often to be known as the Polish school of poster.'

'This language appealed to viewers' imaginations, and slipped in associations related to their experience.'

 1. The Barricade (1958), book cover, Marian Stachurski
2. Boomerang (1968), book cover, Mieczyslaw Kowalczyk

pg. 142 - Zdzislaw Schubert wrote: "The poster ceased to be just a dry communication of the subject - it became, through the artist's intrinsic reflections, an interpreter and commentator on the subject.

...This resulted from the poster's treatment as an artistic discipline, intended to fulfill specified utility functions - and not merely as an instrument for conveyance of information employing artistic means...'

'In the Polish People's Republic, in its most ambitious examples, the poster began to function as a specific field of the arts, ruled by its own laws... .Polish artists showed that the poster may be, in spite of its limitations, an equally sensitive, aesthetic and deeply meaningful instrument in expressing its designer's attitude to the surrounding reality, like every other discipline of art."


'Polish posters were noticed and entered international circulation. Exhibitions of "merry" posters began touring the world, counteracting in the minds of the public the stereotype of Poland as a grim communist country behind the Iron Curtain.'

- International Poster Biennial in Warsaw (founded 1966)
- Poster Museum in Wilanow (in 1968)