Original contemporary/vintage polish posters(1950s-1990s) - the antique & vintage art posters of tomorrow...the art investment for the future;from the world-famous Polish School of Posters, recognized as the best in contemporary poster art comparable to France's La Belle Epoque of the 1890s. |
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The Writing on the Wall
 It was a Sunday morning in 1989,
and Gary Cooper was all over
Warsaw. Nearly 10,000 posters,
plastered around the city at daybreak,
bore the image of the marshal from
the 1952 Western High Noon. His
photograph was black and white, save
for the red Solidarity logo placed on
his chest, and he carried a paper
ballot in place of a pistol. The poster's
inscription was simple: IT'S HIGH
NOON, JUNE 4, 1989.
That paper sheriff was on a mission:
to encourage Poles to vote for
Solidarity in that day's parliamentary
elections. In the Western, the hero
always wins; in the elections,
Solidarity secured a landslide victory,
and the High Noon poster became an
emblem of triumph and new
beginning. Yet the poster itself marked an ending. It was the last great work
of the Polish Poster School.
Half a century before Twitter became the medium of choice for underground
communications in Iran, artistically innovative Poles used the power of
images to slip subversive messages past the communist watchdogs. In an
age when "print" means "old," and visual appeal takes a back seat to speed,
it's hard to believe what a powerful weapon lithography could once be.
Twenty-four posters from the heyday of the Polish school are on view at New
York's Museum of Modern Art until November. The works, clustered together
as they would have been on a poster kiosk in Warsaw, chronicle a movement
that actually benefited from the oversight of the communist regime. Posters
advertising plays, films, circuses, and exhibitions were subject to strict
control, but they also received state funding. Censorship also provided a
strangely nurturing environment for creativity, especially in the way artists
borrowed from surrealism and expressionism to develop a language of
metaphor. In one poster advertising a 1981 production of Macbeth, the
king's face appears trapped in a kind of brick bandage resembling a castle.
His eyes are obscured, his jaw locked in place. To the censor, it showed a
face with a castle; to the viewer, it could speak volumes about the blinding,
mind-numbing danger of power.
It's been 20 years since Cooper's marshal marched into Warsaw, leaving the
country—and its posters—changed forever. Poles remembered his influence
on the anniversary of the election this year by displaying an oversize reprint
of the poster on Warsaw's Palace of Culture. But today, state support for
artists is gone, and sales-driven, artless advertising is king. In Poland (as in
the United States), visual culture is saturated with pop-up ads and all-too-
obvious sales slogans. It's nearly impossible to find socially compelling
commercial art. Maybe the Polish Poster School can take us back to that high
noon, when a picture really could speak a thousand words.
© 2009
"Solidarnosc, Twenty Years of History" Book available from Polish-American Bookstore, NYC, (212) 594-2386; Polish Bookstore & Publishing, Inc, Brooklyn, NY, (800) 277-0407, email: sales@polbook.com; your local Polish bookstore, or from publisher: "From Peaceful Resolution
Photo exhibit on 'The Polish August,' organized by 'The KARTA Center,' Warsaw, Poland The Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in New York
Photos #218, #232, #233, #255 from the book "Solidarnosc, Twenty Years of History".
Other posters by artists of the Polish School of Posters
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