Welcome

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Zapraszamy

The first thing you'll notice about the posters on this web site, drawn from the Golden Age of Polish Posters (1950-1980), is that they appear quite unlike most movie posters, theater posters, or music posters you've seen before.

That era brought a deliberate, concerted movement among graphic designers in Poland to transform the traditional poster into something radically different. Something wild. The concept snowballed into many years and many thousands of posters that offered the viewer both information and a brief encounter with art, usually head-turning art.

US version Polish version

Rather than employ Hollywood "star power" in glamorous shots of the actors, or "impact" scenes with explosive poster-sized stills, the shift was to a completely graphic interpretation of the theme or plot of the movie or play or event. And the interpretation belonged to the poster's creator only. In other words, the design of the poster told something of a visual story about the story, dictated by the artist's imagination rather than Hollywood or other entertainment industries and their accepted marketing rules.

US version Polish version

Designers actively integrated a more "painterly" approach, pushing the boundaries of well-entrenched graphic design for the entertainment industry. In short order, the "School of Polish Poster" (not a physical learning facility but a school of thought or a style) built an international reputation for poster art that was different, skilled, fresh, intriguing, and often pretty weird.

Most of the pioneers of the Polish School embraced the abstract to some degree. Many were also children of the European Surrealists in an artistic sense, and kin to the "Action Painters" breaking out with a bang simultaneously in the West. It showed in their work, and that's part of what we celebrate on this site. By the late 1950s, Polish graphic artists had won dozens of international awards with an approach that turned poster design on its ear. Surrealism and the abstract, of course, dovetailed nicely with the psychedelia of popular art throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and Polish artists were quick to put their mark on that style, as well.

This site is designed as a place to wander about and enjoy two distinctively different, but quite inter-related, types of visual art.