Art: Pretty Polish Posters

In the U.S., most top fine artists would work haughtily with a refuse any commercial offer or to paint any exhortatory message in it; in Poland, an easier ethic and a powerful state need for propaganda prevail. Thus the common poster, which may proclaim no loftier message than the ordinary American billboard, may bear the signature of a top artist. On display last week in the West German city of Essen were 124 posters done between 1951 and 1959 in Poland. The show has traveled all over West Germany, convincing the Germans that in this art form Poland stands as high as any nation.

Poland achieved its present standing almost in spite of itself. In its early years after World War II, the new Red regime was all for more and bigger posters; but like other countries in the Communist bloc, it favored the ponderous style of social realism. The graphic artists, led by the late Tadeusz Trepkowski, insisted on the right to something they called “emotional symbolism”— a highly charged, individual style in which mood and metaphor, as well as words, would carry the message. The artists won, and the poster became the first art form to be liberated from the long night of Stalinism.

The 32 artists in the Essen show span two generations, and their posters cover everything from Communist youth rallies to safety regulations to new movies.

Though the styles run from representational to abstract, their chief characteristic is their emotional appeal.

An announcement of the French movie version of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is dominated by two abstract blobs that on closer inspection turn out to be the gnarled claws of an old witch. A poster for a Federico Fellini film on the demoralization of youth shows youth as a bird hovering over a twisted treelike abstraction symbolizing society. A music festival is announced by a semiabstract landscape still wet with rain and crowned with lowering clouds. Across this tense scene that hovers between sun and storm is written, in an elegant 19th century hand, the signature “F. Chopin.” A poster for an exhibition commemorating the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Polish Communist Party is a subtle and muted tribute to those who once risked their lives for what was supposed to be a noble cause. It is a simple collage of a torn piece of red banner plus scraps of leaflets and crude slogans written hastily on a wall.