Welcome to the “Faces of Poster”. Collection of Irena Hochman and Tadeusz Mysłowski exhibition. The posters presented at the exhibition are part of the collection of contemporary art gathered by Irena Hochman and Tadeusz Mysłowski – art dealer and artist from Lublin who live in New York. In 2017, they donated their collection to the National Museum in Lublin. This set, collected for more than half a century, depicts important phenomena in Polish graphic art of the second half of the 20th century and world art. At the same time it is a reflection of Mysłowski’s interests and sources of inspiration as an artist. The exhibition is dedicated to Szymon Bojko –outstanding historian and art critic, poster expert, researcher of Polish artists in the USA, lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence,  privately – good spirit and friend of Tadeusz Mysłowski. The posters, called “flowers of the street” by Mysłowski, originate mainly from the 1960s, when the artist studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts.

The first “founding” object of the collection was a poster announcing Tadeusz Kantor’s “Popular Exhibition of 937 Exhibits”, held at the Krzysztofory Gallery in 1963. As part of the exhibition, Kantor presented “non-artistic” or “lowest-rank” objects, as he would himself call them. Everyday objects, such as newspapers, unsent letters, and unfinished sketches from drawers, were presented alongside the artist’s drawings arranged on clotheslines. This “anti-exhibition”, by shifting the focus to the creative process, was the beginning of a new environment – art based on creating artistic, author’s space that comprehensively affects the viewer. For Tadeusz Mysłowski, it became one of the most important experiences that gave rise to the idea of creating a collection.

Let’s move on to the exhibition poster section.

The International Poster Biennale in Warsaw, launched in 1966, was the first event in the world to compare the achievements of Polish and international artists and provide an opportunity to learn about the directions in which the medium was developing worldwide. From its inception, it enjoyed recognition and renown in the artistic community. The first poster accompanying the competition at Central Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions Zachęta was designed by Wojciech Zamecznik. The symbol he created, with a rectangular shape alluding to the poster, surrounded by an outline and a dot inside it, began to function as the logo for the Biennale. The dominant feature of the poster designed by Waldemar Świerzy for the second edition of the competition is an abstract patch of colour filling the composition with a gradient, perhaps alluding to the painterly tradition of poster design.

In 1984, Mysłowski and Irena Hochman organised an exhibition of Mondrian’s last works at the Carpenter+Hochman Gallery in New York: “Piet Mondrian: The Wall Works, 1943–44”, inaugurating the gallery’s work. A poster from previous exhibition of a Dutch painter with a dedication by Harry Holtzman traces the friendly relationship between the two artists.

The artist developed the basic ingredients of “pure art”: neoplasticism recognised as the most extreme and ascetic form of geometric abstraction. The basis of this neoplastic language consisted of rigorously cut horizontal and vertical lines at right angles, which delineated square and rectangular fields filled with flat colour in the three primary colours: red, blue and yellow, and in the so-called non-colours: white, grey and black.

We can find fascinating display of formal experimentation in the poster for Marcel Duchamp’s exhibition. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Duchamp challenged conventions and was a master provocateur. The poster for the exhibition at Paris’s famed La Hune relies on a simple cut-and-paste technique. Here, Duchamp utilised the template he had already used for the cover of Sur Marcel Duchamp – a monograph about him by Robert Lebel (1958). The template – a zinc plate with the flat contour of Duchamp’s face – was made a year before. Initially intended for the monograph, the self-portrait in profile has seen multiple background-colour variations over the years, including in exhibition posters.

The creative use of photography is a distinguishing feature of the poster for Andy Warhol’s and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s exhibition – a clash of two celebrated figures and their different visions of art. The first series of Warhol’s and Basquiat’s collaborative paintings was displayed in his Zurich gallery in 1984 and a year later in New York at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. The poster uses one of Michael Halsband’s photographs taken in preparation for the exhibition. The picture of Warhol and Basquiat wearing Everlast trunks and boxing gloves became their iconic portrait. According to Shafrazi, the idea behind the boxing theme was to capture the artists’ rivalry during their collaborative work.

The work Big Nudes, which announces an exhibition of nudes at the School of Visual Arts in 1967, is considered to be Milton Glaser’s most famous poster, alongside his work announcing a new Bob Dylan album. The informational layer here has been reduced to the bare minimum; it is dominated by the image of a fragmentarily framed nude female body, which has been scaled up by the artist. As a result, the enlarged female nude does not fit into the pictorial field; it seems to “burst” the composition, overrunning the frame of the poster and intruding into the surrounding space. Glaser’s innovative work corresponded with the bold, provocative theme of the exhibition.  The poster is also evidence of experimentation with form and changing approach to designing advertising materialns. Thanks to the techniques used by the artist – especially the minimisation of the text part – it can be read as an independent visual work.Let’s move on to the film and theatre poster section.

In the communist period, cinema in Poland became a “magical” vehicle for entertainment. Although screening of western productions in Poland was  delayed, the cinemas were overcrowded. Paradoxically, in a situation of great interest in film screenings, the poster as an advertising tool was not needed, but it attracted with its visual side, reviving the grey reality of Polish cities. The metamorphosis of this new medium was occurring mainly in film posters, which were under less state control than political ones. It was important for Polish artists to maintain their artistic autonomy and break free from the prevailing model of the Western film poster, which relied on stills and was artistically unsophisticated.

Metaphor and picturalism, in other words giving posters the character of a painting work by leaving clear traces of a brush or operating with free stains of colour – characterised the phenomenon referred to as the Polish school of poster. The pictorial layer contained a summary of the plot described by Waldemar Świerzy as a “synthesis of two hours”.

Jan Lenica’s allusive poster for Roman Polanski’s film Knife in the Water uses an ambiguous metaphor, the reception of which requires reflection. The artist referred to the plot and the main characters by summoning three fish and giving them human faces. One of them flows in the opposite direction – “upstream” – breaking up the existing system. Between the fish one can clearly see the tension that causes conflict. One can clearly feel the emotional coldness and drama of the film.

Thérèse Desqueyroux is the most famous novel by Francois Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The title character is on trial for a failed attempt to poison her husband Bernard. The plot begins with court proceedings discontinued at the request of the would-be victim. The dramatic fate of the heroine was filmed by Georges Franju in 1962. The poster by Franciszek Starowieyski conveys the atmosphere of horror in the unfolding events. The face of the woman, obscured by a mane of thick hair, symbolises the unclear motives behind her actions, mysterious personality and her struggle to understand herself. The bird with a skull on her shoulder heralds the attempted murder. Handwritten informational captions enhance the painterly nature of the representation. The poster is considered to be the closing work of the “Baroque” period of the Polish School of Posters.

The typographic poster by Stanisław Zagórski stands out against the pictorial tendencies leading the way among artists of the Polish School of Posters. This is evidenced by the predominance of black and white in the composition, the departure from handwritten lettering and the use of photography. Using a sequence of numbers and letters tightly filling the picture field, the author illustrated the eponymous cipher, with which the military used to pass on information about the activities of the enemy army. The resulting pattern – partly obscured by a hand clutching a revolver, a reference to military action – comes to the fore. The lack of individual features on the human head shown in profile, needed to identify the figure, alludes to the anonymity afforded by the use of the cipher machine and the need to maintain state secrets.

In Wojciech Zamecznik’s artworks, photography is elevated to an integral and dominant element of the visual message. Subjected to experiments through his in-depth knowledge and combined with typography, photography was the core of his sparsely detailed compositions. The present collection includes his landmark work – the poster for Mondo Cane. Zamecznik utilised the photographic image of his wife, Halina. On the poster, she has the film’s title painted black on her cheek. Zamecznik painted it on her face before taking the picture. The stripped-down aesthetics of his poster heralded the rise of experiments in radical defiance against the painterly style in posters. Here, defiance takes the form of shunning colour in favour of shades of black and white – the distinctive feature of graphic art. Letters in type replaced handwriting to become an integral element of the poster medium.

The Birds is one of the first film posters by Zelek, created for the famous thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The work of the Polish poster designer is an example of the artist’s search for his own means of expression, rejecting the pictoriality characteristic of the Polish School of Posters in favour of typography placed on an equal footing with the image. In The Birds, the artist used black and white colours and typeset lettering as the main motif building up the composition of the image. A word reproduced several times replaces the image of the film’s eponymous characters. The graduation of the type from the smallest to the largest creates the impression of a cloud of birds approaching the viewer, centred around a skull with bird wings in the foreground, which symbolises the danger awaiting people – an imminent attack by aggressive birds. Zelek’s interest in typography is also evident after his trip to Vienna, where he created a typeface called New Zelek.

The tragicomedy The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt tells the dramatic story of Claire. As a young girl, she had an affair with one Alfred Ill. When Claire became pregnant, Alfred denied paternity, accusing her of promiscuity. The humiliated woman survives the death of her child and flees the city. Years later, her dramatic fate is reversed, and she returns to Güllen as an older woman with a vast fortune, offering a high price for killing Alfred Ill. Dürrenmatt’s play has seen multiple screen adaptations. Jan Lenica designed the poster for the 1964 film The Visit, directed by Bernhard Wicki. In this work, the artist uses a clear contour and a flexible, wavy line, which creates finely decorative shapes surrounding a female figure depicted in a grotesque manner with the head of a bird. The composition is complemented by the ornamental typography used for the film’s title. Lenica used here the means of expression characteristic of Art Nouveau, which became a dominant feature of his late work.

The title of this film refers to the Italian Renaissance writer Giovanni Boccaccio. His most famous literary work, The Decameron, appeared in print around 1470 and was included in the list of banned books in 1599. The themes centre around human vices: folly, stinginess and debauchery. The film Boccacio 70 follows the structure of The Decameron and consists of four novellas directed by different directors: Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli and Luchino Visconti. The number 70 in the title is an allusion to the censorship in force in Italy at the time and the delay in the film’s release by eight years from its date of production.

Intense colour, sharp contours, and a simplification of figures tending towards the pictorial have become recognisable features of Krajewski’s work, drawn from the pop-art aesthetic.

The directions of further development of the poster, moving away from pictorialism, were marked, among other things, by the influence of American mass culture, which evinced itself in the assimilation of pop art and comic book aesthetics. In the collection, these are most fully manifested in the posters of Waldemar Świerzy and Andrzej Krajewski. Świerzy’s work is a direct transposition of the comic strip – film frames enclosed in sequences of a pictorial story accompanied by characteristic speech balloons. The artist makes use of its dynamics and operates a graphic drawing filled with a flat colour spot, using a bold black outline. Świerzy’s reference to the art of the comic strip confirms the popularity of this medium in 20th-century mass culture. One of the most famous creators of pop art making direct reference to the art of the comic strip was Roy Lichtenstein, who contributed to its popularisation. In Poland, comics enjoyed considerable popularity thanks to Henryk Chmielewski (Tytus, Romek and A’Tomek) and Janusz Christa (Kajko and Kokosz).

Fernando Arrabal – Spanish playwright, director and poet – often explored existential themes in his work. For three years he was a member of André Breton’s Surrealist group. Together with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ronald Topor, Arrabal founded the Panique group in 1962, in which

Roman Cieślewicz found the creative freedom during his time in France in the Panique group, established by Fernando Arrabal – Spanish playwright, director and poet. In Paris, he created the series “Symmetrical Figures” between 1971 and 1974. Made using the silkscreen method, the prints are characterised by a composition based on a mirror image along a vertical axis. A prelude to the formal treatments used there can be seen in a Parisian theatre poster entitled Arrabal. The sparse composition from 1968 was made using the photomontage technique the artist often employed. The black-and-white, symmetrical silhouette or the use of the mirror effect foreshadowed a series of serigraphs from the 1970s which included the above features.

Let’s move on to the circus poster section.

This poster by Roman Cieślewicz is an example of a new way of advertising the circus, developed in the 1960s, that relies on illustrating particular circus “acts”: tumbling, wild animal training, acrobatics or clown gags. Cieślewicz’s work uses the formula of a visual joke combined with his often-used photomontage technique. The monumental, realistic silhouette of the elephant is controlled by a figure composed of multicoloured elements, as if cut out of paper. They simultaneously become part of the inscription “circus”. The typographic arrangement used emphasises the dynamics of the show, and the colourful, overlapping lettering characters in Cieślewicz’s poster are not so much informative as they are, by personifying the acrobat, a fully-fledged element of the composition.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Hubert Hilscher depicted the key figures of the circus arena in his posters on several occasions. These included a tiger, lion, elephant, monkey, zebra, parrot, panther, cyclist and juggler. Hilscher’s love of animals is also evidenced by his collection of wooden, ceramic and glass figurines, which may have been the inspiration for his depictions of animal motifs in his posters. Representative examples for Hilscher’s use of such means of expression as the abandonment of local colour, fanciful colouring, clear contouring and caricatured stylisation include: a “leafy” lion, a rainbow zebra and a tiger balancing on a wheel, showing its menacing, sharp teeth. In transforming the figure of the carnivore, Hilscher resorted to a convention close to illustration for children – he simplified the form, used thick outlines and contrasting colours. Despite reducing the tiger’s silhouette to a sign, the composition, lacking in any detail, remains highly decorative.

Let’s move on to the advertising poster section.

In Henryk Tomaszewski’s poster, tourists are encouraged by the Lajkonik to take interest in Poland’s folkloric values. Associated with regional rituals, the Lajkonik is a landmark symbol of Kraków’s centuries-long heritage. The concept of a poster could be regarded as a wink to the viewer, a virtuoso joke far from the usual pompous grandeur of artwork advertising countries. Put together in a seemingly random fashion from several colourful clippings, the horse silhouette is clumsy and simplistic, as if made by the unskilled hand of a child. The same could be said of the pieces of a wheel – Tomaszewski’s favourite figure. They provide a frame for the Lajkonik in an otherwise background-less picture, albeit disregarding symmetry and regularity. This sloppy rendering serves to express a more relaxed approach. The artist employed this device intentionally to expose orthodox thinking patterns.

Established in 1958, the state-owned company Polish Fashion was for many years one of the most recognisable brands in the history of the Polish fashion industry. Roman Cieślewicz is the author of a poster for the company. For a “fashion” poster, this work is highly unorthodox. His artwork could be described as an intellectual puzzle based on a system of associations and a play of imagination. Cieślewicz merged two symbols of beauty – the head of Nefertiti, famous for her timeless beauty, and a red rose, which serves as a fanciful, sophisticated head covering for the Pharaoh’s wife. White, red and shaped like Poland’s map, the piece of her top is a clear reference to the brand’s national origin. Through photography, Cieślewicz gave the whole artwork a concrete dimension, resulting in a vision of contemporary yet timeless beauty, sophistication and luxury – the core values of this fashion brand.

On the poster one can also see the company logo in the form of a characteristic swallow, designed by Jerzy Treutler, which was an element of the company’s visual identity.

Tadeusz Mysłowski’s fascination with the work of Andy Warhol, whom he met in person, is confirmed by the presence in the collection not only of posters and prints by Warhol, but also of objects that were not his work with the signatures of the “pope of pop art”. One of these is a Campbell’s soup can autographed by the artist. Warhol’s iconography is defined by the reality of mass consumption, which consisted of borrowings, devoid of his interpretation, of commonly available products, images from the world of advertising and mass media, and images of pop culture icons. In 1962, Warhol exhibited thirty-two paintings depicting Campbell’s Soup cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.

Warhol, who began his career as an illustrator, also designed album covers, including the Sticky Fingers album cover by The Rolling Stones, which is on display at the exhibition. It gained a cult following for its innovative form of a working zipper as part of the cover. The band’s distinctive logo appeared on the cover for the first time.

Let’s move on to the musical poster section.

Among Poland’s most prestigious music events is the International Chopin Piano Competition. Running since 1927, the contest has been deservedly enjoying worldwide acclaim. Lyrical and imbued with poetic metaphor – evoking the native landscape – Trepkowski’s piece announced the event’s fifth edition of 1955. Trepkowski composed a stripped-down composition free from overly illustrative content, relying instead on a precise sign system. He reduced the distinctly Polish autumn landscape to a synthetic line of willows fading into the horizon, a cloudy sky and flat Mazovian fields traversed by black-and-white piano keys. These seemingly distant elements’ perfect symbiosis and rhythm create a visual reference to Chopin and his music.

Milton Glaser’s poster showing Bob Dylan’s portrait, albeit in the language of graphic art. The author achieved this effect by using smooth and firm Art-Nouveau-style contours. A six-million copy release, the poster became an emblem of 1960s American pop culture. It was commissioned by Columbia Records to be packaged with the album Greatest Hits by the great American singer-songwriter, composer and poet. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s self-portrait, this image derives its impact from the contrast between Dylan’s luxuriant curly hair, with its swirling streams of colours, and the artist’s crude planar profile standing out boldly in black against the white background. Equally significant as Dylan’s synthetic, crude image is Glaser’s innovative, a typographic rendering of the musician’s name is an integral part of the poster. Milton Glaser admitted that the inspiration for the design was Marcel Duchamp’s 1957 self-portrait, which you saw earlier in the exhibition.

Let’s move on to the social and political poster.

In the social realism period, posters were a tool of the propaganda machine and aggressive indoctrination. Propaganda sought, among other things, to convince people of the triumph of the communist system and to stigmatize actions that were inconsistent with the prevailing political doctrine. Włodzimierz Zakrzewski set up the Propaganda Poster Studio in Lublin, which mainly dealt with the mass production of colourful posters designed to visualize propaganda slogans prevailing at that time.

One of the directions of agitation concerned the achievements of the state and the successes attained within the framework of the planned socialist economy. Poster artists promoted industrialization and called for increasing efforts to implement tasks ahead of schedule.

Tadeusz Trepkowski’s posters operate with synthesis and symbol as elements of a reflective metaphor, steeped in intellectual depth. There are clear references to the pre-war design tradition inspired, among other things, by the work of the eminent French poster designer and art theorist Adolphe Mouron Cassandre. The anti-war poster No! was created for the Congress of the Peoples for Peace held in Vienna in 1952. Its dissimilarity relative to the canon of propaganda posters paved grounds for a long-standing conflict between the artist and an influential group of social realists. The artist was accused of formalism and his projects, including the outstanding No!, were commonly rejected. The poster in question, themed around World War II and the Holocaust, evokes the image of a destroyed city encircled by the outline of a falling bomb. It constitutes a suggestive metaphor for a warning against an apocalyptic experience. Similar warnings can also be seen in the works by Józef Dynda and Zbigniew Kaja included in this collection.

Zbigniew Kaja worked in painting, artistic printmaking, book design, stage design and exhibitions, as well as posters, which became his main means of artistic expression and the largest part of his oeuvre, consisting of around three hundred projects. As a poster artist, he most often took up cultural and socio-political themes. The work We Remember is an expression of objection to the events taking place during the Second World War. Kaja evokes the motif of camp uniforms – the striped sleeve depicted on the poster, marked with a red triangle reserved for political prisoners, sends the viewer to the tragedy of the concentration camps. The poster appeared in three language versions: Polish English and German. The first Polish version of the poster commemorating the events at Auschwitz, bearing the inscription “Never again”, was created in 1955; it received an award in the “Warsaw’s Best Poster” competition in 1962.

The presence of the poster titled Books on All Branches of Knowledge by Alexander Rodchenko in Tadeusz Mysłowski’s collection reflects his interest in works by Russian avant-garde artists. The geometry of the structural order, which can be noted in the poster, points to Rodchenko drawing inspiration from El Lissitzky’s ideological poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, based on the correlation of different geometric structures. Rodchenko’s poster was commissioned by the Leningrad Branch of the State Publishing House as part of a literacy campaign to counter illiteracy in Russia. The photomontage used by the artist is an agitation tool, an authentic verse from reality employed to further enhance the impact. The sincerity of the message is legitimised by the photograph of Lila Brik, a muse of Vladimir Mayakovsky associated with the Russian avant-garde movement, portrayed as a proletarian.

One of the global social undertakings involving the use of posters is the fight against the AIDS epidemic and the defence of the rights of those suffering from the disease. In the 1980s, HIV and AIDS in the USA became synonyms of fear, stigma and death, provoking a critical response from artists. For Keith Haring, an artist himself affected by the disease, visual measures were intended to raise awareness, draw attention to the spreading of AIDS, and also to promote safe sex. Using his works to speak openly about his experience of the disease, Haring condemned the stigmatisation of homosexuality, the social ostracism of those suffering from AIDS, and the conspiracy of silence regarding the epidemic. The artist attracted attention for the graffiti he created on the billboards of the New York subway system. Using condensed contour drawing with flowing lines and a set of fixed, synthetically treated elements, he created a recognisable, expressive pop-graffiti aesthetic.

Presented artworks focusing on the idea of artistic activism are linked to the protest, within many artists’ fields of vision, against acts of violence and widespread access to firearms in the USA. In “Untitled” (Death by Gun), a work by Félix González-Torres, the artist documented four hundred and sixty victims shot in the USA in just one week in May 1989. The artist published their names, ages, cities and states, in most cases including a photograph and a brief description of the circumstances of their death. After more than three decades since the work was created, the artist’s message still holds relevance, as deadly mass shootings and firearms incidents remain a common occurrence in the USA.

The “Faces of Poster” exhibition closes with other works by Félix González-Torres that are filled with personal and emotional meaning. They were originally displayed in the form of piles of minimalist sculptures meant to initiate a dynamic interaction with the audience. They were designed to “go off”, very much like the installations made of scattered sweets which González-Torres himself encouraged people to eat. He wanted the sheets of paper taken away by individual viewers to continue to serve in any way they wanted, also as posters.

This poster was created in the first years following Tadeusz Mysłowski’s departure for New York, at a time when the artist was working intensely on developing a new language of artistic expression based on the rules of geometry. The poster’s composition is built around a synthetic grid, which became the predominant element in the artist’s imagery. Its combination with the headline of “The New York Times” determines the place, significance and role of New York in Mysłowski’s work as his living and artistic space. The arrangement of intersecting lines was inspired by the urban structure of the city. Mysłowski used the arrangement to replace the original newspaper text as if he wanted to refer to the words of the motto stated in the headline: “get all the news and get it right”. The poster was accepted for the International Poster Biennale in Warsaw in 1974 and can currently be found in the collection of the Poster Museum at Wilanów.