Polish Poster Design Under Communist Reign

To a fully industrialized and postmodern world the foundations of modernism may seem a bit idealistic or naïve, but for a century that witnessed two world wars and countless national protests challenging governmental oppression, modernism at its core is very real. The progression of Polish poster design, which found its true beginnings after Nazi Germany invaded Warsaw in 1939, encapsulates the visionary approach modernism embraced. As Warsaw struggled to adjust to the broken buildings and debris that used to be their city, the citizens of Warsaw struggled to find hope.

“Modernism’s attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic,”  and with the limited resources of a repressed Poland, artists and designers strained to express their artistic visions through the few mediums that were available. The growing popularity of poster design in developed nations like France (Art Nouveau) and Germany (Bauhaus) paved a more available and affordable path for Polish artists in a time when selling art to collectors was not an option. Photography, it seems, was not even a consideration for Polish poster designers, who instead used more traditional materials such as paint and ink, complete with hand-lettered blocks of text, to express themselves.

German occupation of Poland lasted until the end of World War II in 1945, with Poland losing more than six million citizens during the war, over six hundred thousand of which had died as a direct result of combat operations.  As a devastated Poland struggled to recover, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin over-took the nation in a fashion that Winston Churchill described as an “Iron Curtain” of control.  After promises of a free election for Poland with a failed attempt to follow, Stalin and company eventually fixed the polls with careful control in order to obtain desirable results.  For the next forty years, Poland would fall under oppressive Communist rule.

As Poland continued to struggle with its disheartening governmental regime, poster making emerged as a primary form of public expression. Similar in size to the adverts of modern New York City, the brightly colored posters of Warsaw were a direct contrast to its bleak and disheveled surroundings. The roots of Polish poster design were inspired by classic American film, a popular form of entertainment for the dispirited nation. Artists of Poland were commissioned to remake the American film propaganda by officials who thought the American versions difficult for a Polish nation to interpret. The commissioned artists agreed to remake the posters on the condition they be allowed to preserve their artistic freedom. For officials, this was acceptable so long as the artists agreed to respect the government’s traditional laws of censorship. This resulted in beautifully simplistic designs, rich in metaphor and visually striking, as the artists competed with one another as well as with their censors to produce high quality posters.

The following decades would witness the growing popularity of the Polish poster as something of a paradox, revealing highly individualistic approaches while still maintaining a communicative role, with its aesthetic spirit surviving “political attempts to control artistic expression.”  Polish posters would achieve increased notoriety, and Polish artists would push their limits in using metaphors to express a general distaste with the state of the Polish government. For decades artists would compete with one another in a sort of game, complying with government expectations in the first layer of their image while still trying to smuggle in some personal undertones.  What resulted was an affluence of aggressive anti-establishment propaganda, masked by the stories of American film. A famous poster of this era, designed by  for the film Police, depicts a noose running out of a man’s mouth, back into his ears and again out of his eyes, representing the popular phrase “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”. Surprisingly, the poster raised no red flags and was approved immediately.

With Stalin’s death in 1953, Poland found itself with a new leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka. “Gomulka, a man who eight years earlier had been suspended from the party and jailed on Stalin’s orders as ‘a rightist nationalist deviationist,’”  again promised the nation significant changes. At first Poland rejoiced, welcoming Gomulka’s word as a signal of hope, but when Gomulka’s decision in 1968 to allow a national campaign against student activists ultimately evolved into a “a full-scale anti-Semitic campaign that sent most of Poland’s remaining Jews into flight,”  his reign as leader of Poland began to collapse. In 1970, Polish police killed scores of street protestors contesting the price of food , and Gomulka had no choice but to resign

It was fitting then that the second generation of Polish poster designers would find their true voice during Gomulka’s period of reign. Many believe the 1960′s to have marked the beginning of the Polish poster’s true impact in an increasingly frustrating environment.  This “second generation of artists” (those who found their beginnings during the communist period that followed the end of WWII), would later launch the highly influential Polish Poster School, built on their predecessors’ artistic instincts by creating posters that not only incorporated an individualistic style, but also played with a subjective form of expression. The posters being created during this era were no longer considered advertisements at all; they were art.

The reason for these artists’ success in conceptualizing posters as art instead of commercial propaganda can be at least partially attributed to the departments of the Polish government that commissioned the artists. Unlike the privatized businesses of the West, public forms of art and, more specifically, movie posters were commissioned by two central bodies in the Polish government: Film Polski (Polish Film) and Centrala Wynajmu Filmow – CWF (Movie Rentals Central). These two institutions were not concerned with the relation between the American films and their Polish poster counterparts. So long as the poster was not offensive in the eyes of the Polish government, the poster would be printed.

What came to follow would define Poland’s poster movement as a pivotal era in the nation’s historic and artistic timelines. The Graphic Arts Department at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts “divided its areas of instruction into fine arts, visual communications, applied arts, and poster art. It helped, thereby, to establish what is known as the Polish Poster School.”  As a result, the Polish community “began to regard poster design as an art form equal in importance to painting.”  Posters were no longer being commissioned for film only. Due to the Polish poster’s popularity, artists were now being hired to create posters for theatre events and the Polish circus (Cyrk). The generation of artists being commissioned for posters had now realized the power that came with their craft.

As Polish posters began to gain notoriety for their powerful anti-communistic connotations, the student activists of the 1968 protests and the workers who had been shot at in 1970 during Gomulka’s final months as leader joined together to form what would eventually become the Solidarność (Solidarity) movement. With the election of a Polish Pope in 1978, “nearly a third of the nation joined Solidarity and hundreds of thousands, mostly young workers, were emboldened to quit the Communist Party.”  In 1980, the movement would later grow into a trade union against communism and, in 1981, communist leader Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski would declare martial law in Poland.

“Can a self-organized society transform the political system of a state within the Soviet empire, by pressure from below, without violence?”  To say that the Solidarity movement was a revolution would be inaccurate; the Solidarity party never attempted to overthrow the old state power. Instead, the Solidarity movement and the Party-state existed side-by-side for over a year in what has been described as a “Dual Power.”   A traditionalist Polish government, growing tired and possibly afraid of the uprising, declared martial law in December of 1981 and banned Solidarity and other small organizations. Martial law would last officially until July of 1983, but many political prisoners of the period were not released until 1986.

Apart from restricting the civil liberties of the majority of Poland’s citizens (a curfew was invoked), martial law effectively pushed Polish poster design underground. Many artists were no longer free to express themselves through their artwork for fear of being arrested or killed. What resulted was something of a dark age in Polish poster design; the citizens of Poland who fought so hard to maintain their artistic freedom had inadvertently forced the government to disallow art altogether. Suddenly, the citizens of Poland were no longer concerned with anything other than the revision of their nation. As a Polish working class continued to fight for their rights, the Solidarity Party continued to build support for reform. American President Ronald Reagan’s public opposition to any further Soviet military involvement in the Eastern Bloc and widespread strikes by Polish workers in 1988 forced Jaruzelski and the Communist Party to begin official discussions with leaders of Solidarity.

What resulted from the series of “Round Table Talks” was the promise of semi-free elections in 1989 that would allow Solidarity members to run for one-third of the seats in the lower chamber of parliament. The other two thirds were to be reserved for candidates from the Communist Party and its two allied, completely subservient parties.  Again, the citizens of Poland would be faced with a doctored electoral process, no different than the elections following WWII. The difference, as time would soon tell, was the uprising of a Polish nation no longer content with complacency. The elections were held as scheduled, and members of the Solidarity Party were victorious in gaining every seat up for election. Furthermore, many Communist members did not even receive enough votes to maintain the seats that were given to them. After four decades of discontent, Poland had finally achieved their freedom.

In a fashion true to Polish tradition, the 1989 elections and the revival of the Solidarity Party can be directly related to a poster designed by Polish graphic designer Tomasz Sarnecki, just twenty-two years old. The head of the poster displays the Solidarność logo in bold, red type. The foot of the poster reads “W Samo Poludnie – 4 Czerwca 1989” (At High Noon – 4 June 1989). In the middle over a white background is American actor Gary Cooper, famous for his role in High Noon as a sheriff forced to take on a group of outlaws by himself. The photo of Cooper, in greyscale, has been modified to include a Polish ballot in his hand. On his chest is a red Solidarity badge. The simplicity of the poster powerfully accentuates the Polish cry for revolution. In 2004, former Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa would write:

Under the headline “At High Noon” runs the red Solidarity banner and the date—June 4, 1989—of the poll. It was a simple but effective gimmick that, at the time, was misunderstood by the Communists. They, in fact, tried to ridicule the freedom movement in Poland as an invention of the “Wild” West, especially the U.S. But the poster had the opposite impact: Cowboys in Western clothes had become a powerful symbol for Poles. Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual. Solidarity trounced the Communists in that election, paving the way for a democratic government in Poland. It is always so touching when people bring this poster up to me to autograph it. They have cherished it for so many years and it has become the emblem of the battle that we all fought together.

 

For Poland, the desire for reform was undying and led to a free nation. The progression of the Polish poster evolved during these difficult decades, and ultimately found its end with the 1989 elections. As much of the free world was already dominated by commercial propaganda, a newly free Poland struggled to catch up economically. It is appropriate then that the end of Poland’s fight for political freedom can be iconicized so fittingly through the High Noon poster.

The first decade of the twenty-first century in America saw a similar struggle for governmental reform in the controversial presidency of George W. Bush. While nowhere near as oppressive as Poland’s Communist regime, the final years of Bush’s second term in America were filled with an American cry for change. A Democratic candidate in the form of Barack Obama symbolized this hope, and it was Shepard Fairey’s propaganda poster, appropriately titled Hope, that would ultimately come to symbolize this movement.

A postmodern society, so sure of itself in so many regards, continues to find its true voice with the modernist cry: “The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.” (Edmond and Jules De Goncourt, 1822-1896).