Art without advertising
The absence of a commercial market freed designers from selling anything.
Hubert Śmietanka — CC BY-SA 2.5 · Ahmet Düz, Dreiländer- & Oberrheinfotograf — CC BY-SA 4.0 · 1935mkuser1212! — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jjsjsjshhs — CC0
A name given abroad to a generation of Polish designers of the 1950s and 1960s — among them Henryk Tomaszewski, Jan Lenica and Wojciech Fangor. Their manner rested on hand drawing, symbol and visual metaphor rather than photography and faces. Their work is now taught in design schools worldwide and collected by modern art museums.
By bus from central Warsaw, about half an hour. The palace first, as it is larger and needs two hours with the gardens, then the Poster Museum in the adjoining stables. The palace is among the most important survivals in Warsaw — it was not destroyed in the war, so it is original, unlike most of the city.
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The first museum in the world devoted to poster art, opened in 1968 in the former royal stables beside Wilanów Palace in southern Warsaw. The reason it exists here is the Polish School of Posters: an artistic phenomenon that arose in the 1950s and 1960s and became internationally known. In an economy without commercial advertising, artists were commissioned to design posters for films, theatre, circus and opera, and so were freed from having to show stars' faces or sell a product. They produced works of art in their own right: symbolic, strange and often hand-painted. Foreign film posters in Poland were entirely redesigned — a Polish poster for an American film resembles the original in nothing, and sometimes surpasses it. The collection exceeds sixty thousand posters, Polish and international. The site adjoins Wilanów Palace, and the two combine into one day in southern Warsaw.
The absence of a commercial market freed designers from selling anything.
A Polish poster for an American film resembles the original in nothing.
A Polish and international collection among the largest in the field.
The former royal stables, Wilanów Palace, southern Warsaw