Theatre Motif Design Of Polish Poster School

Led by the world-famous designer Henryk Tomaszewski（1914—2005），adozen of Polish poster designers all reached their summit in the1950s-mid-1960s,although they did not share the same artistic style, each had their own characteristics.They had created works counted among the most valuable posters in the history.These poster designers were honored as "Polish Poster School" by the academiccircles and gained widely affirmation and praise. Their posters are famous for thedesigners’ character, humor and fantasy, among them the theater posters areparticularly splendid which have the highest aesthetic value and to be the mainsource of Artistic Poster. Polish Poster School merged the aesthetics of painting andthe succinct, simple metaphor in the poster. Painterly style, lively colors and linearquality combined with creative use of sense of individualism and humor were adistinguishing feature of this stream. The Polish poster designer was able to effacethe line of distinction between himself and a traditional artist. Polish poster art hadsignificant role in development of the world poster graphic design. Its majorcontribution was a new power of suggestion through use of clever allusions, conciseand inventive metaphor. Printed slogans, often hand-lettered and highlighted withstrong and vivid colors inherited from folk art, were combined with popular symbols;this characteristic hybrid of words and images created a certain aesthetic tension. Inaddition to aesthetic dimension, the Polish poster conveyed clear emotionalinvolvement of the artist, who was no longer merely an objective observer butinstead openly presented his own interpretation and commentary on the subjectmatter.This paper will introduce systematically the theater posters of Polish Poster School(as well as I know, this is the first time in academic circles) discuss them as "theCrown Jewels" on the basis of relatively adequate literature and image data andhighlight their prominence in graphic design. I also interpret these posters from theaspects of symbol analysis, rhetoric and iconology to real the means through whichthe posters complete the task as a kind of information transmission media, estimatethe worth of composition of these painterly poster through form analysis and tapPolish Poster School’s artistic value, aesthetic value and social value from multipleperspectives.