Henryk TOMASZEWSKI (1914-2005), Poster - Marysia and Napoleon

print, paper; 98 x 68 cm;
facsimile l. d.: Tomaszewski 64;
Poster for Teatr Powszechny for the play "Marysia and Napoleon" by Andrzej Jarecki.

Graphic artist, draftsman, poster designer, illustrator. When we recall the figure of Henryk Tomaszewski, first and foremost we see an outstanding poster designer, one of those artists who formed the Polish poster school of the 1950s and 1960s. The distinct and separate character was provided by the school's treatment of the poster as a separate visual art genre, which was not affected by the evaluation criteria carried over from other visual art genres. In retrospect, however, it seems that the main criterion differentiating the Polish school of poster art from others was its refusal to succumb to the dictates of commercial photography and the individualism of its artists, their artistic personalities, as strong as Henryk Tomaszewski's, who developed his own creative methods. He defined their essence this way: "A simple idea expressing complex content, as if someone instead of a whole long sentence said one word or wrote an exclamation mark, an aversion to verbosity, a tendency to conciseness, a mental shortcut." (Agnieszka Szewczyk, "Polish-Warsaw Poster School," in Powinność i bunt, Warsaw 2004). He painted, drew, cut out, ripped out, glued, put together different materials. "(...) he practiced an endless collage of reality" (Dorota Folga-Januszewska, "Henryk Tomaszewski, Posters", Warsaw 2017). His posters "Football", "Moore", "Love", "Revisor" or "Witkacy" have forever gone down in the history of Polish art. He was born in 1914 in Warsaw. He graduated from the School of Graphic Industry. In 1939 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw with a degree in painting. From 1952 to 1985 he led the Poster Studio at the Graphic Arts Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Full Professor. He educated hundreds of students. He passed away in 2005.