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DOI Artikel:Włodarczyk, Wojciech: "Aspects of Socialist Realism": Exhibition in the National Museum in Warsaw
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.18904#0099
hetics, and preserved it in socialist realism bccause of their mass appeal. Poster design, graphic
design, book illustration, and photogiaphy, governed by different laws because of the rigours
of technology, were hardly in the foreground, especially within a doctrine as sensitive to high-art
circulation as was socialist realism. Posters, associated almost automatically with the persuasive
function of socialist realism, had a minor role to play at that time. The first studios of poster
design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, in charge of Henryk Tomaszewski and Józef
Mroszczak, were launched as late as 1952. They owed their independence to the strikingly liberał
policy of the then Academy Rector Marian Wnuk. The most interesting posters at the exhibition
Aspects of Socialist Realism, also remarkablc for the early date of their origin, are by Julian
Pałka educated at one of the poster design studios at Warsaw Academy (Fig. 6). Certainly
what I have said about the „anomalous" position of poster design during the period of socialist
realism is not enough to prove that the poster should not become the key to the interpretation
of the art of the period, but sińce it has been thus treated, some reservations are necessary.
Another problem which arises once poster design has been raised to the role of a meaningful
phenomenon in socialist realism, is linked, generally speaking, with the realities of the period.
Persuasiveness and the advertising function, which are rightly attributed to posters, also imply
the conditions in which they function, first cf alł, the member of the public*s possible choice
from among the different values publicised by a poster. It is ęommon knowledge that there were
3. Juliusz Krajewski, Thanking the Tractor Driver, 1950, oil on canvas, Warsaw, Muzeum
Narodowe
89
design, book illustration, and photogiaphy, governed by different laws because of the rigours
of technology, were hardly in the foreground, especially within a doctrine as sensitive to high-art
circulation as was socialist realism. Posters, associated almost automatically with the persuasive
function of socialist realism, had a minor role to play at that time. The first studios of poster
design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, in charge of Henryk Tomaszewski and Józef
Mroszczak, were launched as late as 1952. They owed their independence to the strikingly liberał
policy of the then Academy Rector Marian Wnuk. The most interesting posters at the exhibition
Aspects of Socialist Realism, also remarkablc for the early date of their origin, are by Julian
Pałka educated at one of the poster design studios at Warsaw Academy (Fig. 6). Certainly
what I have said about the „anomalous" position of poster design during the period of socialist
realism is not enough to prove that the poster should not become the key to the interpretation
of the art of the period, but sińce it has been thus treated, some reservations are necessary.
Another problem which arises once poster design has been raised to the role of a meaningful
phenomenon in socialist realism, is linked, generally speaking, with the realities of the period.
Persuasiveness and the advertising function, which are rightly attributed to posters, also imply
the conditions in which they function, first cf alł, the member of the public*s possible choice
from among the different values publicised by a poster. It is ęommon knowledge that there were
3. Juliusz Krajewski, Thanking the Tractor Driver, 1950, oil on canvas, Warsaw, Muzeum
Narodowe
89