1951-1985
The Polish Poster School was noted in the fifties and sixties for an originality and strength of design which helped to create the sophisticated respectability in the sixties of graphic art generally .... the great age of the silk-screen. Did such a school ever really exist? Was it not another of the cultural myths with which Poland as a political entity has always surrounded herself? A myth created both by and for her in the same way as her other myths of romantic nationalism, as a symptom of the identity crisis of that nation. That crisis goes on, weathered somehow for two centuries of non-existence as a geographical area and of half a century of very dubious autonomy. If not as a land, then at least as a culture some strong bid for national persona was made in the arts, in literature and, after the Second World War especially, in film - Wajda, Skolimowski, Zanussi - and in the theatre of the absurd - Grotowski, Kantor (Dead School and Mrozek (The Emigrants).
In the eighties, Solidarity presented an image of purity of action, of the independent will of the people, to a jaded Western intellectual elite which had resigned itself to the simulacrum of the mass-media, which, as Baudrillard turgidly repeated, had impacted the possibility of free action and, instead replayed THE CODE endlessly. But, Poland was "different". The political action there offered the charismatic possibility of the continuing existence of the "individual", instead of the photocopy: whereas, in the West, Foucault was assuring his readers that the individual self, as a fluke aberration of history, was now passing out of the flow of time. But, was Solidarity not yet