GRAPHIC DESIGN HISTORY 2009

Jan Lenica was the leading Polish poster artist of last century. His posters has been described as “child like gouaches, verging on the abstract, though immediately distinctive…Lenica’s career in poster art cultivated associations with the absurd”.

Jan studied music, then architecture, then became a poster illustrator and made regular contributions (from 1945) to the satirical journal “Szpilki” as well as book illustrations and began work on posters in 1950 then a collaborator on early animation films. He liked to use cut-out stop motion animation in his films and was mostly known as an experimental animator. This animation work reflected in his posters and book illustrations making them easily recognisable as a lot of them appear to have that cut-out quality.
Over time his art became known to be surreal in its design, he had a theme of satirical dark humour and overall scepticism about life reflecting in everything he worked on.
Lenica was a professor of graphic, poster and animated cartoon studies for many years at German high schools. He lectured at Harvard University in 1974 on poster art, and in 1979 was named the First professor of the animation class at the University of Kassel in Germany. In 1987 he was working in Berlin at the Academy of Fine Arts.
Overall, when I look at his posters he shows me a casual or even dispassionate method of following the rules of design which must have been very strict mid century. Through his use of colour and line we can see echoes of his ground breaking animation experiments and architectural training.