The Poster between Reality and Art

The Poster between Reality and Art: A Few Words on the Work of Tadeusz Piechura

Tadeusz Piechura’s posters are especially well known in Łódź, and not only because of his solo exhibition at the Museum of Art in Łódź in 2000. Despite every pessimistic episode in the history of the artistic poster, they remain present even in the streetscape, by virtue of contrast. That contrast grows ever stronger and, remarkably, distinguishes his posters from the advertising sheets hung for the purposes of consumption, filled with masses of people, “alluring commodities”, faceless smiles and inhuman ideals of an intoxicated and intoxicating human “beauty” contained in the body, which today increasingly appears to be ascending the pedestals of “new” art. Umberto Eco is probably right when he writes in On Beauty (2004): “One characteristic of twentieth-century art in an age when life has been commercialised is its continual focus on objects of use. The reduction of all objects to commodities, and the gradual disappearance of their use value in a world of constant exchangeability, fundamentally altered the nature of everyday things. […] The object loses all qualities of uniqueness and individuality; it loses the ‘aura’ that defined its beauty and meaning. The new beauty is reproducible in its transience. It must encourage consumers to make ever more frequent changes, as a consequence of rapid wear and boredom with existing objects, so that the growth of production is not impeded.”

The contrast between Piechura’s universal iconic language and his deliberately austere typography is therefore almost uncanny. It makes his work astonishingly different and thus visible within a world of colourful scrawls. In this respect, he invokes the finest traditions of the artistic poster, which include such names as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy and, finally, Jan Lenica. In his work, Piechura retreats into complete monochrome, into what once embodied the ideal of early book design. The economical and uniform concept of harmonising text and image, pure in its reception, becomes a translingual, universal structure of global communication, yet one alienated from the mindless bombardment of the viewer by the iconic imagery of primitive and bodily consumption. His works inscribe themselves so powerfully in the viewer’s memory that they rise before the mind’s eye, emerging from one’s own past to reveal the essence of the content held within solutions that are so simple, and therefore timeless and beautiful, that they have few comparably inspiring counterparts in the world of posters.

Artur Rubinstein emerges from the blackness of a plane immersed in the abyss of non-being, absorbed in an invisible keyboard. Only the head and hand of this great son of Łódź appear, filled with the musical echo of an imaginary sound resonating from the second poster in the same series, created for the 1990 opening of the Artur Rubinstein Music Gallery collection at the Museum of the History of the City of Łódź. Here the pianist is gone; only the keyboard remains, its depressed keys forming a tonal scale of unending sound. This is more than John Cage’s musical and painterly thinking; it is the closure and opening of time within the imperishable moment of a finished work. Had Piechura created nothing else since then, he would still deserve a place in an art history that has no need to shout, an art resembling a sequence from Antonioni: a black-and-white reminiscence of an endless étude of memories made permanent on this scrap of paper, which has spoken and endured as the poetry of unending dreams of true and absolute art.

This pure, disciplined reductionism, manifest in a series of thematic posters, is the product of sustained reflection and proves, in the fullest sense, that art is not merely the spontaneous impulse of a “staged” happening, but a bridge between the uprising of the spirit and the work of the grey matter that together create the work of art as a whole. Here, almost unexpectedly, we discover an intellectual affinity with Paul Klee, who, perhaps more than anyone, sought within his apparent frailty to arrive at exceptionally subtle solutions in which word and iconic sign became a unity of heart and mind. Whether this constitutes a direct influence or merely a reminiscence of something heard and seen is not especially important in an age when aspirations towards an ascetic ecstasy contained within a sign approaching the point reappear from time to time. “If you wish to express infinity, make only a point,” one of the Bauhaus masters, Paul Klee, used to say. His cosmological reflections are not so distant from Piechura’s; within his subconscious, Piechura is capable of translating archetypal models of the universal human soul into the form of mythic eternity. In its static quality, this is only ostensibly different from the attempts embodied in his dynamic, unending series. It can be seen especially where colour suddenly appears like a jarring note — where red appears — generating an entire sequence of signs and posters that disturb the silence of enclosed spaces filled with harmony and an almost meditative Zen Buddhism. Perhaps this remains a search, or merely a reflection of the hope that things could be otherwise.

There are complete forms to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken away. They are like polysemous and secret words, yet are so necessary if we are to endure — not in deconstruction, not in multiplicity, but in eternal unity with the cosmos, experienced in the mystical rapture of fading light between black and white. Last year, Roman Opałka sought an ultimate solution immersed in white; this year, Piechura demonstrates that one can see oneself only between the two poles of white and black, because either one, left to itself, fades and disappears… but where?

Perhaps one of Piechura’s posters will answer this question, and that is why it is better to devote time to them than to what has been inscribed with the stylus of transience. Tadeusz Piechura’s concentrated iconic language pays tribute to the poster, born in the nineteenth century for such varied purposes and raised to the heights of true art — an art admittedly capable of reproduction, but thereby enabling a more widespread and perhaps even more democratic reception of universal truths encoded in the minimalist icon of truth between word and image.

Dr hab. Piotr O. Scholz is a professor at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, where he heads the Department of Comparative Art History at the Institute of Cultural Studies, and a professor at the Institute of Art History of the University of Innsbruck. On his initiative, an exhibition of Tadeusz Piechura’s posters will be shown at the University Gallery in Innsbruck in November and December 2004.