Polish Schools of Illustration
When we talk about the Polish school of illustration, the names of Bohdan Butenko, Janusz Stanny and Jan Marcin Szancer inevitably come to mind. But the publication Captains of Illustration: 100 Years of Children’s Books from Poland shows that the century of children’s book illustration has been extremely diverse.
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Illustration by Franciszka Themerson to ‘Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There’ by Lewis Carroll, Festina Lente, Warsaw, 2015
The history of Franciszka Themerson’s drawings for Alice in Wonderland actually spans three periods. A year after the end of World War II, the British publishing house George G. Harrap commissioned illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s famous novels from the Polish artist, who was living in London. In the first half of the 20th century, the Alice books, which went on to become the most eagerly illustrated children’s books in history, still often appeared with the original 19th-century drawings by John Tenniel. Children in Poland had to wait until 1927 for a newly illustrated edition, when the publishing house Gebethner and Wolff published not yet Alice’s but Ala’s Adventures in Wonderland, featuring airy illustrations by Kamil Mackiewicz very much still anchored in the art-nouveau canon.
In her illustrations, which only saw the light in 2001 after a series of misadventures, Franciszka Themerson rendered the surreal world of Carroll’s novels using brilliantly simple devices. The figure of Alice, drawn in black ink with precise shadowing and great care taken to ensure realistic proportions, is reminiscent of Tenniel’s original drawings and comes from the orderly, rational world of Victorian England. But the chess pieces around her – linear, flat, unidimensional, drawn using red and azure blue – represent the reality on the other side of the looking glass, which no longer conforms to the rules Alice is familiar with.
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Illustration by Olga Siemaszko to ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll, Nasza Księgarnia, Warsaw, 1969
One of the best-known illustrated versions of Alice in Wonderland is the one with illustrations by Olga Siemaszko from 1955. Although ‘the First Lady of Polish illustration’ belonged to the first post-war generation of illustrators educated in the classical academic canon, and her style remained essentially unchanged for decades, she did not hesitate to criticise her older colleagues for their conservatism in the early days of her career. These included Jan Marcin Szancer, whom Siemaszko succeeded in 1945 as the artistic director of the children’s magazine Świerszczyk (Cricket). This is how Krystyna Rybicka described Szancer:
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Szancer was raised on the Young Poland tradition and wanted children’s books to convey an orderly and gentle world.
Olga Siemaszko’s world, although at first glance equally cheerful, begins to burst at the seams and break up into pieces that can no longer be put back together. With their superimposed planes, her illustrations for Carroll’s story, created towards the end of the communist regime when social realism was still the leading art doctrine, betray the artist’s fascination with the acquisitions of cubism and futurism.
Sweeping strokes & textiles
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Illustration by Józef Wilkoń to ‘Ali Baba’s Treasure’, Czytelnik, Warsaw, 2014
Józef Wilkoń had planned to be a painter. Luckily for the many generations of children raised on his illustrations, he did not manage to put those plans into effect. And yet it was precisely the painterly background of the artist – who studied with the formist Zbigniew Pronaszko and the colourist Hanna Rudzka-Cybisowa – that made his works exceptional. In their sweeping gesture, Wilkoń’s abstractions rival the abstract expressionists and often themselves stop just short of abstraction, as seen for instance in the illustrations for Skarb Ali Baby (Ali Baba’s Treasure), in which a desert storm takes the shape of an expressive grainy spot on tar-black paper. Wilkoń was just as skilled with the line as he was with the colour spot, for example imitating the dynamism of cave painting in galloping horses or mammoths rendered with single, dynamic strokes of the brush.
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Illustration by Elżbieta Gaudasińska to ‘Thumbelina’ by Hans Christian Andersen, Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, Warsaw, 1983
Another illustrator of the adventures of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves, Elżbieta Gaudasińska, drew her inspiration from Middle Eastern fabrics. Also, when it came to European fairy tales, Gaudasińska’s illustrations, made with simple lines – full of rounded, often rhythmically repeated forms evoking a thicket of grass, a choir of frogs, or the ruffled surface of a lake – have a textile-like feel. It is no accident. The artist’s works, reminiscent of woven tapestries, reflect her versatile education in painting and fabric-making, a field she had begun to explore as early as elementary school (in her school art club), following up with studies in Anna Śledziewska’s studio at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.
The cat jumped over the moon
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Illustration by Janusz Grabiański to ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’ by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Nasza Księgarnia, Warsaw, 1970
What Julian Fałat was in ‘proper’ painting when it came to watercolours, Janusz Grabiański became in illustration a couple of decades later. Bringing out the whole capricious spontaneity of the watercolour spot, Grabiański was able to fully keep it under his control – especially in his animal figures, using only a couple of brushstrokes to produce an outline and a stunning array of details. In Grabiański’s menagerie filled with dogs and farm animals, a special place is held by cats. The artist illustrated nearly all the works about these furry creatures published in Poland, from Julian Tuwim’s Wlazł Kotek na Płotek (The Kitty Climbed Up on a Fence) to the adventures of Ryży Placek and T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. His impressive oeuvre includes realistic and anthropomorphic cats playing, yawning, staring out of windows or into aquariums, or even dandy cats walking on two legs in musketeer garb. Of course Puss in Boots couldn’t be absent from this throng.
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But Janusz Grabiański didn’t only have an eye for animals. His illustrations to Marian Falski’s classic Elementarz (ABC Primer) feature painstakingly rendered urban and country landscapes that give a chic touch to the reality of Poland under the communist regime. Blocks of flats from pre-fabricated elements turn into fancy Le Corbusier designs, ‘millennial’ schools become Bauhaus campuses, and the cars driving down the streets no longer resemble the clumsy things that rolled out of Soviet factories but shiny Opel Kadetts or Ford Mustangs. Meanwhile the streets of Warsaw, despite their familiar shop signs, shine with neon signs and lights more reminiscent of in New York’s Times Square than Constitution Square.
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Illustration by Stanisław Zamecznik to ‘Czarodziejskie Trójkąty’ (Magic Triangles) by Maria Terlikowska, Biuro Wydawnicze ‘Ruch’, Warsaw, 1964
After the constructivists had reduced painted reality to simple geometric figures and primary colours, Stanisław Zamecznik – an architect, stage designer, poster painter and quite a popular illustrator – decided to take young readers on a journey back in time. In his illustrations to Maria Terlikowska’s Czarodziejskie Trójkąty (Magic Triangles) he displayed a poster maker’s sense and ability to produce simple yet astonishing forms, combining the illusion of space, abstract composition, and patterns familiar from children’s drawings on just two sheets. The book is part of the geometric trilogy Figury (Figures), which also includes stories about circles and squares that introduce children to geometry and encourage abstract thinking – thanks in equal measure to Terlikowska’s text and to Zamecznik’s illustrations. Zamecznik’s other big achievements in illustration include his graphic design for Jan Brzechwa’s Tańcowała Igła z Nitką (The Thread and Needle Danced Together), in which the artist combined drawings, photographs and typography into a harmonious whole.
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Illustration by Daniel Mróz to ‘Zwierzydełka’ (Animals) by Robert Stiller, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków, 1977
The illustration art of Daniel Mróz (1917-1993) grew out of a somewhat different tradition than that of his colleagues. Already as a child, Mróz fell in love with Max Ernst’s surrealist collages. The impression they made on him was not tarnished by his later encounters with professors and fellow students at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts. Although formally separate, intellectually Mróz found a place for himself amongst the artists making up the first Kraków Group.
His illustrations to Robert Stiller’s Zwierzydełka bear witness to an attachment, dating back to his fascination with Ernst’s collages, to a realism styled after 19th-century nature engravings, here applied to surreal animal hybrids. But Mróz came down in history primarily as an illustrator of content addressed to somewhat older readers. Throughout his life the artist contributed illustrations to the first Przekrój magazine (edited by Marian Eile). He also created a series of canonical illustrations for the science-fiction writings of Stanisław Lem, for whose literary style Mróz’s fantastic and at the same time incredibly tangible and scrupulously intricate drawings were a perfect match.
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Illustration by Zbigniew Rychlicki to ‘Klechdy Domowe’ (Local Legends) by Hanna Kostyrko, Nasza Księgarnia, Warsaw, 1960
Zbigniew Rychlicki was really an institution in himself. For three and a half decades, during the golden age of the Polish school of illustration, he headed Nasza Księgarnia (Our Bookshop) publishing house, a giant on the children’s literature market. Throughout this time he also remained active as an artist. It is to him that we owe the first versions of Plastuś and Miś Uszatek (Teddy Floppy-Ear)… and not only on paper, but also on film. Rychlicki looked after all the details – in the puppet animated series about the adventures of Uszatek, he designed the protagonist’s incredible wardrobe, whose collection of pyjamas would put many fashion bloggers today to shame.
The artist, who came from a small village near Przemyśl and grew up surrounded by folk art, continued to be fascinated by the latter in all its guises throughout his life. When illustrating Klechdy Domowe (Local Legends), he extensively drew on flat, expressive folk woodcarvings as well as expressionist art, which by the way also drew inspiration from similar sources. In the illustrations to Jak to Dawniej na Kurpiach Bywało (Once Upon a Time in Kurpie), in keeping with the book title, Rychlicki employed patterns taken straight out of Kurpie paper cutting, featuring garlands of repeating ornamental forms and flat areas of colour. Nor did he shy away from taking his inspiration from glass painting or stained glass.
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Illustration by Adam Kilian to ‘The Wizard of the Emerald City’ by Lyman Frank Baum, Nasza Księgarnia, Warsaw, 1962
Adam Kilian imbibed his love of folk art with his mother’s milk. The said mother, Janina Kilian-Stanisławska – an art critic, collector and the head of a theatre – had a number of folk artworks in her collection. Her passion was also shared by a family friend, Leon Chwistek. Through his mother, who frequented the Lviv avant-garde milieu, Kilian got to know the formists, while absorbing folk art and its avant-garde iterations at the same time. References to woodcutting and glass painting appeared especially in the 1960s in the diverse productions of the ever-exploring illustrator, whose creations included Jacek and Agatka from the first Polish bedtime cartoon series – iconic figures for a couple of generations growing up in Poland under the communist regime. It was from his mother that Kilian also inherited a knack for collecting, being especially fond of ceramic tiles with folk motifs. He sometimes made them part of his illustrations, not only by reproducing the painted motifs but also the stunning webs of cracked glazing on their surfaces.
Originally written in Polish, Oct 2019, translated by Mark Bence, Dec 2020
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