Chopin Competition's Posters - Part II (1960-1990)

In 1959 an International Competition for a Chopin Year Poster was held. It was won by the Poznań-born architect Manfred Kruska (1936–2019), who left Poland with his family in the 40s and lived in Berlin, where he completed studies in architecture. Kruska recalled that he received 30,000 zlotys for winning the competition, but he was only allowed to spend the money in Poland, so he studied for a while at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. 

With a suitable change of text, the poster was also used to announce the 6thChopin Competition. In his design, Kruska was the first to use photomontage in a competition poster design. Against a white background, he placed two variants of a piano’s black keys. 

The base keys are simple and minimalistic. The second set of keys, superimposed onto the first and forming a sort of disintegration or reflection of them, are expressive, disrupting the calm surface of the keyboard. 

In the wake of the emancipation of the Chopin Competition posters in terms of their plasticity, initiated by Trepkowski and continued by Kruska, henceforth designs would focus on the composer in a more metaphoric and suggestive way.

While earlier posters focussed on Chopin’s image, with his famous profile, or on the piano keyboard, in the case of the posters for the 7th Competition, the starting point was musical notation. The use of the plural here is not a slip of the pen, since all the posters selected by the organisers for this edition of the Competition contained the same motif.

This version by Rosław Szaybo (1933–2019) is marked by expression; on either side of the score, the surface is chaotically blotted with ink. This contrasts with the black keyboard rectangle placed beneath the notes, which at the same time softens the form. A similar motif of ‘dirty’ musical notation was used by Stefan Małecki in his poster for the same edition of the Competition. 

Rosław Szaybo was a titan among musical poster designers. A native of Poznań and a graduate of Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (the poster workshop of Henryk Tomaszewski), he worked not only in posters, but also in photography, as well as designing book covers and also album covers for such stars as Elton John, Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen. 

The keyboard motif reappeared for the 8th edition of the Competition. Bronisław Zelek offered a realistic take in his design, but we will focus on a more symbolic poster – the other official design by Stefan Małecki (1924–2012). This black-and-purple composition, divided across the middle, brings to mind a piano keyboard seen from the side. 

Stefan Małecki was a Warsaw-based graphic artist, illustrator and painter. He designed mainly posters and company logos, as well as postage stamps, which exerted considerable influence on Polish philatelic aesthetics. Małecki twice won second prize in the Chopin Competition’s poster competition: in 1965 (behind Rosław Szaybo) and in 1970. 

The 1970s in Polish poster art were a melting-pot in terms of design, where older trends mixed with newer, experimental visual messages. Young-generation artists enjoyed increasing possibilities for comparing their ideas with global trends, including at the Warsaw Biennale. Private collectors, museums, libraries and archives all gathered posters for their holdings. So posters not only held sway on the streets, but also moved into the realm of the museum.

In the mid 70s, the 9th edition of the Chopin Competition was represented by a poster by Teomil Kemilew (1936–2008), chosen through a competition, in which third prize went to the painter and graphic artist Elżbieta Wejsflog, who thereby became the first woman prize-winner in the history of the contest to find the Chopin Competition’s graphic design. Her design also entered official circulation.

The name of Henryk Tomaszewski (1914–2005) is associated with the Polish school of poster design. From 1946 he started to design film posters, leading to five first prizes at the International Poster Exhibition in Vienna in 1948. Shortly afterwards Tomaszewski took up the new chair in poster design at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Art. That event was one of the milestones in the history and development of Polish poster design. 

The poster for the 10th Chopin Competition carries a powerful visual charge, although it is marked by a simplicity of composition. The artist employed the Polish national colours of red and white, inscribed by hand with the composer’s signature and with a dried bellflower. Thanks to the combination of these elements, the poster received both an international and an intimate character.

In this design, we see a stave on which, instead of notes, the artist has placed willows in perspective. Everything is treated synthetically, and at the same time the design is laden with content. This poster represents a transposition of the vision of a Chopin landscape, yet the landscape itself vanishes, remaining only by means of suggestion, since the visible stave at the same time represents the boundaries between fields. 

This design not only refers to attributes of Chopin; it also invokes Tadeusz Trepkowski’s work from almost 30 years earlier. Yet this is not about pigeonholing posters, but rather about indicating the visual affinities between successive editions – about conjuring images from one’s memory. Szulecki also presented designs for the next two editions of the Competition, in 1995 and 2000, which were marked by an increasing minimalism and precision.

Lech Majewski (b. 1947) is a graphic artist who has been associated with Warsaw since his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he joined the workshop of Henryk Tomaszewski. A typographer, pedagogue and designer of posters and books, he has expressed his opinion on contemporary poster design: