Chopin Competition's Posters - Part I (1927-1955)

The poster for the first edition of the Chopin Competition, in 1927, still bears the hallmarks of nineteenth-century bills. It was designed by Ludwik Gardowski (1890–1965), a graphic designer actively involved in the discussions over establishing a national typeface and attempts to create it after Poland regained independence in 1918. It was Gardowski who designed the first modern Polish typographic ornament, combining folk elements with a geometric form (1923).

His Chopin poster comprises mainly a Polish-French text, its form reminiscent of old commemorative plaques. Gardowski highlighted the serifs of some letters, which enhanced their decorative qualities.

At the top of the poster, he placed Chopin’s profile (after the familiar medallion by Jean-François-Antoine Bovy) within a geometric ornament, framing the whole design with a decorative border. 

The Competition took place in January 1927, although the poster carries the date 15 October 1926, originally planned for the unveiling of Wacław Szymanowski’s Chopin monument in the Royal Łazienki Park in Warsaw, when the Competition was also to have begun.  

The 1930s in Polish poster art were dominated by two Warsaw centres: the Polytechnic, where architecture students had additional lessons in poster design, and the School of Fine Arts (from 1932 the Academy of Fine Arts), with which Stanisław Ostoja-Chrostowski (1897–1947) was associated. And although Ostoja-Chrostowski was never so heavily involved in poster design as artists from the Polytechnic, he was still influential in this field. 

Like Gardowski, Ostoja-Chrostowski employed schematic designs, with the dates along the sides, a block of inscriptions at the bottom and Chopin at the top (also after Jean-François-Antoine Bovy’s medallion). He sprayed white paint on the composer’s profile and the medallion itself, which visually illuminated them.

The poster for the 3rd International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition may trigger the impression of déjà vu. It was designed, as five years earlier, by Stanisław Ostoja-Chrostowski. This poster is just as clean, disciplined and legible. The lettering is elongated and quite narrow, but highlighted with shading, which lends it a three-dimensional form.

Yet the designs differ in their colouring: the previous poster was in bright red, whereas this time the artist employed sky blue, which visually calmed the composition. Chopin’s profiled is also treated in a different way: in the previous design, Ostoja-Chrostowski imitated the bronze of the medallion; this time, the colours are flat, graphically treated, without the plasticity of a painting. 

The 4th Chopin Competition was held 12 years after the 3rd, in 1949. The poster for it is the first post-war design. And although we still see a rather typographic form in its composition, this is a design in which the amount of text is reduced. The visible block of inscriptions results mainly from the fact that the contents are in two languages.

The first post-war Competition was organised on the centenary of Fryderyk Chopin’s death. It might seem that the poster should have marked that date in some way, thereby distinguishing itself from its predecessors. 

This anonymous poster is the least interesting of all the competition posters to date. Although it also displays a typographic form, its lettering does not stand out in any particular way, and it is also lacking a geometric border. The medallion had already been appearing occasionally in this form on the Chopin Year posters and in publications devoted to the composer.

Although this design contains less text, its character is distinctly more informative than pictorial. It may represent an attempt to maintain continuity with regard to previous designs and with the Competition itself, which was lost during the war.

Over the course of his all-too-brief life, Tadeusz Trepkowski (1914–1954) designed 80 posters for films, political campaigns and community initiatives. His poster for the 5th edition of the Chopin Competition in 1954, printed shortly before his death, in a way represents a synthesis of his entire graphic output. He designed it in the form of a metaphor, a visual equivalent to Chopin, which is why we have no need of the composer’s silhouette in order to recognise him. 

Tadeusz Trepkowski’s synthetic pictorial thinking was translated into an ascetic poetics, ‘sometimes to the point of exaggeration’, as Jan Lenica, one of the fathers of the Polish school of poster art, wrote in the catalogue to a posthumous exhibition of Trepkowski’s poster designs (1955). 

Precise signing and an ability to strip his designs of excessive pictographic content characterised the short, but intense creative period of this self-taught Warsaw graphic artist.