1987 Polish Theatre Poster - Turandot by Brecht - Sadowski

Description

ate: 1987
Size: 26.5 x 38.5 inches
Artist: Wiktor Sadowski

About the Artist: Wiktor Sadowski is a Polish artist working … more ate: 1987
Size: 26.5 x 38.5 inches
Artist: Wiktor Sadowski

About the Artist: Wiktor Sadowski is a Polish artist working in poster, illustration and painting. He was born in Oleandry, Poland in 1956. He graduated in 1981 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in Tomaszewski's studio.

About the Poster: Beginning in the 1950s and through the 1980s, the Polish School of Posters combined the aesthetics of painting with the succinctness and simple metaphor of the poster. It developed characteristics such as painterly gesture, linear quality, and vibrant colors, as well as a sense of individual personality, humor, and fantasy. It was in this way that the polish poster was able to make the distinction between designer and artist less apparent.

Polish posters have come to stand apart from the advertising design conventions fostered in Europe during the 20th century. It was during the communist regime, a time when culture was closely monitored by the state, that Polish artists found liberation in poster art. Ironically, this foremost public art form became ground for individual expression. During that period, the cultural institutions, of theatre and cinema especially, flourished as they were funded by government agencies. Artists freshly out of the fine arts academy flocked towards poster production as the demand for this art was rapidly growing. The result became some of the most unique and expressive posters the world has ever seen - and artworks in themselves.

About the play: Turandot or the Whitewashers' Congress is an epic comedy by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. It was written during the summer of 1953 in Buckow and substantially revised in light of a brief period of rehearsals in 1954, though it was still incomplete at the time of Brecht's death in 1956 and did not receive its first production until several years later. The story is loosely based on Count Carlo Gozzi's commedia dell'arte play Turandot (1762), a production of which Brecht saw in Moscow in 1932, directed by Yevgeny Vakhtangov. From 1930 onwards, Brecht began to develop a version of his own, which became part of a wider complex of projects exploring the role of intellectuals (or "Tuis," as he called them) in a capitalist society. Brecht's protagonist is coarse, lacking the whimsical charm of Gozzi's portrayal and the aspiration to nobility in Schiller's adaptation (1801).

The poster has a minor rip in the left margin. Ready to frame. less