If there was one person who defined the Polish School of Posters above all others, it was Henryk Tomaszewski, often called the father and spiritual leader of the movement. He liked to strip away unnecessary details, creating posters that are striking, minimal and noticeably hand-crafted. A 1965 poster for Henry Moore art show looks as though the artist’s last name is roughly cut from paper, and another for a production of Hamlet from a few years earlier features a sketchy chair with a black scribble on the back, a faintly visible skull scratched into the paint.

Tomaszewski was born into a family of musicians in 1914 and trained at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. In 1947, during the aftermath of World War II, he began creating posters for Poland’s state-run film distribution agency. All films were censored at the time; there were rules around the depiction of Hollywood film stars; and due to the state monopoly on film distribution, there were no commercial pressures to promote any particular film.

This created a fertile ground for experimentation, and Tomaszewski perfected the art of creating bold, stripped-back, painterly compositions that have been compared to Japanese calligraphy and the work of Picasso. He won many medals and prizes from institutions as far afield as the US, Japan and Brazil, and was granted the title of Honorary Royal Designer for Industry by Royal Society of Arts in London.

Tomaszewski went on to become a professor from 1952 until 1985 at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, and mentored the next three generations of Polish poster artists. Among his students was his son, Filip Pagowski, best known to many as the graphic designer behind the Comme des Garçons ‘Play’ logo: a simple, roughly-drawn heart with eyes. We were lucky enough to visit Pagowski in the house he grew up in, look at original Tomaszewski paintings and hear stories from his life. 

“My father’s posters became more abstract and simpler over time,” Pagowski told us. “They didn’t age. It was fascinating to watch him finish the details and lettering with a small brush.” Another of Tomaszewski’s students, Piotr Mlodozeniec, said that the teacher would set assignments to depict concepts such as “in unity there is strength” or “a big nothing and a small nothing,” to encourage them to think about composition and symbolism in a fresh way.