Issue Twenty Two: CYRK
Today’s collection is a series of Polish circus (or "Cyrk") posters from the 1960s and 1970s. These circus posters represent a specific genre within the larger Polish School of Posters, a movement that ran from 1950 to 1980, primarily in Warsaw. Cyrk posters first emerged in 1962, when the government agency that oversaw the state-run circus commissioned prominent artists like Henryk Tomaszewski and Roman Cieslewicz (previously featured in issue fifteen on magazine Ty I Ja) to create fresh takes on the circus poster. Their hope was that these posters—which focused less on advertising specific performances in favor of more symbolic and visually rich imagery—would mirror the contemporary updates taking place within the circus itself and encourage wider public attendance.
Visually, Cyrk posters utilize many of the common design techniques seen in the rest of the Polish Poster School: saturated colors, surrealist abstraction, unusual lettering, and bold, painterly lines. But like many of the posters in the movement at large, there are often deep political metaphors hidden beneath their cheery surfaces as well. Bears, a symbol of the Soviet State, are dressed in undersized tuxedos and clown suits to represent the boorish overconfidence of the communists controlling Poland since World War II, while monkeys, owing to an old Polish proverb meaning “not my circus, not my monkey,” were a metaphor for rebellion—in this case, “not my circus, not my government.”
This issue's featured archive is the Typographica Library, a digital bookshelf of type and lettering resources to aid research and selection created by Stephen Coles of Typographica. I'm specifically keen on their new database of Specimen Books of Metal & Wood Type, which links to over 200 foundry catalogs from the 18th–20th centuries that are publicly available online