Meet the avant-garde Polish poster artist who became the king of Parisian fashion magazines

Today would have been the phenomenal Polish graphic artist and photographer Roman Cieslewicz’s ninety-first birthday. This blog post is dedicated to his talent and his memory.

Cieslewicz (pronounced tch-e-ch-la-vitch, kinda - though Sylwia would probably correct that!) was one of the world’s most influential and talented print and poster designers. He was born in Lwow Poland (now Lviv Ukraine) on 13th January 1930 and died in his adopted home city of Paris on 21st January 1996.

His career took him from the People’s Republic of Poland to Paris, where he rose to stardom amongst avant-garde artists and intellectuals from across the globe.

He won numerous awards for his work which has been displayed in over a hundred solo exhibitions over the past four decades - from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1973, to MoMa in New York and the RCA here in London back in 2010.

During the ‘50s he was artistic director of the super-cool and ground-breaking Polish fashion magazine ‘Ty i Ja’ and he co-created the awesome cultural art and design magazine Projekt - in part the inspiration for our name.

Cieslewicz considered himself a graphic designer and a poster designer above anything else. He remembered a fascination with the typography of shop signs even as a young boy. He said his obsession with circles, which repeat throughout his work, could well be due to being sent to collect the morning rolls by his mother each day. His style was often surreal and fantastical. Whatever he was working on, he always liked to push the creative to see how far he could take the design and avoid falling into what he called ‘the system’.

During the 50’s and 60’s in Poland he created some of the most iconic posters of the Polish School of Posters. The magazine cover he designed for Opus featuring his USSR/USA Supermen image became famous world-wide.

In 1963 he moved to Paris and became art director of Vogue and Elle. He joined the artistic creme-de-la-creme and became king of the glamorous fashion magazine industry, but his work spanned far more widely than that to include commissions for logos, posters, journals and illustrations.

Roman Cieslewicz was full of energy and ideas and he was always experimenting with technique in his work. He painted, he printed and he was an accomplished photographer - often combining these talents to reimagine his subject matter in rich and surreal photomontages.

Asked in a 1993 interview ‘what elements make a good poster design?’ He answered ‘an image, a word. And the regular to-and-fro between them. The idea is contained in the image, and it is the relationship between the image and the text which gives it such force’.

Roman Cieslewicz has been described as a ‘cosmopolitan capitalist’, but he remained inspired and driven by the treasures of Polish culture - retaining a strong ideological connection with the art from the Soviet revolution.

References / further reading:

https://culture.pl/en/artist/roman-cieslewicz

http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/reputations-roman-cieslewicz