oster design combines the fine and applied arts, incorporating painting, graphic design, collage, and photography. In countries where television is not a major advertising medium, the poster remains a transient yet effective means of reaching the widest audience on behalf of culture, commerce, and ideology.

Posters are displayed everywhere throughout the Czech and Slovak Republics, becoming an integral part of the cityscape. They are pasted next to each other on large plywood hoardings attached to windowless walls of old buildings or onto fences surrounding parks and construction sites. Officially designated for poster display, these well-kept colorful quilts of public billboards not only disseminate information on cultural, sports, and political events but also serve as constantly changing outdoor exhibitions of graphic art. Through such widespread and continuous exposure, poster design has become one of the most accessible and effective art forms, reaching out and influencing even that part of the public that does not frequent museums or galleries. In juried exhibitions, the best posters achieve national exposure, and for many graphic artists, book illustration and poster design are important vehicles for a wider recognition of their personal style both at home and abroad.

For the exhibition, Dana Bartelt selected from her collection of fifteen hundred posters two hundred works by contemporary Czech, Moravian, and Slovak artists. The posters, which she accumulated during her graduate work at the North Carolina State University School of Design and on two research trips to Czechoslovakia, include film, theater, political, commemorative, environmental, and commercial posters dating from the 1960s through the 1980s. All of them predate the peaceful "velvet" revolution of 1989 against the Communist regime of the preceding forty years. These posters--chronicles of the social, cultural, and political events--document the ebullient spirit of their creators through their poetry, metaphors, and wit.

In their visual sophistication, the posters also reflect the cultural heritage of Slovakia and the Czech Republic, two small countries that can boast of the second oldest university in Europe, twenty professional theaters in Prague alone, an opera house in every regional city, and remarkable musical traditions. They are countries of readers, where people form queues in front of bookstores whenever a new, desirable book is available and where poetry is published in unusually large editions. Cultural activities and performing arts constitute the primary source of the artists' creative inspiration.

In light of the restrictions that were imposed on the designers by the centralized government, which had a virtual monopoly on business and industry, including film and publishing, an unexpected feature of the poster design is its diversity. The reason may lie in the diversity of the artists' backgrounds. Many of them hold graduate degrees as painters, architects, sculptors, and scenographers, and all are involved are involved in a variety of design work. Their printing techniques include offset, letterpress, stone lithography, and, especially, silkscreen, which is often used for smaller, more valuable editions of theater and exhibition posters. Under the pre-Vaclav Havel regime, silk-screening had an additional advantage: by producing a limited number of prints in his own studio, the artist was able to bypass the approval process of the state commission. This agency screened out unacceptable ideas and could prevent the printing of a designer's work in a state-owned printing office.

A feature common to all the designers is their striving for self-expression in an environment that demands political conformity. They seem intent on designing posters that have an emotional impact and appeal to the sense but that also challenge the viewer to an intellectual response. Their imagery includes lyrical and neosurrealist overtones, drama, irony, or playful humor, and the message is delivered in a variety of styles:

Cestmír Pechr, Henry IV. Theater poster, 1984.

by painterly means, expressive lettering, or sophisticated collage.

Possibly the most painterly posters are those designed by Cestmír Pechr. His talent for expressing the spirit and mood of a theatrical production is best documented in a series of posters

Olga Vyletalová, Felix and Othelia. Film poster, 1972.

introducing identical symbols--pale hands, for example--in varying degrees of stylization.

Neosurrealism plays a prominent role in the works of Olga Vyletalová. Vyletalová has gained worldwide recognition for her perception of the elusive, surreal existence of beauty combined with mystery.

Petr Pos, Operation Banzai. Film poster, 1985.

Petr Pos uses an intelligible but highly idiosyncratic graphic expression. His monochromatic pen drawings often portray fantastic creatures with anthropomorphic features in a world of strong emotions and tense situations.

Jiri Salamoun, on the other hand,

Jiri Salamoun, Lucy Is the Fright of the Street. Film poster, 1984.

has a feeling for the humorous, the grotesque, and the satirical. Through the comparison of paradoxes and the combination of the logical with the absurd, he translates rather than describes the content of a movie or a play. Sexuality is usually presented in an absurd or comic style.

(More, to Part 2 of 2)

Ideas American Characters | Poe's Raven | Schubert's Music | Icon or Altarpiece? | Moral Knowledge in the Modern University | Contemporary Czech & Slovak Poster Design | Director's Desk