About a month ago, I noticed that the Polish Embassy on 16th St. NW had many posters displayed along its fence. Last week, I got around to walking by for a closer look. These are reproductions of posters from the Poster Museum in Warsaw. Placing them along the embassy fence struck me as an odd way of showing them, but then I considered that the originals were made to be pasted to walls.
One item sets out the theme of the exhibition:
A couple of long stretches:
One understands why in 1919 Poland felt the need for an army:
On the other hand, I find the martial image odd in a poster promoting education:
And the invitation to subscribe to a government loan is dramatic:
The National Museum round the corner here has put wonderful photographs from an exhibition that ended last year on its fence, which seems a bit cruel to me as I am tantalised but couldn't have gone as I wasn't here. Is it better to be able to glimpse a few of the exhibits or to never know what you had missed, I wonder.
ReplyDeleteOdd for education, maybe, but I rather like the image of a dreaming boy (his mind far from the classroom where he sits) who conjures a Medieval-ish knight with pike on a leaping charger. Perhaps it's a sort of self-portrait or confession by the artist who made the poster. It certainly looks like my own childhood attitude to school, as I was an inveterate reader of books during class. It's a wonder I know any math at all.
ReplyDeleteYou make a very good point.
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