Riders of the Polish Sage

What is the secret connection, the reader of this eccentric and enjoyable book may ask, between Polish poster art and the American western? None whatsoever, except for the obvious fact that some Polish posters were made to advertise American western movies. And yet, one should be grateful to the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles for using this feeble excuse to mount a recent exhibition and to publish a book that not only shows some of the best Polish posters of the ‘60s and ‘70s but also illuminates rather peculiar facets of communist cultural politics in Eastern Europe.

Kevin Mulroy, the editor of “Western Amerykanski” (which means “American western” in Polish) and director of the research center at the Autry Museum, explains in the preface that the idea of this book was born when the museum started acquiring foreign western posters, including a batch of posters from Poland. “Before long,” he writes, “it became clear that something extraordinary had taken place in East European poster art after World War II, and particularly in Poland. Posters from Western Europe remained faithful to the plot of the film. . . . But when the western traveled beyond the Iron Curtain, clearly all bets were off.”

The story of what really took place and why--when Polish artistic sensibility met the “American creation myth”--is told in some 160 color plates and three accompanying essays. Mulroy and a British film historian, Edward Buscombe, write about the appeal of the western outside the United States, especially in Eastern Europe. Polish-born scholar and poster collector Frank Fox tells of the cultural resonance of the western in Poland and offers highly original interpretations of some of the posters reproduced in the book. Polish art critic and curator Mariusz Knorowski explains how the so-called Polish Poster School could originate and gain international recognition amid seemingly unfavorable political and economic conditions.

For this reader, the book also brings back some rather personal memories. The strange, almost cubistic figure of a gunfighter on the book’s frontispiece (Wojciech Wenzel’s 1959 poster for “Shane”) reminds me that “Shane” was probably the first western I ever saw. I must have been 8 or 9 when I was taken to the show by my grandfather against the wishes of my parents. I remember feeling dazed and a bit unsettled by the contrast between the seemingly austere realism of the picture (knowing little about American history, I placed the story in contemporary times) and what I perceived as fantastic, even supernatural, aspects of the plot. Could real people shoot that fast? My grandfather, a World War I veteran, was equally skeptical. On the way home he patiently explained to me the mechanics and tactical limitations of the revolver. (During his years in the trenches he used the Belgian Nagant, a European refinement on Mr. Colt’s invention.) As for my father, who saw many of his college friends killed during the anti-Nazi Warsaw uprising of 1944, he steadily refuses to this day to watch any movies in which shooting is played for fun.

The Polish romance with the western was always marked by a certain ambiguity, even for boys like me. After all, we were growing up among people who did quite a bit of real fighting and who knew, in nightmarish detail, the nature of real violence. The more general allure of the American West--the rugged beauty of the land, struggles with nature, freedom and opportunity--was a different matter. As the authors of the book remind us, Poles became part of the American frontier saga quite early in its history. In 1854, a group of Polish farmers from Upper Silesia, led by a Franciscan monk, settled in Texas, some 60 miles south of San Antonio, in a place still known as Panna Maria (“Virgin Mary” in Polish). Later on, some of them moved to Missouri, where they built a town called Cracow, after Poland’s ancient capital. During the American Civil War, which coincided with an ill-fated Polish uprising against the Russians, they were courted by the Confederacy, but most of them decided to stay with the Union. I was amused to learn from Fox’s essay that, even today, Josef Klyk, a Polish amateur filmmaker from the Silesian village of Bojszowo, uses those episodes in his own “kielbasa westerns,” which he writes himself and then shoots with an old 16-millimeter camera.

The American West drew Polish adventurers, prospectors, businessmen and also quite a few intellectuals. In 1876, a small colony of Polish theater people led by a famous actress, Helena Modrzejewska, settled in Anaheim, where they planned to live on a farm in perfect harmony with nature and each other. “What wild dreams we dreamt!” wrote Modrzejewska in her memoir. “What visions of freedom, peace and happiness flitted across my brain! I was to give up the stage and live in the midst of nature, perhaps in a tent! I pictured to myself a life of toil under the blue skies of California, among the hills, riding on horseback with a gun over my shoulder. . . .” Needless to say, the communal farm soon failed, although Modrzejewska, having mastered English and shortened her name to Modjeska, had quite an amazing career on the American stage. (Her story gave inspiration to Susan Sontag’s new novel, “In America.”)

At about the same time, a member of Modrzejewska’s retinue, a young journalist and aspiring author, Henryk Sienkiewicz--future Nobel Prize winner for literature--spent two years traveling in the American West hunting big game, living among the Sioux and befriending a colorful bunch of frontier characters. His perceptive and humorous letters from America, published in the Polish press, painted a rather down-to-earth picture of frontier life. The romanticism of the Western landscape surfaced, quite unexpectedly, in the best-known historical novels that he wrote after returning home, especially “With Fire and Sword,” set in 17th century Ukraine. Because Sienkiewicz never visited Ukraine, his Ukrainian steppes look very much like the America prairie and the Dnieper River like the Mississippi and the Missouri. Even the novel’s central episode, a bungled charge of the Polish cavalry against Cossack insurgents, reads like a description of Custer’s Last Stand.

Fox rightly points out that the Polish fascination with the American West had something to do with the fact that Poland, longer than any European country, had its own frontier. It extended in a huge crescent along the nation’s shifting eastern borders, from the primeval Lithuanian forests in the north through grasslands and the Carpathian foothills of Ukraine to “the wildlands” and river deltas around the Black Sea. It was a land where Poles battled for centuries with Balts, Russians, Cossacks, Tartars and Turks--a magic and cruel domain where national myths and heroic sagas were born. Unlike the American frontier, however, which kept moving westward until it reached the Pacific, the Polish borders were rolling back, collapsing inward, until Poland was no more. At the end of the 18th century, exactly when Americans were winning their independence, Poles were losing theirs, swallowed piece by piece by Russia with the help of Germany and Austria. While cheering the triumphs of American manifest destiny inscribed in the myth of the American West, Poles must have realized that, in their own continental power game, history had assigned to them the role of Mexicans, if not that of the Native Americans.

Despite the ambivalence resulting from specific Polish historical experiences, the western enjoyed tremendous popularity in Poland and, with the exception of a short lacuna during the darkest Stalinist years, seemed also to have almost unqualified approval from the communists. This may come as a surprise to those who embrace quintessentially American virtues: rugged individualism, self-reliance, moral rectitude, in-born sense of personal freedom. The authors of the essays in “Western Amerykanski” somehow skirt the issue, though it deserves a closer scrutiny. One explanation is the fact that, on a closer look, the western presents a rather cruel and nihilistic view of human nature and the condition of freedom. In the world of the western, freedom and dignity are clearly privileges of a few supermen of unshaken will and superior martial skills, while people of more civil disposition are habitually humiliated and abused. Whenever the story is given a semblance of a social context, the society is invariably in the state of anarchy, moral collapse or powerlessness. Its rudimentary democratic institutions--a town meeting, a local election--are usually presented as sham and ineffective. Eventually it is up to the lone superman to save and redeem the many while treating them with barely concealed contempt.

Perhaps it was a philosophy the communists thought they could live with. Perhaps they secretly believed that the local populace would see them as “good sheriffs” keeping at bay the forces of anarchy. On the other hand they might have seen the western merely as clean, nonideological fun that was free of consumer temptations--no flashy cars, no stylish interiors or trendy clothes shamelessly flaunted in western crime movies.

Whatever the reason, during martial law imposed on Solidarity in 1981, the Polish state-controlled television station treated its viewers to a year-long “western Marathon” featuring one classic western picture every Saturday night. This infusion of the (quite literally) captive audience with the western imagery produced at least one unexpected comeback. When, in 1989, the Polish government was forced to the negotiating table and agreed to hold semi-free elections, one of Solidarity’s best-known political posters, created by Tomasz Sarnecki, featured Gary Cooper from “High Noon” striding to the polling station with a Solidarity logo above his sheriff’s star and a ballot in his hand. Even this poster, however, was a bit of a double-entendre. On the surface it embraced the heroic pathos of the genre while at the same time mocking the myth of the lone (and lethal) saving angel. “Thank God, we are not living in a western,” said its more subtle message. “Our showdown is an election! Our sheriffs do not need to carry guns, because, unlike in Fred Zinnemann’s movie, they have the whole town behind them.”

As for the posters that accompanied Poland’s sometimes equivocal romance with the western, they do present a baffling phenomenon to American viewers acquainted with the rules and conventions of “commercial art.” In Poland in the ‘60s and ‘70s, flagrant disregard of those conventions was a rule rather than an exception. For example, almost all posters reproduced in the book brazenly ignore the thing known as “star appeal.” With the exception of an occasional John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, the actors’ visages are hardly ever used. Even their names are often a barely readable scribble in the margins. If photographic material is utilized at all, it is almost invariably as an element of an elaborate collage that follows the artist’s vision, not the movie’s theme. The posters do not attempt to present a character, a scene, an action sequence, even a general idea of the plot. A few contain subtle symbolism that seems to refer to the film’s content (Waldemar Swierzy’s poster for “The Missouri Breaks” by Arthur Penn is a good example), yet these are so abstract and cerebral that their true meaning can be discerned only after seeing the movie.

What we have is clearly not “advertisement” but art that draws inspiration from popular culture in order to deconstruct, mock and celebrate it. Its closest relative is Western pop art--with its blurring of distinctions between “high” and “low” taste, its fascination with the commonplace and its parodistic attitude toward commercial practices and techniques. What was different in this Polish brand, however, was the fact that it pretended to be the very thing it tried to caricature: a Warhol painting paraded as a real ad for Campbell’s soup.

At least in part, this peculiar phenomenon was the product of the political shift and ensuing change in the financing of the arts that occurred in communist Poland in the late ‘50s. With the worst years of Stalinism finally over, there was a sharp drop in demand for propagandist socialist-realist works (the ubiquitous busts of Lenin, statues of heroic workers, landscapes with shiny new tractors) that used to embellish halls of state offices and party headquarters. Because there was no private art market to speak of, the authorities were faced with the task of keeping the quite numerous arts community, especially the younger, more restless generation, employed, well-fed and generally satisfied. Poster commissions and other forms of utilitarian art, like book covers and illustrations, became the main venue of state subsidies for the arts. The government channeled its funds through numerous state-owned art associations, publishing houses, theaters and advertising agencies, which paid the artists handsomely and, for the most part, let them run their own shows as long as their art remained free of overt political content. Of course in the economy of perennial shortage of everything--from good entertainment to butter and toilet paper--there was hardly any need to “advertise” anything. But for the Polish artists the absurdity of the arrangement was also an advantage. Liberated from the ideological and aesthetic corset of socialist art, they were also free of any real commercial strictures. Most of them used this double freedom to create something almost without precedent anywhere else: a new brand of amusing, surreal, popular art not averse to intellectual and aesthetic provocation.

Was it also, as the essays in “Western Amerykanski” seem to suggest, an art with “hidden agendas” and subliminal messages “about America, Poland, individual experience, and universal values?” Fox, in particular, seems inclined to see symbols of “[d]eath, mutilation, destruction, incarceration and dysfunction” in even the most innocent-looking posters. I am afraid this is a bit of an over-interpretation. Most of the works shown in this book are merely intelligent visual pranks--funny, lighthearted and whimsical even when the movies they represent are not. It is true, as Mulroy and Buscombe observe, that they often “challenge fundamental and cherished tenets of the genre” and present an ironic comment on the myth of the American West. They do it, however, in a rather light, satiric way. By recycling the most cliched western motifs--cowboy hats, guns, rearing horses, cactuses--they underscore the artificiality of the Western conventions; by frequently employing children’s drawing techniques and circus stylization, they seem to beg the viewer not to treat their subject with excessive piety.

There is an irony also in the fact that both the American western and a sizable chunk of the Polish Poster School recently shared the same nostalgia-filled rooms of the Autry Museum. Just as the western was killed by the modern action movie, the Polish poster succumbed to the very thing it mimicked so artfully for more than two decades--the bona fide “advertising art” made to flatter, not to challenge, consumer tastes that swamped Poland after the collapse of communism. This is sad but also a bit of a relief. Polish poster art was one of the more attractive products of an otherwise dismal period, when communism tried to cover its fiendishness and decay under the trappings of Western consumer culture. The posters added life to gloomy Polish streets and brightened dinky rooms in dreary concrete housing projects. Eventually they even found their way to London psychedelic boutiques and Manhattan lofts.

But their preponderance kept Polish graphic art in the state of prolonged adolescence--delightful in its loud, obnoxious way but tolerated only because it was expected to be soon outgrown. The radical separation of art and advertising witnessed in recent years throughout Eastern Europe proved to be not such a bad thing at all. Original, artistic posters have been replaced with huge, standardized movie billboards, but private art galleries flourish and Polish art is clearly entering a new, more mature stage. (Brilliant, technically innovative prints seem to be the new Polish specialty.) The back cover of “Western Amerykanski” features a poster by Jerzy Flisak for Stuart Millar’s movie “When the Legends Die.” It shows a gaudy rodeo saddle with a pair of angel’s wings, flying away into the blue beyond. A fitting farewell to two powerful legends so skillfully retold in this engaging book.