The Transition to Art: Poster Exhibitions at the Outset of the Poster’s Institutionalisation

Abstract

What happened when the poster, originally an advertising medium, became an object of appreciation in the museums of Communist Poland? What criteria did it have to comply with in order to be accepted into a temple of art, a museum? The article analyses poster exhibitions organised at the Zachęta Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions in the 1950s. During this period, the interest of museum curators, critics and art historians in this medium must be envisioned as always being underpinned by political and propagandist interests; the transition of the poster to the status of a work of art is analysed here in this double, i.e. cultural and political, perspective.