This book monograph (based on a PhD thesis) about posters made in Poland between 1944 and 1954 seeks to explain why there was a boom in the production of this type of art during this period. The book offers the explanation chronologically, starting with favorable conditions in the inter-war period, the frequent use of posters by the underground movement during World War II, to the establishment of dedicated workshops (in Lublin under Soviet tutelage and in Łódź) in the early post-war period. But for Katarzyna Matul the major factor was the massive investment in movie posters in the second half of the 1940s. The state-sponsored cinema organization "Film Polski" took the important decision not to simply reproduce foreign posters, but to create its own; it was thanks to cinema that the poster industry really took off, as illustrated by the examples of the poster for Citizen Kane (released in Poland in 1948) and for the French movie La Symphonie Pastorale in 1947. Here there was a real artistic interest, which Matul analyzes well: the project was to make posters that were different from the "American style," which the Polish artists considered "bad taste" and, implicitly, to make posters that also veered away from the Soviet examples. The ambition to forge a "Polish style" in this field motivated the artists.

The book references interesting unpublished and unknown documents, such as a stenogram of a debate in 1951 at the Zachęta National Gallery (preserved at the National Museum in Poznań in the collection of the artist Szymon Bojko, the author of the 1972 book Polski plakat współczesny). The stenogram shows different expectations surrounding the poster art, but all interlocutors shared the aim of creating a unique and successful product.

Three main points can be discussed. Firstly, posters for movies about the Holocaust raise questions about the connection between poster art and the postwar memory politics. This is the case with Wanda Jakubowska's film Ostatni etap, whose poster depicts a broken flower put against the backdrop of a concentration camp uniform. The poster was judged by some to be formalist, which led to a discussion about what formalism meant (a recurrent question at the time). Another film that gave rise to controversy is Ulica Graniczna, a re-enactment of the Warsaw ghetto and the 1943 uprising; in this case, the debate set director Aleksander Ford against the poster artist Eryk Lipiński and focused on the appropriateness of showing "figures burning in destroyed houses." These interesting cases raise the question about the ways we connect the history of the poster and the history of the visual memory of the Shoah in Poland. This question links the book to the 2023 exhibition Pomniki oporu: Sztuka wobec powstania w getcie warszawskim (1943-1956) (Monuments of Resistance: Art and the Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto), dedicated to the visualization of the Shoah, which took place at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

Secondly, Matul's hesitations surrounding the word "socialist realism" can be questioned. The author states in her introduction that she wants to showcase creativity throughout the period 1944-1954. Still, the core of the book is based on a conventional chronological division. In 1944-1948 the poster format boomed, then it was interrupted in 1949-1953, to make a great comeback during de-Stalinization. The author associates the term "socialist realism" negatively, with the dark period of low creative output. This leads to an unresolved question whether posters from the 1944-1948 period functioned outside the realm of socialist realism. Or should we consider them as within the realm of socialist realism? This ambiguity reveals the persistent hesitation surrounding this very term, which continues to encumber researchers.

Thirdly, there is a question about the uniqueness of Polish posters in the Communist Bloc. Matul does not explicitly discuss this point, but she implicitly suggests it, by claiming that there was a "Polish style" in poster design. The exceptionality argument already appeared in the 1950s. From that time on, Poland organized poster exhibitions in other socialist countries, where their specific style was discussed, contributing to their growing reputation. Poland also succeeded in creating "big names" in poster design, such as Tadeusz Trepkowski, who was revered after his death in 1954, which led to the general appreciation of the Polish poster industry. We might add that, in 1968, the founding of a museum specifically devoted to posters in Wilanów contributed to the further association of posters with Poland. Posters created in other Soviet Bloc countries did not have a similar aura. And yet, if we consider posters by György Konecsni in Hungary, or even anonymous Czechoslovakian, Romanian, and Bulgarian posters, the thesis about the exceptionality of the Polish style in poster art is less obvious. Also, the strict division between the 1944-1948 period and the 1948-1953 period seems less obvious. Though it is not exactly the author's aim, this book points about the transnational history of posters from across the whole Socialist Bloc, and invites to a more critical history of Poland's poster art as a distinct brand.

Jérôme Bazin