XX Krakowski Festiwal Jazzowy - Recorder player atop a trash can

Very Good. Text on poster: XX Krakowski Festiwal Jazzowy // P[olskie] S[towarzyszenie] J[azzowe] with trumpet logo // DLA ELI [for Eli]. Date: 1975. Height x width: 84cm x 59cm (33" x 23.25"). Printing information: lower left corner: Drukarnia Narodowa, zam. 514/75. 2000. S-75-7768. Condition: No visual flaws.

Mleczko made his reputation as a satirical illustrator, working in advertising, book illustration, editorial cartooning, scenography, and periodicals, in Poland and abroad. He studied architecture at the Kraków University of Technology, where he started his career with mischievous illustrations for student publications.

What is now seen as the height of Poland's poster creativity was a paradoxical by-product of the height of Communist Party control over public messaging related to the arts and cultural endeavors from the mid-1940s to almost the end of the century. What had been, before the war, and dating back as early as the mid-19th century, florid and often text-heavy formats, where fonts and textual layout bore a predominant or equal burden with imagery in conveying information, yielded in the five decades after World War II to the primacy of the image on its own. Visuals became mischievous, allegorical, satiric, and parabolic, and so fantastically creative that they could make innumerable apolitical or counterpolitical appeals while eluding the specific controls of verbal censorship.