EUROPA 2003 - POSTER ART - TOMISLAV KRIZMAN, POSTER MARYA DELVARD, 1907

The stamps have been issued in a 20-stamp sheet. The First Day Cover (FDC) and two maximum cards were also issued. Two powerful artistic personalities, Krizman and Bućan, whose posters feature as motifs of this stamp set, mark the value and temporal coordinates within which the Croatian poster has emerged and is carrying on. The first appearance of the poster in Croatia corresponds to the advent of the Secession - in Vienna it appeared in 1897, in Zagreb in 1898. Expressing a special sensitivity for applied art, the style has made the poster the nucleus of graphic design. The style that found expression in the two-dimensional world of surface was ideal for the poster to be inaugurated as the popular image of the new times, as the scenography of city streets and squares, while the printing technique of lithography has made it possible. The authors of our first posters were primarily painters, but at the same time also excellent graphic artists and drawers. Most of them studied at the Crafts School in Zagreb, founded in 1882, and further at the higher art schools and art academies of Central and Western Europe. Bela Čikoš Sesija, Robert Auer, Menci Klement Crnčić, Tomislav Krizman, Ljubo Babić, Frano B.Angeli Radovani, Mirko Rački, Jozo Kljaković, Radovan Tommaseo, all of them have created wonderful posters for various areas of human activities (culture, economy, sports, entertainment, politics), some of them becoming models of poster art. Even nowadays we consider Tomislav Krizman to be an unattainable role model in the area of graphic design and artistic craftsmanship, and we can consider his opus in this area to be pioneer work. One of his first posters comes from the year 1907 and was made for Marya Delvard, a singer and reciter who, before her arrival in Zagreb, used to thrill the cabaret audiences of Vienna and Munich and also used to inspire artists. By emphasizing the exaltation, coldness and self-confidence of a diva, “immersed” in the atmosphere of a literary cabaret, Krizman has perfectly pictured and presented a type of the fatal secessional female. After the Secession, having achieved its full affirmation, the poster has continued its media march even more forcefully, expressing in its specific way all the changes that have occurred as the consequence of various artistic styles, trends and tendencies. Proof to that are the wonderful posters of Ljubo Babić, with the exceptional poetics and aesthetics of expressionism (he has made posters for the journals “Plamen” /Flame/ and “Republika”) and there also the constructivist posters of Josip Seissel. The Croatian poster reached its stellar moment in the 30s of the 20th century that is marked by extensive production (among them also numerous posters for the Zagreb Fair), with the style developed upon the experience of the Bauhaus and the attractive aesthetic Art Deco. The exponents of this style were authors-designers Sergije Glumac, Vladimir and Zvonimir Mirosavljević, Božidar Kocmut, and Pavao Gavranić. In the period after the Second World War, many significant changes and incentives for Croatian art, thus also for the poster, were to take place in the 50s of the 20th century, specifically with the activities of the EXAT group. The standard-bearers were artists, painters and sculptors who belonged to different trends, affinities and orientations. Some of them found their world and sense of artistic creation in abstract art and non-figuration; others remained faithful to the figurative approach. The former got involved in experimental visual research and, in time, accepted and included the computer as a powerful means of science and technology, the latter expressed their attitude to the world within the spheres of the sensual and the spontaneous. Having accepted the geometric abstraction as his constant orientation, Ivan Picelj produced a huge, integral and homogeneous opus of posters of characteristic visual groups of forms. Beside him we must mention the following artists: Milan Vulpe, Mihajlo Arsovski, Alfred Pal, Boris Ljubičić, Dalibor Martinis, Stipe Brčić, Mirko Ilić and, naturally, Boris Bućan. Boris Bućan made his entrance into artistic life in 1969 and since then has created entirely new values, unique in the history of the Croatian and world poster art by building up his authentic author’s approach. “The Firebird”, the poster from the year 1983 made for the Croatian National Theatre in Split, is only one of the anthological examples from his admirable opus. The most recent generations of Croatian designers are participants in the great changes that have happened and that have been happening in the area of design, primarily in the technology of work that imposes new aesthetics and ways of communication. In this system, the poster as a medium has retained a respectable role. Lada Kavurić