Cooper Hewitt says...
Jan Lenica was a Polish graphic designer and cartoonist. He was born in 1928 in Poznań, Poland. Lenica cited his father, the artist Alfred Lenica as the single most significant influence on his work. Both father and son shared a belief in Modern art as well as a reverence for Max Ernst, the French Surrealists and the Polish surrealists. A teenager when the Second World War ended, Lenica’s oeuvre also reflects the experience of death and the loss of identity. In the years immediately following the war, Lenica earned money drawing political cartoons that appeared in both Communist newspapers and cultural journals.
After graduating from the Architecture Department at Warsaw Polytechnic, Lenica worked as a poster illustrator as well as a collaborator on Walerian Borowczyk’s early animation films. Lenica introduced sophisticated graphics to the field of animated film and remained extremely influential in into the early 1960s, serving as the first professor of animation at the University of Kassel in Germany, while continuing to teach graphic design and poster illustration. By the mid-1970s, Lenica had largely dismissed his concern with a political or social agenda took on larger corporate work for clients including the Olympic Committee and the German Sparkasse Bank. Lenica is represented in museum collections throughout the world, and was the receipt of numerous awards, including the Max Ernst Gold Medal Prize from the International Poster Biennale in Warsaw in 1966.
