Teeming with clowns, zebras, thespians and ballerinas, post-World War II Polish posters look just like old posters—which is exactly what you should see. At first. Beautiful as these posters are—nodding to Peter Max’s vivid forms and colors, Fernando Botero’s luminosity—their pulchritude sometimes runs second to a more sinister exhibition. In the hands of a host of artists known chiefly to other graphic designers, their Pagliaccis are mere players on a stage—red herrings, whose true agenda is hidden.

The stage, now, is the Richard Goad Theatre, which on Friday opens a display of postwar Polish posters in its foyer—but before that it was postwar Poland, after nearly a decade of deprivation and war, when the Communists were tightening their squeeze. Posters, created by designers from the now-world-famous Polish school of poster design, filled a void—becoming not just an impressive form of advertising but a way to voice things you couldn’t say out loud.

“A lot of artists found ways to snake negative things into the posters. Some of them are not beautiful. Some of them are depicting a beautiful subject, but they’re doing it in a disturbing way,” says Goad marketing director Vic Warren. And for some very disturbing reasons: as East Germany would in later years, Poland quickly disappeared in the late 1940s behind the cloak of its own Communist regime—not to emerge until 1989. So, while happy circuses, classic Shakespearean plays, and abstract takes on Wagnerian operas were common poster subjects, their details say as much about their times as about their subjects.

“We have just one [circus poster] in our collection and it’s a very, very wonderful poster,” Warren says. “It’s very dark and cartoonish and it’s a spy clown in a black hat and a black overcoat. He’s got a red nose and he’s carrying a newspaper that says ‘cyrk’ on it.” “Cyrk” means circus—and a guy in a black coat means trouble: “Combining the idea of the undercover agent with the circus,” Warren says, making it sound like a scene from The Third Man or Charade. “There was KGB and all that stuff going on.”

It continued for decades—at least until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989—and thanks to these designers’ skill, it’s still here with us today. The result of a collaboration with Polish poster sellers Contemporary Posters of New York, this show is proof that word did get out about Communist rule. Now, it’s on display and on sale, years after it should have been destroyed—uncannily mirroring the path of so many post-Communist countries to capitalism.

THE POLISH SCHOOL OF POSTERS THE RICHARD GOAD THEATRE | 4250 ATLANTIC AVE | LONG BEACH 90807 | 562.997.1494 | LBSHAKESPEARE.COM | 562.437.1443 FOR APPOINTMENT | OPENING RECEPTION FRI 6:30PM | THROUGH DEC 15

Tags: communists, poland, propaganda, world war II