Vintage Posters | Parsifal | Jan Lenica

Parsifal is a music drama in three acts by the German composer Richard Wagner and his last composition. Wagner’s own libretto for the work is freely based on the 13th-century Middle High German chivalric romance Parzival of the Minnesänger Wolfram von Eschenbach and the Old French chivalric romance Perceval ou le Conte du Graal by the 12th-century trouvère Chrétien de Troyes, recounting different accounts of the story of the Arthurian knight Parzival (Percival) and his spiritual quest for the Holy Grail. The poster artist Jan Lenica (1928-2001) was a Polish graphic designer and cartoonist. A graduate of the Architecture Department of Warsaw Polytechnic, Lenica became a poster illustrator and a collaborator on the early animation films of  Walerian Borowczyk. Between 1963 and 1986 he lived and worked in France, and from 1987 he lived and worked in Berlin. In 1974 he lectured on poster art at Harvard University in Cambridge, USA. He was a professor of graphic, poster, animated cartoon for many years at German high schools and the first professor of the animation class at the University of Kassel, Germany, in 1979. Lenica’s work made one of the key chapters in the history of Polish art of the second half of the twentieth century. His fame and recognition in Poland as well as international acclaim was earned by his poster art and animated films, the two areas in which he was considered one of the world’s finest artists. He is regarded as a forerunner of modern animation.