Vintage Polish Posters | The Master Builder | Ibsen | Swierzy

The Master Builder is a play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It was first published in December 1892 and is regarded as one of Ibsen’s more significant and revealing works. The play was first performed in 1893 at the Lessing Theatre in Berlin. It opened at the Trafalgar Theatre in London the following month, with Herbert H. Waring in the name part and Elizabeth Robins as Hilda. Productions in Oslo and Copenhagen were coordinated to also open in 1893. In the following year, the work was staged by Théâtre de l’Œuvre, the international company based in Paris. The first U.S. performance was at the Carnegie Lyceum in New York in 1900. The German director Michael Klette adapted this story for his movie Solness (2015). The artist for this poster is Waldemar Swierzy, born in Poland in 1931. He graduated from the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts in 1952. Subsequently he was Professor at the University of Fine Arts in Poznan from 1965 and Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1994. In 1992 the government of Poland issued a postage stamp to honor one of his Cyrk (Circus) posters, ‘Clown with Derby’. Swierzy is one of the Polish School of Posters’ most prolific artists, having created over 2500 posters. He employed unusual concepts with a variety of techniques, frequently mirroring Polish social history from 1950s through 1980s, with a myriad of styles: folk art from the 50s, pop art from the 60s, portraits from the 70s, and TV images from the 80s. In addition, his Jazz Greats series of famous American jazz personalities became so well known that he reissued them in his later years as signed lithographs. The series includes Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles and Charlie Parker, among others. He passed away in 2013.