Captains of Illustration ed. by Anita Wincencjusz-Patyna (review)

CAPTAINS OF ILLUSTRATION. 100 Years of Children's Books from Poland. Edited by Anita Wincencjusz-Patyna. Translated by Agnes Monod-Gayraud. Adam Mickiewicz Institute / Wydawnictwo Dwie Siostry, 2019, 498 pages. ISBN: 978-83-60263-57-02

With almost five hundred pages, the volume Captains of Illustration offers a comprehensive tour of Polish children's book illustration between 1918 and 2018, with short articles in English and nine hundred illustrations. Eleven contributors give brief insights into aspects, trends, and characteristics of Polish illustration art, following one hundred keywords. In addition to editor and art historian Anita Wincencjusz-Patyna, colleagues, illustrators, designers, book historians, and many others contribute their knowledge. The extremely heterogeneous perspectives on the topic highlight the diversity and complexity of the Polish art of illustration and make for a highly readable volume. Some of the contributions, which are each only one or two pages long, are written in a conversational, at times casual tone, while others are more descriptive and analytical.

The playfully phrased keywords, which organize the many, well-chosen sample illustrations by 230 Polish artists, cover a wide range of topics. Thus, "Alice in Wonderland", "Elephants on Parade," and "Shopping Trip" are to be found among them, as are "Naked Truths," "Typographic Tricks," and "Pop Art Power." This free mix of themes, motifs, artistic techniques, and stylistic tendencies, as well as art historical epochs and illustrations of children's book classics, creates a broad panorama of illustrated children's literature in Poland. Since illustrations from almost all decades are shown for each keyword, artistic and stylistic lines of development can be traced and comparisons made. Many artists are represented with examples under several keywords, enabling readers to discover the peculiarities and characteristic traits of a particular illustration style.

While the motifs from the everyday world of children's experience and life, such as the family, the telephone, the post office, or animals (cat, bird, fish, etc.) are commonplace in children's literature, other chapters focus on specifically Polish motifs, such as the significance and representation of the Polish cities of Gdansk, Cracow, and Warsaw in Polish children's book illustration; the national colors, red and white; and important personalities such as Janusz Korczak, or artists such as Bohdan Butenko and Franciszka Themerson, as well as well-known Polish children's book characters. Furthermore, the chapters "Polish School of Illustration," "Socialist Realism for Kids," "Occupied Poland," and "Watch Out! Bulldozers" take a look at landmarks, special periods, or events in Polish illustration history. "Read to Me, Mummy!" and the "Squirrel Series" present the two most important book series that have been and continue to be published in Poland over several decades.

The literary and art historical periods are visualized at the end of the volume in a timeline. There, Captains of Illustration offers an alphabetical overview of all illustrators presented in the volume, with brief biographical notes, including "classic" artists such as Bohdan Butenko, Adam Kilian, Zbigniew Rychlicki, Janusz Stanny, Jan Marcin Szancer, Franciszka Themerson, and Józef Wilkoń in addition to younger representatives such as Edgar Bąk, Jan Bajtlik, Monika Hanulak, Marta Ignerska, Aleksandra and Daniel Mizieliński, Marianna Oklejak, and Paweł Pawlak. The eleven authors of the keyword contributions are also presented.