GRAPHIC DETAIL

JAKUB EROL

N THE 1970S AND ’80S, THE WONDERFULLY protean Polish graphic artist Jakub Erol, who passed away last year at the age of 76, created over 1,000 movie posters. Though he worked in a multitude of) to bizarre surrealism (a rib cage with eyes for ) to straightforward illustration (a charmingly literal portrait of ), he also developed a very distinctive use of black and white that became his trademark. The stunningly sculptural serpentine knot for the 1973 American snake-centric horror film ( in Polish) may be his masterpiece, but his most defining style features white faces or skulls—often baring impressive fangs (even the car hood for John Carpenter’s sports teeth)—on jet-black backgrounds. His heads and bodies in these posters have a deliberately unfinished look: flat planes of bright white with beautifully drawn details at their edges (he was at the very least a masterful draftsman). Born in 1941 to a Turkish father and Polish mother, Erol grew up in Lódz before studying at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts under the legendary Henryk Tomaszewski. Not long after graduating, he cemented his career path by winning a poster competition to promote the 1970 centenary of Lenin’s birth. One of his best-known designs was for Tarkovsky’s film about another Russian icon——but he also illustrated a surprising number of Hollywood blockbusters, including , , , , and (for which he painted a red bullwhip snaking through the eye sockets of a white skull). According to his daughter, Sylwia, he retired from film-poster work when computers were introduced (he couldn’t figure out how to use one) and international campaigns became homogenized. Before then, she remembered him working all the time in his studio at home. One of his final pieces shows a hand holding a pair of fake eyes pretending to be a face—promoting, of all things, .