GRAPHIC DETAIL
OR THE POLISH DESIGNER BRONISŁAW ZELEK, words were always as important as images. In his haunting 1967 poster for Henning Carlsen’s , the title squats in the cerebrum of a ravaged anatomical skull, the rounds of its letters looking like is all lettering: a multihued pop-art assemblage of license plates and bumper stickers. But it is his iconic poster for Hitchcock’s that uses type most dramatically, with the repeated Polish title advancing in swarms behind a death’s-head on wings. Zelek, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 82, made more than 100 posters in the 1960s while working as an assistant to the great progenitor of the Polish Poster School, Henryk Tomaszewski, at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Though he ostensibly retired from graphic design in 1970 and moved to Vienna to devote his life to painting, his stark, iconic posters have remained hugely influential. His image of disembodied hands embracing the back of an anonymous head for (1967) was “borrowed” 40 years later in the international posters for Woody Allen’s 2010 , while his composition for the Brigitte Bardot love triangle (1967), in which hands cradle an empty swath of halftone dots, may well have influenced Vasilis Marmatakis’s design for Hands feature prominently in much of Zelek’s work: a finger morphs into the barrel of a revolver for (1969), and a black hand containing Brock Peters’s superimposed face reaches for the sky in (1962). Though he tended to favor monochrome photographs with the contrast turned up high, he occasionally used bold planes of color, as with his blue-faced Lee Marvin—a rare image of a movie star in his work—for (1967). Before he completely left the world of graphic design, Zelek continued his devotion to lettering by becoming a font designer in the mid-’70s, creating two self-named typefaces still in use today: the rounded, Escher-like “Zelek,” and the jagged, interlocking “New Zelek 45” (which sliced off the corners of its letters at a 45-degree angle), used most famously in the logotype of the British electronic music duo Basement Jaxx.
