The War on the Wall. Polish and Soviet War Posters Anaysis

Abstract

Every war is not only the fight of the armies but also a war of the ideologies. One of the forms of the ideological war is propaganda posters. Over forty posters presented and analyzed in this article come from the Polish-Soviet war in 1919-1921. The research work is based on grounded theory procedures adopted for visual data analyses. Particularly useful was a method of coding families worked out by Barney Glaser and modified to the visual data analysis by Krzysztof Konecki. The author reconstructed several basic motifs, formal solutions, and communication strategies (i.e., continuity and continuation versus avant-garde and revolution, image of the enemy and “one’s own” imagination, strategic conversion) used by artists-ideologists from both sides of the conflict.