Collections

Art prints from the comic strip project 'Stories and Sketches' by Jacek Michalski and Monika Powalisz

'Jewish Warsaw' is an educational Internet platform. It was created by the team of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in 2015 thanks to Norwegian and EEA funds; it can be found at: https://www.polin.pl/en. It presents the city while telling about its Jewish inhabitants: contemporary Varsovians and historical figures.

One of the platform's components are nine comic strip novellas 'Stories and Sketches'. The scripts were written by Monika Powalisz (who also created, in 2011, together with six female cartoonists, a short story about the Jewish Warsaw, Golden Bees, https://www.komiks.gildia.pl/komiksy/zlote-pszczoly/1; boards from that comic book can be also found in the POLIN collection); the person behind the graphic layer was Jacek Michalski, an artist from Bydgoszcz, one of the most important creators of the Polish comic-book scene as early as in the 1980s and 1990s, and author of numerous historical comic books in the twenty-first century).

'Stories and Sketches' are works intended for downolading from the platform as 10-page files (9 boards) or for frame-by-frame online viewing along with multimedia references, including comments and contextual materials. Each biographical story is focused on a specific event from the life of a hero or heroine, while showing a particular historical moment, important for the history of the city, society, Polish Jews.

Jacek Michalski drew directly on a tablet, not on paper; hence, it is a total of nine art printouts of boards from the project that have been included in POLIN’s collection, one from each novella. They are signed by the scriptwriter and the cartoonist. It is the quality of the print and the fact they are signed that determine the uniqueness of those exhibits.

Przemysław Kaniecki

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