Jan Marcin Szancer. Ambasador wyobraźni

Jan Marcin Szancer: An Ambassador of the Imagination is a beautiful, meticulously

prepared album that invites readers into the creative world of an artist who combined a love of detail with a talent for typographic synthesis, erudition with creative discipline, and compositional brilliance with excellent insight into the intellectual needs of readers, both young and old. It opens with an extensive overview of the artistic biography of Jan Szancer, who was a true Renaissance man: a painter, stage designer, scriptwriter, costume designer. Above all, however, he was an unsurpassed illustrator who shaped literary tastes for many decades – not only among readers in Poland, but around the world.

The album’s two hundred pages are filled with Szancer’s illustrations that stun with their expressiveness of artistic gesture and sophisticated sense of humour. For Polish people, this book is a retrospective of our earliest sensations connected with reading, when words and images merged into one evocative experience. Permanently imprinted in our memories as an illustrative paradigm and connected to quotes from literature, they transport us back to moments of pure joy with the poems of Jan Brzechwa and Julian Tuwim, and remind us of stories about Mr Inkblot, gnomes, genies, and characters from fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and Carlo Collodi.

The album concludes with recollections from the artist’s daughter, his close professional associates, and other artists who provide an explanation of the unique nature of Szancer’s work and, more broadly, of the phenomenon known as the Polish School of Illustration. The uniqueness of this album is further enhanced by a bibliography in the form of a catalogue containing 349 book covers by a man who was more than just an illustrator of children’s books: he was also a hypnotist, magician and true ambassador of the imagination.