József Árendás was born in 1946 in Imeľ, in Upper Hungary (today mostly in Slovakia), the third child of a family of teachers. The family moved to Soltvadkert in 1947, and finally settled in Dunaalmás in 1954.
He completed his secondary education in Tata, where he discovered his passion for drawing at the independent art school (a workshop-based art school where students learn directly from practicing artists) of the graphic artist Károly Kerti. There, he became familiar with the diverse forms of artistic graphics. After winning the Graphic Design Prize at the National Amateur Fine Arts Exhibition, he repeatedly applied to the College of Fine Arts (now: Hungarian University of Fine Arts) but was rejected several times due to “lack of space”. Eventually, in 1967, he was accepted to the College of Applied Arts to study Typographic Design. The course—relaunched in 1966 under the direction of György Haiman—placed great emphasis on the traditions of applied graphics, teaching current creative and printing techniques, and understanding international artistic trends. Its aim was to train designers who, in addition to their professional knowledge, would also be able to meet the “market” requirements of the profession.
The generation graduating in the early 1970s, including Árendás, studied under exceptional teachers and mentors who transcended institutional boundaries, such as Sándor Ernyei, József Finta, Pál Gerzson, and György Konecsni. Many of the “students”—including Kálmán Molnár, István Bakos, Károly Schmal, Wanda Szyksznian from the College of Fine Arts, and Pál Antal, József Árendás, István Bányai, Gyula Benczúr, András Felvidéki, Gábor Gyárfás, Tibor Helényi, István Kulinyi, Kálmán Székely, and László Zsótér from the College of Applied Arts—often worked together on pavilion designs for national and international fairs organised by Hungexpo. Many were members of the “Budapest” and “Derkovits” creative groups, which operated as cooperatives in the field of graphic design (Árendás became a member of the Derkovits group in 1974), participated in professional exhibitions such as the Békéscsaba Design Biennale and other international or national showcases, competed before the jury of Hirdető (the Hungarian Advertising Company) for a commission to design a movie poster, and sometimes they were the ones who served as jury members for such competitions. The generation that emerged in the 1970s produced works that continued, reinterpreted, and turned into subjects of experimentation the tendencies initiated by the “great generation” to renew the cultural poster genre. In addition to their engagement with contemporary visual art developments and the trend sensitivity that grew out of this, their work was characterised by virtuoso and wide-ranging use of tools, the incorporation of highly diverse techniques, an emphasis on typography, and the spread of various forms of image manipulation that intervened strikingly in photomontage. Within this generation, Árendás stands out with his coherent and distinctive work. Although he has already made his mark in many areas of graphic design, he is above all a poster artist. His creative approach found its true expression in posters and in their unique media-specific qualities. Within this genre, he typically received commissions for cultural projects.
During the Kádár era, posters were produced for every major film. By the 1970s, the negative myth of the imperialist “West” had faded from the propaganda and education strategies of the period of consolidation, and from the press that conveyed them. Beat music was seeping through the Iron Curtain, and going to the cinema became a major leisure activity. The cinema—and its messenger on the street, the poster—became a symbol of accessible entertainment, the embodiment of a way of life. The poster’s graphic designer, in turn, could display his talent in the street’s open-air gallery by incorporating the artistic techniques and trends of the time according to his own ambitions (one could design a good poster even for a bad film).
From the time he graduated until the regime change, Árendás designed three or four cinema posters a year for Mokép, the state film distributor. Up to 1989, it was Magyar Hirdető (the Hungarian Advertising Company) that evaluated the sketches submitted for state commissions; after that—just as today—the distributor was required to purchase the film’s promotional materials together with the screening rights for foreign films. Nowadays, the layout of the typical cinema poster—built around a photomontage of a key scene or the main characters—has become standardised and dominant, and the “graphic designer” is often left with no more than the task of translating the captions on the imported poster into Hungarian.
In the heyday of the film poster, two (sometimes three) graphic designers were invited to watch films in the same screening room where János Kádár used to go, but Árendás also enjoyed attending lectures by Yvette Bíró, an aesthete, at the Gorky Cinema Film Club. He is also very fond of Fellini’s work. Árendás’s poster created for Fellini’s La Strada (1981) is zoomed in to the point of blur, expressing with great sensitivity the interpersonal relationships depicted in the film, the range of emotions experienced side by side but not together. The mask-like face, highlighted by the overexposure of the photograph, literally reveals the character’s profession (artist), but also makes Gelsomina a symbol of purity. His playful and experimental approach to photography—exploring the possibilities of the medium or reworking images through alternative artistic methods—was characteristic of his generation and is also a testament to the sixteen years he spent practising in a photo lab. While the enlarged pixels in his poster for La Strada obscure the composition, the noisy photo of Gyuri Cséplő (1979), zoomed in to the level of individual pixels, presents a radically different mood of revealing reality. In contrast to fiction, this lyrical documentary-feature film tells the story of an ambitious gypsy boy's development, seeking to reveal the deeper layers hidden beneath the surface of a dilapidated visual reality. Árendás travelled to Szabolcs for the poster to take photos of the main character, who played motifs from his own everyday life in the film.
The “photographic” film posters that are richer in color and elevate an experimental attitude to the level of a protagonist are those constructed from tinted photograms made of various objects. The poster for Xantus’s film Hülyeség nem akadály (lit. Stupidity Is No Obstacle) (1985) is a true optical game for the eyes: a human profile assembled from the most unexpected objects, from a safety-pin ear and a bicycle-bulb eye all the way to a corkscrew brain. 29-es vágány (lit. Platform 29) (1989) was created using the same technique. The tangled slices of railway track, the scattered toy-doll limbs tinted in kitschy pink, and the nails arranged along the magnetic field lines of the epicenter together form a startling, grotesque vision—one that could belong only to a modern American tragedy served in a comics-style aesthetic.
Pop art—with its bold outlines, clean colours and flat, even surfaces reminiscent of comic-book aesthetics—appears in several of Árendás’s posters [Fuss utánam, hogy elkapjalak (lit. Run After Me So I Can Catch You) (1977), Bolond évek (lit. Foolish Years) (1979)]. Examples of the comic style’s expressive character depiction, which highlights gesture and confident drawing skills, include Papa mozija (lit. Papa’s Cinema) (1980) and Meztelenek és bolondok (lit. Naked and Foolish) (1982), both rendered with meticulous detail and rich visual texture. The expressive poster for Az utolsó valcer (lit. The Last Waltz) reflects the character of The Band, who play a mixture of rock, country, and bluegrass. Scorsese’s concert film marks the end of a musical era, with icons of the hippie generation passing their instruments to one another for a final waltz. In the poster, the guitar—a metaphor for music itself—flares open one last time as its “beating heart” stretches outward from the instrument’s body. Harlow typeface by Colin Brignall, originally inspired by the late art deco of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1979, when the poster was made, it was a fresh and often used typeface: in other words, it has a nostalgic feel to it, yet it represents a new era.
The pronounced contours of the drawing—or the scribble-like, wavering mesh of lines—often take centre stage in his film posters. A striking example is the poster for A Romeyke ügy (lit. The Case of Romeyke) (1978), which recalls the atmosphere and memory of the images he secretly sketched along the edge of waxed canvas as a child. Spanning more than two decades, the film posters are therefore technically—and quite literally—highly colourful. Árendás’s distinctive visual language can be grouped into two fundamental categories: detailed renderings rooted in traditional reproduction graphics [e.g. A maláji tigris (lit. The Malayan Tiger) (1978), Kojak (1980); Dicsőségre ítélve (lit. Doomed to Glory) (1980)], and the works that employ fewer, generally contrasting colours and opposing surfaces, featuring bold yet highly characteristic motifs [e.g. Ragtime I–II (1980), Popeye (1986)]. The typefaces used for the captions consistently reflect the overall mood of each composition and often become decorative elements in their own right—as seen in the fashionable, shaded, sweeping, handwriting-like yet deliberately uneven characters of Meztelenek és bolondok (lit. Naked and Foolish), or the more classical lettering of Ragtime, with its slightly elongated strokes and alternating thick-and-thin rhythm. He also designs custom lettering, as in the title of Emlékeim a régi Pekingről (lit. My Memories of Old Beijing) (1981), which evokes Chinese characters, and cursive script, for example on the poster for Nyugtalanság (lit. Restlessness) (1982). Far from slipping into the trap of formalism, the identifiable stylistic features are consistently governed by a perfectly articulated central motif—an engaging idea often built on a visual twist or playful subversion [e.g. Út a végzet felé (lit. Road to Destiny) (1976), Végső leszámolás (lit. Final Showdown) (1977)].
The Hungarian section features eleven works by Árendás in the Wilanów Poster Museum in Warsaw, regarded as the alma mater of poster art. His posters begin to appear in the collection from the year he graduated from college (1972), and according to the database, the most recent one was added in 2005. From the post-graduation years, we find a few exhibition posters, but the majority of the works were created on commission for the theatre. If we were to take this as a narrow cross-section of his oeuvre, we might consider him primarily a devoted creator of theatre posters. And although, from the perspective of his full career, the steady stream of Mokép film-poster commissions continued up until the political transition, the period between 1982 and 2006—when Árendás served as the all-round visual designer of the theatre in Zalaegerszeg [known as the Állandó Színház (lit. Permanent Theatre) until 1983, and thereafter as the Sándor Hevesi Theatre]—was indeed an outstanding and truly defining chapter in his work.
Among cultural institutions, it is perhaps the theatre that has most steadfastly—and most stubbornly—clung to the medium of the poster, and continues to do so to this day. It is common for a theatre to employ its own graphic designer, whose individual style and representative visual language, tailored to the theatre’s profile, gradually becomes an inseparable hallmark of the institution’s identity.
The theatre poster is a significantly different category from the film poster, as the graphic artist generally has no opportunity to watch the production take shape during rehearsals or to consult with the set designer or director about the emerging atmosphere and visual world of the play. For this reason, we may say that although the theatre poster is inseparable from the performance it advertises, it remains an independent artefact of poster art—one that is more loosely connected to the finished work and allows far greater scope for the designer’s own ideas and creativity. The theatre poster is, in fact, a stage set in its own right—a symbolic element of the performance, much like the masks of Thalia and Melpomene, which have traditionally served as the emblems of the theatre.
In Árendás’s theatre posters, the assured quality of his draughtsmanship remains a constant: a fundamental artistic technique that underpins his gift for creating symbols and his affinity for visual metaphor. The mood of the works is likewise shaped by elements of surprise, humour or irony. The meticulously rendered, line-based posters produced with printmaking techniques continue to appear, always articulating a striking or monumental symbol. Examples include Lakat alá a lányokkal (lit. Lock Up the Girls) (1982), where the unruly corset recalls the snapping guitar strings of the 1979 Valcer (Waltz) poster, or A túsz-szedők (lit. The Hostage-Takers) (1983), in which the officers of the Hungarian State Protection Authority (the secret police of the People’s Republic of Hungary from 1945 to 1956) replacing Greek columns create a chilling, oppressive composition. He frequently uses black or dark backgrounds from which the subject emerges with dramatic intensity, as in the anthropomorphic tombstones of Vihar (The Tempest) (1983), or in Jeruzsálem pusztulása (lit. The Destruction of Jerusalem) (1984), where a dead face becomes visible behind the smouldering paper. Typography rarely takes the leading role [Micimackó (Winnie-the-Pooh) (1985)], yet it always serves as an important and carefully crafted decorative element that supports the image articulated on the poster: it is never invisible, but reinforces the subject through its forms and style. Examples include the lettering on Mefisztó (Mephisto) (1990), which appears to slip or tear apart; the fateful cross formed by the T in Macbeth (1990); or the two letters “R” in Revizor (The Government Inspector) (1990), which seem to watch from either side and close in on the viewer. In Árendás’s posters for lighter stage genres (operetta, romantic comedy), he frequently employs his signature bold, cheeky pink alongside elegant, elongated or strikingly decorative typefaces, as seen in Imádok férjhez menni (lit. I Love Getting Married) (1984/85), Marica grófnő (Countess Maritza) (1990) and Régimódi történet (An Old-Fashioned Story) (2003). He does the same for performances dealing with themes that he finds stereotypically feminine. Certain recurring stylistic elements and a distinctive formalism can be observed: his attraction to the forms of the female body and his sensitivity to creating an erotic tone. In the poster for Cyrano (1997), the naked female figure is overlaid with the hero’s two characteristic attributes—the sword and the oversized nose—which together soften the erotic charge of the image. In the visual field of Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man) (2003), we see intertwined trees undergoing metamorphosis—in other words, naked bodies. In A vörös bestia (lit. The Red Beast), the creature’s delicately raised leg, spinning a hat on the tip of its shoe, together with the red–black colour scheme, lends the poster a lush, sensual tone; yet in Marica grófnő Countess Maritza (2003), where a very similar motif is set against a soft pink background, it appears much more like a mischievous touch on the artist’s part.
The early posters produced during the Zalaegerszeg collaboration are more monochrome (often due to the theatre’s limited budget), but over time a marked inclination towards experimentation emerges: a continual drive for renewal and a willingness to hint at current trends [Lichtenstein-style pop art in A zöld kakadu (The Green Cockatoo) (1985)]. Striking throughout is the artist’s ability to express the underlying idea with clarity and refinement, his instinctive gift for creating symbols [e.g. Három nővér (Three Sisters) (1985)], and his penchant for humour—for turning things and ideas inside out—often through the language of illusionism [Üvegfigurák (The Glass Menagerie) (1986); Nők iskolája (The School for Wives) (1994)]. One of the most compelling works of the 1980s—and perhaps of the entire theatre period—is the poster for Three Sisters. This blurred, ethereal composition, almost dissolving into obscurity yet “noisy” with its field of raster dots, evokes with great force the fate of the three sisters: confined to the provinces, yet constantly longing to escape. In 2005, the poster was given a mouldy green colour, which further emphasises the underlying Chekhovian mood - because in the end everything remains as it was, in the slowly killing, foreboding gloom. Švejk was a subject he had the chance to interpret in poster form twice. The first occasion was in 1988 for the Zalaegerszeg production of the tragicomedy, where the duality of the Forrest Gump-like character comes to the fore: he becomes comic precisely because he takes everything seriously. Beneath the marching soldier’s uniform, an x-ray-like nude study “shows through”, yet Švejk wears it as proudly as a king wears his new clothes. In 2001, the Veszprém Theatre produced another poster of the brave soldier for their farce. The figure, who steps backwards and forwards at the same time, is closer to Švejk’s traditional interpretation, helped by a very strong reference to Jozef Lada’s eternal illustrations. The idea for the figure carrying a crutch over his shoulder instead of a rifle came directly from press photographs of limping veterans seen after the war. With only slight exaggeration, one could say it is harder to find an Árendás poster without a hint of humour smuggled into it, so it is much easier to choose a work in which he deliberately resolved it this way. Árendás is particularly fond of the theme—treated again in Hyppolit, a lakáj (Hyppolit, the Butler) (2001)—in which the petty bourgeois aspires to become grand bourgeois, a subject that so often slips into the ridiculous. In the poster, he captures the moment when the main character, talking over one another, rattles off dishes to the butler (which, of course, they have never tasted). The empty speech bubble symbolises the lie, while the armchair that seems about to tip over is as precarious as the couple’s financial situation. And to create the right expressive atmosphere, he once again turns to pink, ensuring we understand that this is humour at its finest.
The exhibition poster occupies a special place within the genre. Its function is to communicate information about the exhibition event being advertised in a very precise and emblematic concise way.
The situation is quite different, however, when the designer creates a poster for an exhibition presenting his own works. In such cases, the exhibition poster becomes the ars poetica of both the artist and the graphic medium itself. In the works Árendás produced for solo or group exhibitions, he sometimes adopts a didactic approach, sometimes relies on stylistic allusion, and at other times uses playful solutions—but he always takes the opportunity to leave his own unmistakable signature on them.
On the poster advertising his solo exhibition in Tata in 1986, he used for the first time his typographic–symbolic brand sign ár&ás (works), which has appeared as a constant signature on his pieces ever since he discovered the wordplay and visual play hidden in his surname. The poster for his exhibition in Komárom (1990), which presented his theatre-related works, is a playful combination of a classical theatre building with a pediment and a pair of spectacles. Here, the object functions as a visual reference and sign: on the one hand, it symbolises the act of creative seeing—the objectified emblem of the eye, or more precisely, the graphic artist’s theatre-focused creative gaze; on the other hand, it evokes the theatrical eyepiece symbolising the attentive look of the spectator, the passer-by. At the same time, it also recalls the ordinary pair of glasses—a kind of third eye and working tool—in which the artist himself is often seen. The motif of the spectacles becomes the basis for further formal play in the poster created for his seventieth birthday (2016), where the zero is attached to the seven like a monocle, and again in the announcement for his exhibition at the Hegyvidék Gallery the following year (2017): above the overlapping yellow, cyan and magenta frames—evoking the CMY colour codes — he looks out at us with a compelling gaze.
In 2003, at the invitation of the Polish poster artist Lech Majewski, five Hungarian graphic designers (József Árendás, Krzysztof Ducki, Ferenc Baráth, István Orosz and Sándor Pinczehelyi) exhibited under the title Piątka (“five”, “a group of five”, “quintet”) in the spaces of the Wilanów Poster Museum, which also hosts the collections of the international biennials. For the duration of the Hungarian exhibition, the streets of Warsaw were dominated for several weeks by Hungarian posters. Árendás’s double-tomato motif—suggestive of a woman’s bottom or bare breasts—became, as the artist puts it, “a little erotic”. The vegetable’s deliberate sensuality and grotesque expression also belong to the designer’s easily recognisable trademarks. The female body and its lines, and his virtuoso formal play with them, are characteristic motifs that appear in numerous film and theatre posters. On the poster, the number symbolism is referenced by the tomato’s five-pointed calyx, the colouring-book–style numbering, and the squirt of juice from the overripe fruit. The idea of the monumental tomato was inspired by the huge apple dominating Magritte’s 1952 painting The Listening Room. Since then, Árendás has often sought—and found—female forms in the organic shapes of fruits and vegetables (Plakater fra Ungarn, 2001).
Playing with the initial letter of the word “plakát” (meaning poster) has been a free formal game since the legacy of Nándor Szilvásy’s poster for the 1972 Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle) exhibition. In Árendás's hands, Szilvásy's expressive, anthropomorphic P with its screaming face becomes elegantly sloppy and loose, posing in the picture space, sometimes wearing acorn shoes, sometimes shaped like the graphic artist's fingers (Tata, 1985, Pécs, 1988, Tatabánya, 2003). Szilvásy’s expressive, anthropomorphic P—containing a screaming face—becomes, in Árendás’s hands, elegantly sloppy and relaxed, appearing in the image sometimes in loafers, sometimes as the artist’s own creating fingers (Tata, 1985; Pécs, 1988; Tatabánya, 2003).
The group exhibition showcasing selected works by the graphic designers Baráth, Ducki and Árendás at the Józsefváros Gallery was given the expressive title BaDuÁr (sounds like boudoir) (2015). The witty portmanteau formed from the artists’ surnames was Árendás’s idea, and in developing the concept further he arrived at the cassowary—the exotic Australian running bird whose name echoes the invented word. It thus became the central visual motif of their exhibition poster. The stylised bird, tiptoeing on human legs and wearing heavy make-up, is frivolous for good reason: it has, no doubt, just stepped out of the boudoir.
On 28 January 2005, József Árendás, István Balogh, István Bányai, Ferenc Baráth, Krzysztof Ducki, András Felvidéki, György Kemény, Dóra Keresztes, István Orosz, Sándor Pinczehelyi, Péter Pócs, Vladislav Rostoka and Károly Schmal founded the Magyar Plakát Társaság (lit. Hungarian Poster Association), which has since grown to forty members “on paper”. The poster—one of the prominent communication media of the twentieth century—began to decline visibly after the political transition, with the rise of mass-communication genres and the spread of digital design and image-manipulation technologies. Yet while artistic posters retreated from the streets, more and more of them entered public collections. The founders of the association primarily aim to preserve, for the present, the heritage of the artistic poster—a tradition that has largely lost its commissioners and undergone significant transformation. As active contributors to the poster’s flourishing era, the association’s members seek both to safeguard the representative past of the genre and, through their design and organisational work, to influence its contemporary life in a positive way.
After the change of regime, Árendás increasingly sought out clean, sign-driven compositions in his autonomous posters—works characterised by simplicity, and by striking contrasts of colour and motif. The so-called autonomous poster, a type that appeared only rarely in previous decades, became a distinctive phenomenon among poster artists after the regime change: a form created without an actual commissioner. The autonomous poster serves as a sensitive surface for the graphic artist’s opinion and individual vision—the artist’s mirror and voice, often amounting to a form of fine art articulated through the visual language of the poster. At the same time, the examples of this genre reveal the areas in which the poster, whether as an analogue object or increasingly as an online medium, remains capable of representing certain issues with real impact, suggesting new possibilities for reinvigorating socially engaged announcements and political posters. In contrast with what can be said of his film and theatre posters, certain obsessions have become increasingly identifiable in Árendás’s work—tendencies shaped by the particular design currents of recent decades. This is not, of course, to suggest that he has lost his sense of humour. Rather, the stylistic traits long characteristic of his approach—such as the dominant use of black and red [Bartók Béla (2007), Woman-namoW (2014), Gondolkodó (lit. Thinker) (2016)], the clear depiction of the pictorial pun [Banán (lit. Banana) (2004), Zoo (2005)], larger homogeneous surfaces, or the shift from firm lines and contours towards broader, more painterly brushstrokes [Üvöltés (lit. Howl) (2006)]—now more frequently become the primary agents through which the subject is articulated. The emergence of these cherished graphic “obsessions” was perhaps encouraged by the quieter period that followed the more active, inspirational, commission-filled years—for the poster and its designer—maybe because he had ample opportunity to experiment, or because the use of graphic design programs had such an effect on his mode of expression. None of this changes the fact that the ár&ás works continue to possess a striking visual pull, one that instantly—and quite deliberately—reveals the artist himself grinning back at the viewer from behind the contours, painted body parts and grotesque scenes.
József Árendás is primarily known as a poster designer, yet his name is also associated with the visual identities of the Hevesi Sándor Theatre, Lipóti Bakery (a nationwide network with the largest baking plant in Hungary), and Gyermelyi Pasta (Gyermelyi Zrt. is Hungary’s leading pasta producer). Gyermelyi Zrt. commissioned him to design the brand’s entire visual identity and packaging system first in 1991, and again in 2014. Visual identity, packaging, logos or the design of trade-fair stands belong to the more “invisible” areas of applied graphics—fields in which the designer creates the outward appearance of a company or product, always keeping in mind the intended branding, mindset and corporate philosophy.
[2017]