Picture in Focus: Theater Poster for Ewangelia by Robert Czerniawski

March 5, 2023

Picture in Focus: Theater Poster for Ewangelia by Robert Czerniawski

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53:3, KJV)

Christ raises his hand to shield himself from the blows of his persecutors in this week's variation of what appears to be the Mocking of Christ by Polish Graphic Artist Robert Czerniawski. The bleeding gash in Christ's hand comes later when he is nailed to the Cross, and the trickle of blue recalls the water pouring out of his side from a spear thrust at his Crucifixion, linking the portrait to another genre of Lenten devotional art known as the Man of Sorrows, where the events of the Passion are telescoped into a single image. Czerniawski belongs to a world-famous school of contemporary Polish poster art and created this abstract portrait of the suffering Christ for a 2009 Warsaw theater production of Ewangelia (The Gospel), a play written and directed by Szymon Kaczmarek, where the events of Holy Week are seen through the eyes of John the Evangelist as he begins work on his Gospel. (John Kohan)