On a recent visit to Zagreb in Croatia, I was stopped in my tracks by this poster, above, in the Museum of Contemporary Art. It is a design for the First Science Fiction Fair held in 1972 in the museum’s previous incarnation as the Gallery of Contemporary Art. The poster’s artist, Mihajlo Arsovski, had been designing exhibition posters for the Gallery for more than a decade and this poster was awarded the Gold Medal at the International Poster Exhibition in Varese, Italy, in 1973.
After finding it, I posted about the design on my Movie Poster of the Day Instagram and asked whether anyone followed my account in Croatia, which led to my meeting up with two Croatian artists/designers Neven Udovičić and Sara Kern Gacesa. Neven told me more about Arsovski, who had died at the age of 83 in 2020, and also about Boris Bućan, whose famous poster for Stravinsky’s Firebird I saw later in Split and who sadly died just a couple of months ago, at the age of 76.
Mihajlo Arsovski was born in Skopje, Macedonia, on July 9, 1937, to a family of pre-war leftist revolutionaries and photographers who moved to Zagreb after World War II. He studied architecture and art history before becoming one of the pioneers of modern Croatian graphic design.
Neven led me to some extraordinary posters made by Arsovski in 1966. They are a series of ten silkscreen posters designed for the distributor Kinematografi Zagreb for ten late ’40s American westerns produced by the Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures. All the films, none of which are over an hour long, feature the no-longer household names of either Johnny Mack Brown (a college football player turned actor who appeared in more than 160 movies between 1927 and 1966) or Whip Wilson (a singer turned B-western actor who, along with Brown, had been recruited by Monogram to fill the void left by their erstwhile star Buck Jones who had died in Boston's notorious Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in 1942).
Above: 1966 Croatian silkscreen poster by Mihajlo Arsovski for Law of the West (Ray Taylor, USA, 1949).
While the combination of groundbreaking, 1960s, postmodern, Communist-era Croatian design and minor American 1940s westerns might seem surprising, westerns were in fact very popular in socialist Yugoslavia. (The most open of the original Eastern Bloc countries, Yugoslavia had in fact distanced itself from the Soviet Union after 1948). Marshal Tito, Yugoslavia’s president from 1953 until his death in 1980, loved movies, especially westerns, and named his favorite actor as Gary Cooper. According to Radina Vučetić’s book Coca-Cola Socialism: Americanization of Yugoslav Culture in the Sixties, on Tito’s first official visit to America in 1971 he met with Kirk Douglas (whom he had met previously on Douglas’s own goodwill mission to Yugoslavia in 1964), Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, Lee Marvin, and Shirley MacLaine. But when Tito expressed a desire to watch a western in Los Angeles and was told that no western was playing that week he reportedly exclaimed, “Hollywood, and not a single cowboy movie to be found!”
Above: various 1966 Croatian silkscreen posters by Mihajlo Arsovski for 1940s American Westerns.
Arsovski’s western posters are a beautifully varied and inventive combination of type, color, and photographic collage. I would say that his poster for Crashing Thru (1949), aka Proboj, above, might have been a strong influence on one of my favorite contemporary movie posters—Marcelo Granero’s 2020 design for Nicolás Zukerfeld’s There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse—if it wasn’t so unlikely that the Argentine Granero would have seen Arsovski’s design.
The Croatian-born, New York-based designer Mirko Ilić wrote on his blog back in 2018 that “for western movie posters, from 1966, this is an extremely unusual look. They look more like Punk-Rock concert posters from the late 1970s.”
Above: 1966 Croatian silkscreen poster by Mihajlo Arsovski for Crossed Trails (Lambert Hillyer, USA, 1948).
Above: various 1966 Croatian silkscreen posters by Mihajlo Arsovski for 1940s American Westerns.
Over the course of his 60-year career, the famously publicity-shy Arsovski designed books, newspapers, album covers, signage, furniture, theater sets, and costumes, but it is as a poster designer that he is best known. He designed some 200 posters for the renowned experimental Zagreb theater company &TD Theatre, and his logo design for the company is still in use today.
You can see more of Arsovski’s brilliant non-movie poster work below.
Much of his work was exclusively typography-based, very much in the Swiss style.
The following four posters are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Arsovski designed only a few other movie posters in his career, the most significant being these two posters for films by Yugoslavia’s best-known director, Dušan Makavejev.
Above: 1967 poster by Mihajlo Arsovski for Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Dušan Makavejev, Yugoslavia, 1967).
Above: 1967 poster by Mihajlo Arsovski for Innocence Unprotected (Dušan Makavejev, Yugoslavia, 1968).
Above: Mihajlo Arsovski photographed by Tošo Dabac in 1968.
Many thanks to Neven Udovičić for all his help.