Художествената илюстрация за деца в България през 80-те години на ХХ век
Bulgarian book illustrations for children of the 1980s

Summary/Abstract: After the peak of the Bulgarian illustration in the 1960s and 1970s, the same familiar direction was followed in the next decade. The main illustration trendsetter was the traditional National Exhibition of Illustration and Book Arts and the annual Best Book Competition. Naturally, artists continued their creative quests, each of them finding their own way of expressing their personal creativity, whether complying with the literary text or not, sticking to their recognisable styles or inventing innovative ones depending on the particular project. This trend in the 1980s exhibitions failed to produce good examples of the art of book illustration, but rather demonstrated the best achievements. In children’s illustrations, authors had a much wider artistic freedom depending on the age group, the text or their personal creativity, than the illustrators working in the field of poetry and fiction. The artistic attitude towards the children’s world of fairytales, the folklore and traditional elements, and even co-authorship with the text, shaped the wide spectrum of this category in the exhibitions to their very end in the early 1990s. Despite the huge artistic experience of Bulgarian illustrators, their development, however, faced a number of obstacles such as bad print, planned publishing, the growing financial crisis, which led to a lack of paper, inks and production constraints. Criticism also often lapsed into a ‘helpless’ situation drawing the same conclusions and making rather too literal-minded comments on issues that had not been solved by either the artists or publishers and printers. The end of the decade and the end of the political system in this country brought to an end the exhibitions and competitions, which would never be renewed.

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