This poster advertised the stage adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer's medieval comic poem, The Canterbury Tales at the Jan Kochanowski Theatre, Opole, Poland, in 1976, a production deliberately intended to be provocative to the Communist authorities. Jan Sawka saw his theatre posters as an integral part of the whole productions. In this surreal image of an inflated figure of the lustful Wife of Bath, with the faces of recognisable political figures of the day, there are also references to Pop Art posters, which were influential in Poland in the 1960s.

The career of Jan Sawka (1946-2012) began in his native Poland with work that expressed artistic opposition to the totalitarian communist regime, leading to his being included in the Polish School of the Poster, and his exile to the United States in 1976, the year of this poster. Upon reaching the United States, his creative collaborations merged into counter-cultural, activist, avant-garde and alternative movements within the country he would call home for the majority of his career. This included collaborations as diverse as off-Broadway set designs and working with Samuel Beckett, to creating a historic art installation set for the Grateful Dead. He continued to create work that would ultimately help change the political system of his homeland and that would bring attention to issues as diverse as a non-nuclear future, human rights, apartheid and peace in the Middle East. In the meantime, he created paintings and fine-art prints that confronted issues of freedom on societal, cultural and deeply personal levels that were shown in over 70 solo shows at galleries in New York, Los Angeles and other cities. The last award of his life was from the American Institute of Architects for his design for an inter-faith peace monument for Jerusalem.