5 Revolutions in Design
 

see also:

Suprematism

Constructivism

Russian Suprematism and Constructivism

In order to grasp the context of Russian graphic design from the revolutionary years, it is necessary to take a brief look at the artistic trends of the previous decade that would have a substantial impact on future endeavors. In the years just before the outbreak of the First World War, a thriving Russian avant-garde an scene had developed in Moscow. Russian intellectuals had for decades identified advanced culture with French society, so it was only natural that the new experimental artists based much of their work on what was happening in Paris. Groups such as the Jack of  Diamonds consisted of young progressive artists who were open to Western aesthetics. An example of the pervasive French influ­ence is manifest in the work of two Moscow artists, Natalya Goncharova (1881-1962) and Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964), who developed a painting style after 1912 that they called Rayonism. Rayonist works exhibit elements derived from Analytic Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism. The flat facets inter­penetrate with the dynamism of Futurist work, while the prismatic color recalls Robert Delaunay's many studies of the Eiffel Tower amid bright sunlight. The term "CuboFuturism" is often used in reference to Russian work in this idiom.

    Goncharova's Cats (rayist perception] in rose, black, and yellow) is a fine example of the Rayonist technique (fig. 5.20). The image of two black cats is used as a starting point for an investigation of abstract color harmonies and compositional lines. The Rayonists concerned themselves with the materiality of tight on varied surfaces; that interest is clearly expressed in Cats. Regardless of its French derivation, Larionov and Goncharova also wanted to assert a specifically Russian identity through their work. It is arguable that the dense horror vacui compositions and the bright color of many Rayonist works reflect the lubki tradition—it was quite common for early twentieth-century avant-garde artists to reference native "primitive" traditions such as these folk prints. In fact, Larionov and Goncharova later joined the Donkey's Tail group, which was made up of disaffected avant-garde artists who wanted to explore native Russian traditions to counteract the dominance of Western art.
 

5.20 Natalia Goncharova, Cats (rayist percepltion! in rose, black and yellow),
1913. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Kasimir Malevich , Vladimir Tatlin

Around 1915, Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) devised a style called Suprematism, which proved to have a lasting impact on Russian graphic design. Malevich's Suprematist paintings carried Cubist abstraction to its logical extreme, consisting of colorful squares and rectangles that appear to float in an infinite space. The blocks of color are unmodulated, the compositional struc­tures often diagonal and suggestive of dynamic movement. This is reductive geometric abstraction par excellence; Malevich desired to invent a new universal language with strong parallels to the later work of Dc Stijl in the Netherlands. Like the mature works of De Stijl artists, Suprematist compositions such as Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying (1914-15;fig. 5.21) are entirely non-objective, meaning they bear no representational relationship to the natural world. Malevich christened his work Suprematism in reference to "the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art," indicating his belief that abstract forms could convey powerful emotions. As yet another example of the constellation of art movements that synthesized a hard-edged machine aesthetic with Neoplatonist universalist aspirations, Malevich was optimistic that his work was a perfect fit for the new society that was arising after the Russian Revolution.

For many Russian designers and intellectuals after the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the newly founded Soviet Union obliged them to originate new artistic styles for their new, Utopian society. Perhaps the most influential group of artists who tried to serve the state was the Constructivists, a group of artists who based their aesthetic on the pioneering sculpture of Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953). A rival of Malevich during the war years, Tatlin exhibited a series of sculptures influenced by Cubist techniques in 1915. Called "Counter Reliefs," these non-objective works allowed Tatlin the freedom to experiment with different geometric shapes without being tied down by representation (fig. 5.22). Eschewing the emotional themes favored by Malevich, Tatlin sought to use the everyday materials of the industrial world, including iron, rope, copper, and wood scraps, to explore abstract beauty. These materials are clearly suggestive of industrial products, while the forms of his sculptures have often been com­pared to the products of modern industry, such as airplane wings. Tatlin's Constructivist "Counter Reliefs" signify an important shift in his attitude to art; Tatlin conceived of art as directly tied to the industrial world and thought that artists should approach their work with the logical planning of an engineer. He disregarded the speculative philosophy and autonomy from everyday existence that characterized most art, including Suprematism.
 

A New Utopia

In 1918, with civil war raging as the Bolsheviks attempted to consolidate their regime, a number of former expatriate artists assembled in Russia in the hope they could play a role in building the new Communist state. It is important to remember that avant-garde artists had often speculated on the coming of a new, more enlightened age, and the horrors of the First World War had only increased this sense that major social change was necessary. But, while European artists such as the members of De Stijl never had the chance to witness a dramatic transformation of their government, Russian intellectuals believed that they had received the ultimate gift: a chance to construct a new Utopian society that would promulgate economic justice and social equality through­out the world. Followers of Malevich and Tatlin alike thought that their work, replete with universal values, could help form a "revolutionary" visual identity for the nascent Communist Utopia. Initially, the Bolshevik government embraced the aspirations of the avant-garde with enthusiasm. However, as early as 1919 some Soviet officials criticized the avant-garde for their impracti­cal experiments in abstract form and metaphysical speculations. Tatlin adjusted to this situation and gradually adopted, along with his friend Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956), a more utilitarian concept of art. Constructivism, a term that was not actually coined until 1921, featured a rejection of self-expression combined with a commitment to industrial materials (as opposed to the fine art medium of Suprematism) that made it a natural fit with the ideological goals of the new government. Tatlin's Monument to the Third International (fig. 5.23) demonstrates how the principles he developed in making the "Counter Reliefs" could be transferred to the revolutionary cause. This building was designed to reach a height of over 1,300 feet, with its spiral skeletal structure encasing a series of government offices. These offices were located inside geometric shaped buildings: a cube on the lower level held the legislature, a pyramid on the second level the executive branch offices, while the uppermost cylinder contained the propaganda ministry.

It would seem that in Russia after the revolution there was a feeling that a Utopian future was just out of reach; Tatlin's magnificent monument required architectural sophistication well beyond the capabilities of Russian construction technology, but the combination of abstract modern design and functional intent proved inspirational to many people. While Tatlin did build a 22-foot model of the monument, few people outside Moscow ever viewed it. Instead, it was the mass-produced presentation drawing published by Nikolai Punin (1888-1953) that initiated its iconic status as a symbol of triumphant Communism. Proving the power of mass production, Punin's print made the proposed monument famous across Europe (fig. 5.24).

     After the revolution, Malevich also garnered new status as well as a new position in 1919 as head of a teaching studio at the State Art School led by the Expressionist painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985) in Vitebsk. There he continued to promulgate the Suprematist aesthetic, while having a significant impact on a number of students and colleagues, including El Lissitzky. Malevich and Lissitzky were both important members of UNO-VIS, a group of Suprematist artists dedicated to the Bolshevik cause whose name roughly translates as "Affirmers of the New An." From the outset of the revolution, it became clear that Suprematist principles were less directly transferable than Constructivism to the service of revolutionary propaganda. The metaphysical realm of Suprematist "pure feeling," as well as Malevich's commitment to the autonomy of art from everyday life, made it difficult to envision Suprematism as an effective tool of agitation and propaganda.

     By 1922, Malevich was forced to keep his continuing work on Suprematist paintings secret from his colleagues because they were considered to be at best a waste of valuable time and energy that would be better spent on utilitarian works. Nevertheless, Lissitzky's famous poster from the civil war years Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1920; fig. 5.25) demonstrates how Suprematist principles were at times successfully employed as propaganda in service of the revolution. This two-colored lithograph was pub­lished by a military printing house in a run of 2,000. Despite the reductive geometric abstract forms, it is clear that Lissitzky is employing the same type of simple color symbolism and dynamic movement that more realistically inclined poster designers were using in their works. In a parallel to Zvorykin's The Struggle of the Red Knight with the Dark Force, the Red Army is shown here in the form of a wedge piercing the soft circular form of the Whites' counterrevolutionary forces. While the imagery is clearly indebted to Malevich, Lissitzky has added elements of texture and three-dimensional shading that significantly enhance the potential range of both formal experiments and expression of Suprematist abstraction. Indirectly invoking the lubok tradition, Lissitzky makes a simple, direct emotional appeal to the viewer. Lissitzky believed that the universal language of abstract Suprematism could convey meaning to both learned intellectuals and the illiter­ate peasants who were the main focus of the agitprop campaign.

 

5.25 El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919-20. Offset lithograph.
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

Constructivism and Alexander Rodchenko

While the Suprematists found continuing difficulty trying to rec­oncile their aesthetic beliefs with service to the Communist cause, the Constructivists, led by the versatile artist and designer Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958) and her husband Rodchenko, chose to renounce fine art completely. While Rodchenko had risen to prominence as an abstract avantgardist, in 1921 he came to the conclusion that in order truly to serve the revolution it was necessary to end his career as a painter and sculptor. Constructivists coined the term "Productivism" to indicate their desire to make works that served a practical purpose within the context of the Communist cause. The central role of art formulated by the Constructivists was as a complement to the new workers' state. For this reason, they sought to ally their art with industrial pro­duction, and worked to design practical goods such as propaganda posters, workers' clothes, and government buildings. With the fine art approach of Suprematism gradually suppressed, the aesthetic formulations of Malevich and others were partly absorbed into the Constructivist aesthetic, so that after 1921 the two movements are largely woven together.

     Under the influence of the Constructivists, graphic designers found an exalted status in society unlike any they had enjoyed before. Because the new regime was skeptical of the bourgeois decadence of the fine arts, graphic designers, who had participated fully in the agitprop campaigns of Communism, took their place as ideologically pure artistic leaders. Designers such as Rodchenko rejected the term "artist" in favor of more practical words such as "engineer" or "constructor," both of which suggested a more pragmatic social role as well as an awareness and integration of industrial technology.

     Soon after the Bolsheviks prevailed in the civil war and the consolidation of the Communistled regime (the Bolsheviks changed their name to the Communist Party in 1918), Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP). A response to the industrial decline that had resulted from the revolution and civil war, the NEP allowed for some new private enterprises to develop in competition with state-owned companies. This quasicapitalist situation led to the need for increased advertising by state-owned firms, several of which turned to Constructivist artists for their design projects. Enthusiastically asserting himself in this new arena, Rodchenko worked on a number of publicity campaigns for state companies. In 1922-3, he designed the first comprehensive corporate identity ever seen in Russia for the Dobrolet State Merchant Air Service. Rodchenko's designs included posters as well as logos and letterheads for its corporate communication.

     The basic image in all of Rodchenko's design work for Dobrolet is a drawing of a Junkers aircraft, the mainstay of the airline's fleet. Sometimes Rodchenko used a realistically rendered image of the plane, while in other instances he used a reductive geometric abstraction. Whatever its form, the aircraft is generally portrayed tilted as if in a climb, lending an element of dynamic energy to the image (fig. 5.26). In many graphic works from this period, Rodchenko is making a virtue out of economic necessity; the spare use of color and basic letterpress typography (the latter most likely chosen by the printer) are symptomatic of the general lack of resources that plagued Russia in the early 1920s. It is important not to overlook the continuing color symbolism of Constructivist designs that use only red, the color of the Communist Revolution. In addition, the spare Constructivist style served as a direct rejoinder to the gaudy ornament employed by the defeated imperial government.

Rodchenko's posters for Dobrolet combined Constructivist design with slogans exhorting the viewer to invest in the airline for patriotic reasons. "Shame on you, your name is not yet on the list of Dobrolet stockholders. The whole country follows this list," reads the text in this poster. This type of slogan marks an important contrast between Russian and Western advertising techniques; Rodchenko is not trying to create desire for a product, but is basing his appeal on the propagandistic themes of guilt and duty more often seen in war recruitment posters. The Russian government maintained at this time that an imminent world revolution would spread Communism throughout the West, and the urgent, militant tone of Rodchenko's ad copy sounds the same themes as Russia's agitation and propaganda campaigns.

 

5.26 Alexander Rodchenko, Dobrolet, 1923. Poster. Offset color lithograph.
Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Mayakovsky

In 1923, Rodchenko joined with the avant-garde poet activist Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) in order to form an advertising firm that they called Ad-Constructor. Rodchenko's striking graphic style was combined with Mayakovsky's clever turns of phrase to create many advertisements for state industries, including Mosselprom, a state-owned chain of food stores based in Moscow. The foods sold at Mosselprom were generic government products, lacking specific brand names or labels, so Rodchenko and Mayakovsky had to create an identity for the goods through the poster designs themselves. The texts on the posters were complicated by the need to maintain a tone of agitation, educating consumers on how a product serves the revolution just as much as it fulfills an individual's day-to-day needs.

A fine example of one of Ad-Constructor's images is an advertisement for cocoa, displaying one of Rodchenko's favorite compositional devices, the triangle, in this case formed by two arrows at the base pointing toward the product itself (fig. 5.27). The label of the cocoa looks archaic in comparison with Rodchenko's bold Constructivist design. The huge sans serif letters spell out the text in the Cyrillic alphabet with a variety of styles. Some of the letters are outlines; some are carved out of negative space; others run on the diagonal. All of this creates a tremendous sense of dynamism. Mayakovsky's text urges the viewer to buy the product by invoking the vigorous health of the new Russian citizen. "Comrades, don't argue! Soviet citizens will become stronger in sport. In our might is our right. And where is strength? In this cocoa." The text makes use of many of Mayakovsky's typical rhetorical devices: assonance, alliteration, and exclamation points. This use of repetition and aggressive emphasis neatly parallels the bold color and strong forms of Rodchenko's design.
 

5.27 Alexander Rodchenko, Kakao (Cocoa), 1923-4. Poster. Pencil, gouache.
Text by Vladimir Mayakovsky. Rodchenko Archives.

Photomontage and Film

Soviet graphic designers were perhaps the most technically innovative and original artists of their generation. They were among the first groups of artists to make sustained use of photography and to develop ways in which text and photography could be integrated into a successful composition. While photography had been mass-reproduced in newspapers and magazines through the use of the halftone process for over two decades, its ubiquity did not garner it a very significant role in graphic design until the 1920s. In Russia, the camera was idolized because of its apparent ability to produce depersonalized photographs that spoke to collective ideals more than to the individual vision of a creator. Also, the camera represented an excellent opportunity for many artists to synthesize their love of modern machinery with Constructivist aesthetics.

While straightforward photographs were sometimes integrated with text in a conventional manner, as would be seen in a magazine, more often Russian Constructivists turned to the technique called photomontage. A photomontage is a composite image made up of a variety of photographic source materials. These might include original artwork, but most often artists liked to use images culled from popular newspapers and magazines.

The composites were generally formed through a positive process, whereby images are cut and pasted together to form a collage, which itself is then subsequently mass-produced by letterpress or lithographic processes. Photomontages could also be made in the darkroom using photographic negatives, which could be sandwiched into an enlarger. Alternatively, the photographic paper could be masked as it was exposed to successive images in different areas.

In Russia, it was hoped that the startling juxtapositions of photomontage could result in works that disrupted the conventional passive reception of photographs and unleashed the revolutionary potential of modern images. This general goal of transforming the consciousness of the viewer to a more enlight­ened state was behind many of the Constructivists' formal experiments. Rodchenko made some of his first photomontages in 1923, when he collaborated with Mayakovsky on the publication of a book of the writer's poems, called Pro Eto ("About This"). The poems relate Mayakovsky's distress at his separation from his lover Lili Brik (1891-1978), distress that he connects to their shared fervor for Communist revolution. In the pages of the book, Rodchenko's montages alternate with pages of text. The fact that he was illustrating abstract poetry gave Rodchenko almost free rein to design images that feature only distant rela­tionships to the printed text. Most of his montages combine figures with the elements of modern industrial life; thus it is not the subject matter that illustrates the verses of Pro Eto, it is Rodchenko's style. Just as he and Mayakovsky matched text and image in their advertising posters, so here Rodchenko's abrupt shifts in scale and dramatic compositions are perfectly matched to the intangible feelings expressed in the poem. The page illustrated here is unique in that Rodchenko has eschewed the typical horror vacui style used by many early photomontage artists. Instead, Rodchenko's composition is based on a strong diagonal element, using a lot of empty space to draw the eye in to the central mass (fig. 5.29).
 

5.29 Alexander Rodchenko, Photomontage accompanying
Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem "About This," 1923.
State Mayakovsky Museum, Moscow. Rodchenko Archives.

Photomontage

The invention of photomontage remains something of a contentious issue in the history of the avant-garde. The Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann has established perhaps the most compelling case for claim­ing the credit for himself mainly because he is able to tie the invention to a specific trip he made to the Baltic coast in 1918. Hausmann recounted that he was struck by a military memento that showed a photo of the head of a specific soldier pasted on to a generic image of a soldier's body. "It was like a flash; I saw instantly that one could make pictures composed entirely of cut-up photos." Hausmann conveniently left out of this recollection the fact that his colleague and romantic partner Hannah Hoch (1889-1978) had accompanied him on the trip and played an equal role in the development of photomontage as a visual strategy. Hoch and Hausmann quickly assimilated this technique into their Dada experiments, allowing them to open up a new source of raw materials for a satirical eye to contemplate. Hoch's montage features a title that says it all—Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (fig. 5.28). Her montage exudes con­tempt for the bourgeois materialism and official culture that were constant targets of Dada. She has created an impulsive, spontaneous satire of contemporary Germany out of a mass of fragmented images drawn from popular magazines and newspapers. There is a strong kinetic element produced by the multiple diagonal lines that crisscross the page. The absurd juxtapositions of incongruous images seem on the one hand to lack any specific insights about Weimar culture. Most of the images were derived from commercial publications, although personal touches, such as the photo of Hausmann screaming that was featured in Der Dada #3 (see fig. 3.47) were also included. Additionally, a closer look  at some of the fragments shows Hoch's affin­ity for Communist politics, as both Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin are recognizable. Also, several other images are portraits of accom­plished women, such as the German Expressionist painter Kdthe Kollwitz (1867—1945); these photos are pasted close to a map of Europe that shows the gradual spread of women s suffrage. Clearly, Hd'ch is commenting on the societal turmoil taking place in Germany over the "New Woman" movement, a loose term for the cultural drive toward greater emancipation and civil rights for women that took place after the end of the First World War. Tellingly, Hoch includes a small portrait of herself adjacent to the map that depicts women's increasing voting rights in Europe. Photomontage, which began in Germany as a Dadaist anti-art strategy, quickly became recognized as having opened up new, fertile aesthetic territory.

5.28 Hannah Hoch, Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the last Weimar Beer-Belly
Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919.

Filmic Vision

Rodchenko was equally enchanted by "filmic" vision, and he collaborated often with the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954), first designing film titles for his documentaries in 1922. Vertov was one of a new generation of Soviet filmmakers who rejected the "bourgeois" tradition of storytelling in film because it encouraged passivity and dampened the revolutionary potential of the viewer. In place of narrative, Vertov sought to energize the viewer with a camera that records the moments of everyday life in modern, industrial Russia. Using jump cuts, montaged juxtapositions, abstract patterns, kinesthetic interpenetrations of machine and people, and a Constructivist framework emphasizing orthogonal elements, Vertov tried to create a new aesthetic for cinema that was tied to that art's specific medium. The 1924 film Kino Glanz ("Film Eye") consists mainly of a montage of newsreel footage celebrating post-revolutionary Russia (fig. 5.30). Rodchenko created a poster advertising the film that makes use of his favored triangular composition, the triangle formed by two faces that lead on diagonals through two motion picture cameras directly into the center of an eye. Vertov had written in a manifesto that the human eye and the dispassionate camera eye—the subject of the film's title—could be merged: "I am kino-eye, I am mechanical eye, I, a machine." Rodchenko's poster shows two repeated images of a boy (the base of the triangle) in extreme close-up at an oblique angle, an clement clearly taken from his study of current cinematic techniques. The boys stare at the cameras, which in turn lead upward to the powerful eye at the top of the pyramid, as they seem to confront this new technology. The gigantic sans serif letters gracefully harmonize with the images. Paradoxically, Rodchenko produced this homage to the machine entirely by hand. The "photographs" are all in fact hand-drawn, and the large block letters are similarly rendered. What appears to be a letterpress poster incorporating halftone reproductions of photographs is in fact a lithograph no more technologically advanced than the earliest poster by Jules Cheret. As was the case with Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, Russian technology was not always up to the task of fulfilling artistic visions.

     Rodchenko rarely traveled outside Russia, so his works were not well known in Europe. However, he did provide a design for a Workers' Club that was part of the Russian display at the 1925 "Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industrials Modernes" in Paris (fig. 5.31). The Workers' Club was exhibited in order to contrast the active, participatory role of the industrial proletariat in communal life in Russia with the passive, decadent individual leisure of the European bourgeoisie. Rodchenko took as his theme the recent death of Lenin in 1924, and created a "Lenin Corner" in the club. This type of memorial was quite fashionable after the leader's death, and in fact invoked the Russian tradition of having a corner of the household set aside for the family's religious icon. Rodchenko sought not only to memorialize Lenin but also to promote his policy of increased education for working people. The design for the Lenin Corner shows the standard tropes of Constructivism: a photo of Lenin floating amid a dynamic geometric design of red and black.
 

Gustav Klutsis

Gustav Klutsis (1895-1944) was one of several Constructivist artists who worked not only to create new graphics but also to design dynamic display signs. Klutsis had impressive credentials; he had fought in both revolutions, defended Moscow during the civil war, joined Malevich's Suprematist organization UNOV1S, and later made important contributions to the Russian intellectual organizations known as "LEF" and "October," which included many Constructivists. As part of the agitprop campaign, Klutsis designed a rotating sign that featured revolutionary slogans (fig. 5.32). Using geometric shapes, bright colors, and outdoor illumi­nation, this propaganda sign helped show the connection between new technology and the new consciousness of the proletariat. These types of structure, like Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, remained essentially theoretical, as few were actually ever constructed.

The manner in which the chaotic energy of Dada was sub­sumed into Constructivism is clear in Klutsis's poster publicizing the Spartakiada Moscow athletic games of 1928 (fig. 5.33). While the overall design is an orthogonal one, there is a contrapuntal rhythm to the image that is more spirited than the majority of austere Constructivist graphics. Spartakiada Moscow has the feel of one of Hannah Hoch's Dadaist photomontages, rationalized and made to conform to a grid, yet it still projects the pent-up chaotic energy of Dada. In collaging together different types of photographs with lettering cut out of construction paper, Klutsis created an epic image that encapsulates the vitality of athletic competition. Athletes were often used as emblems of the new Soviet citizen, and the equality of women under the Communist regime relative to their ancillary role in Western European society—represented by the prominent photo of a female athlete in the upper right corner—was a major selling point of Russian propaganda.
 

Constructivists under Stalin

After Josef Stalin (1879-1953) came to power in the mid-1920s, there was increasing political pressure on artists to make works that presented Russian leaders in heroic terms. Klutsis was the most effective of the Constructivists at using photomontage to glorify the Communist leadership. This theme in Soviet propaganda had started after the death of Lenin in 1924, when a huge number of public memorials were built across the USSR. This memorial cult was engineered by Stalin, as General Secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee, who seized control of the Soviet state after Lenin's death. Stalin would prove to be much more hostile toward avant-garde art than his predecessors, and it was necessary for an artist such as Klutsis who worked in the Constructivist idiom to position himself strategically in terms of subject matter—honoring the great heroism of Lenin and Stalin at every turn—so as to assure the leadership of his ideological purity in the face of an abstract style.

In 1928 Stalin instituted the first of his "Five Year Plans," a program of crash industrialization that helped to bring Soviet society closer to its economic goals. The two themes of the heroism of Lenin and Stalin and the triumphs of "socialist industry" under the Five Year Plans, are woven together in a number of Klutsis's photomontages from the early 1930s. Klutsis felt strongly that only radical new art forms such as photomontage were fit to convey the themes of revolutionary Communism:

The old disciplines in the visual arts (drawing, painting, graphic art), with their obsolete techniques and working methods, are insufficient to satisfy the demands of the Revolution as concerns the tasks of agitation and propa­ganda on a massive scale ... An must be on the same high level as socialist industry.

A poster published by the state publishing house in 1930, Under the Banner of Lenin for Socialist Construction (fig. 5.34), demonstrates how effectively Stalin, whom Lenin had distrusted and attempted to undermine before his death, created overlap­ping cults of personality that tied his own rule to that of the original Bolshevik hero. In this photomontage, Lenin and Stalin's eyes have been merged into one, suggesting the former's approval and authorization of his successor. Klutsis fills out the image with a montage of scenes that showcase Russian industry under the first Five Year Plan. The strong diagonals that structure the composition capture the excitement and inherent drama of massive factories and machines.
 

5.34 Gustav Klutsis. Under the Banner of Lenin for Socialist Construction,
published by the State Publishing House. USSR, 1930.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Gustav Klutsis.
USSR: Udarnaya Brigada Proletariata Vsego Avant Garde.
Let's Storm the Production Target.
We Will Turn the Five-Year Plan into a Four-Year Plan.

Gustav Klutsis.
Coal Debt Shall be Repaid to Our Country.
Workers, Everyone must vote in the Election of Soviets! 1930.
Josef Stalin. 1935

Film Posters: the Stenbergs

The witty and whimsical film posters of the brothers Georgu Stenberg (1900-1933) and Vladimir Stenberg (1899-1982) provide an interesting alternative to the generally severe work of the Constructivists. The Stenberg brothers completely revolu­tionized the aesthetics of film posters during the 1920s, using exciting compositional techniques that reproduced filmic vision, including the close-up and freezeframe. Their expressive posters also make use of implied movement and vertiginous shifts in scale and perspective that leave the viewer dizzy while powerfully evoking the intensity of the cinematic experience.

The film industry in Russia had gone into severe decline because of the First World War and subsequent revolution. Many prominent producers and directors had allied themselves with the Whites, and a number of them eventually emigrated after the Bolsheviks gained power. Moscow, home before the war to over 125 movie theaters, including a number of palatial landmarks, had no functioning cinemas whatsoever by 1920. However, by 1922 there was the beginning of a resurgence in the industry, and after 1923 movies once again became an important part of Russian popular culture. The attitude of the Communist Party to the cinema was complex; while it hoped to build a new Soviet film industry that could become an important pan of the agitprop campaign, at the same time the relative openness of the New Economic Policy allowed for the distribution of foreign films, especially from Germany and, later in the 1920s, the United States. The government was badly in need of funds after the destruction of the civil war, and the popular cinema proved to be a ready source of income for the state.

The genius of the Stenberg brothers was their ability to montage elements from a film in such a way as to produce an overall sense of the excitement of the drama. Their posters are not simply out-takes from the films themselves, or images of the stars. Rather, they are wholly original compositions that capture the mood of the film at hand. In order to replicate the effect of an artist masking different parts of photographic paper to form a montage, the Stenbergs designed and built a projection apparatus that allowed them to copy images from a movie frame by frame. Faced with the dearth of quality printing equipment in the USSR, the Stenbergs, like Rodchenko, had to copy the images by hand, resulting in posters that appear to contain photo reproductions but are in fact handdrawn lithographs. For example, High Society

Wager, publicizing a German film of 1923, shows the characters in the film climbing a staircase (fig. 5.35). The movie recounts the story of the downfall of a wealthy couple who become involved in gambling. The Stenbergs' poster does not show a specific scene from the movie, but instead bases a montage on some of its ele­ments. The spiral stair that structures the composition is on the one hand a geometric Constructivist device, yet on the other hand it projects danger and adventure in a way that contrasts greatly with the austere works of Tatlin or Rodchenko. The stairway also serves as a metaphor for the "social climbing" that leads to the downfall of the protagonists.

The 1920s was a golden age for the experimental Soviet cinema, and the Stenberg brothers often made posters for avant-garde filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov. Vertov's 1929 film The Man with the Movie Camera is the story of a day in the life of the city of Moscow. Reflecting Vertov's theory of the plotless film sustained by the "Kino-Eye," the movie uses a number of experi­mental techniques—montage, jump cuts, extreme close-ups—to create an abstract work that pulses with the life of socialist industry. The Stenbergs' poster publicizing the film shows the fragmented form of a woman rotating in a cityscape of towering skyscrapers (fig. 5.36). A spiral of text echoes her motion while providing some details about the film. The image in the poster appears to be taken from The Man with the Movie Camera, but it is in fact a total reinvention of how the movie feels. Nothing in the image comes from the actual film other than the woman's face and the spiral, which in this case evokes the lens of a camera.

 

5.35 Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg, High Society Wager, 1923.
 Poster. Merrill C. Berman Collection.

5.36 Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg,
The Man with the Movie Camera, 1929.

Georgii Stenberg. (Russian, 1900-1933) and Vladimir Stenberg. (Russian, 1899-1982).
Chelovek s Kinoapparatom. 1929. Lithograph. Arthur Drexler Fund and purchase.
Pod obstrelom eskadry (Under Naval Fire). Moscow: Sovkino, 1928.
The Eleventh.1928

El Lissitzky

As noted above, El Lissitzky—real name Lazar' Markovich Lisitskii—joined the art school at Vitebsk in 1919. There he worked in a Suprematist idiom, enchanted by the intuitive aes­thetic style championed by Malevich. Lissitzky soon devised his own manner of abstraction based on Suprematist principles, adding elements of three-dimensionality, rotation, texture, and even realistic rendering to his repertoire, in contrast to Malevich's more reductive approach. Lissitzky called this work Proun, or "Project for the Affirmation of the New Art," a name that res­onates alongside UNOVIS in suggesting a role for Suprematism in building a new society. Examples of Proun graphics include the poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (see fig. 5.25) and the children's book Of Two Squares that Lissitzky published in the Dutch journal De Stijl (see fig. 5.7). The original title for the children's book in its Russian edition was Suprematist. Story of Two Squares in Six Constructions, and it featured a red square and a black square, which unite to join the revolutionary cause.

    Despite his early commitment to Suprematism, Lissitzky also collaborated with the Constructivists, so that his work after 1921 represents an amalgam of the Suprematist exaltation of intuition and abstract ideals with the Constructivists' belief that utilitarian work was morally superior to fine art. A photomontage from 1924 called The Constructor (fig. 5.37) demonstrates how Lissitzky adopted the Constructivist theme of "artist as engineer," superim­posing a hand holding a compass across a self-portrait. The combination of eye and hand, uniting intellectual and manual work, was an important part of the new identity sought by Russian artists in the 1920s. The photographic elements are particularly well integrated with the geometric design of the background, for example in the way a smooth circle is juxtaposed with the compass that could have produced it. The Constructor also shows evidence of Lissitzky's experimentation with cameraless photography, as some of the background elements were made through direct exposure of photographic paper.
 

5.37 El Lissitzky, The Constructor. 1924

El Lissitzky in Germany

 

Despite his strong desire to support the Soviet state, Lissitzky differed from his colleagues in that throughout the 1920s he traveled widely outside the USSR. Fluent in German, he was largely responsible through his lectures, publications, and participation in conferences, for fueling the interest in Russian avant-garde art among Europeans. He spent most of the years 1922-25 in Germany, where he had numerous contacts with members of De Stijl, Dada, and the Bauhaus. Lissitzky continually networked with other artists, attending events such as the Constructivist Conference organized in Weimar by Theo van Doesburg in 1922. The German state was a natural fit for Lissitzky, because it had longstanding trade ties with Russia, was considered a pariah state after the First World War (like the USSR), and hosted a diverse community of artists interested in pursuing new abstract styles. Lissitzky's belief that Constructivist aesthetics could be separated from their political origins in Communism was in staunch opposition to the view of many other artists, such as Klutsis or Rodchenko, who felt that ideology, not art, was at the heart of the project. Scholars now generally separate Russian Constructivism, with its strong ideological bent, from "International Constructivism," as practiced in diverse ways by European artists devoted to geometric abstraction.

    In 1924, Lissitzky collaborated in Hanover with Kurt Schwitters on a copy of the latter's Merz journal (fig. 5.38). The resulting issue #8/9, nicknamed "Nature," encouraged artists to incorporate natural forms in their work. The cover illustrated here displays a startlingly asymmetrical design, the horizontal lines of red text resting on a blue grid that appears to be cantilevered from the left margin. This dynamic asymmetry is balanced by the centered banner at the top of the cover. Later installments of Merz, such as issue #11, discussed in Chapter 3 (see fig. 3.49), show Schwitters integrating Constructivist principles with his Dadaist inclinations.

    Schwitters helped Lissitzky, who was suffering from tubercu­losis, find work designing graphics for the Pelikan Ink Company, based in Hanover. One of the resulting advertisements shows how Lissitzky borrowed a motif from Constructivism, draining it of its revolutionary ideology in the process. The ad employs the compass-wielding hand from his photomontage The Constructor, now transformed from the hand of a revolutionary artist into the hand of a Western consumer (fig. 5.40). The original had featured the artist's commanding eye, which has here been replaced by a bottle of ink. The cuff on the arm in the advertisement has also been changed from something plain into the French cuffs, complete with cufflinks, of a well-manicured member of the bourgeoisie.

    One important advantage for Lissitzky during his German sojourn was the ready availability of up-to-date printing equip­ment, so that he was never forced to "fake" his typographic experiments by using hand-drawn lettering that pretended to be mechanical type, something Rodchenko had had to do on several occasions. In 1923, in Berlin, Lissitzky actually published one of his most important works for a Russian audience, a collection of poems by Mayakovsky called For the Voice (fig. 5.39). Using only the standard elements of letterpress available in any printer's type-case—letters, rules, symbols—Lissitzky created one of the most inventive series of layouts ever seen. The book was indexed with tabs so that each individual poem could be readily found by someone reciting the poems for an audience, as indicated by the Russian title, which can also be translated as "Poems for Reading Out Loud." Lissitzky's designs to illustrate the poems bear a closer relationship to the text than the series of photomontages that Rodchenko made for another of Maykovsky's books. For example, the poem entitled "Our March" features letters that seem literally to march across the page. Most of the elements in For the Voice—the mixing of differently scaled type, the diagonal axes, even the overall sense of kineticism—had already appeared in Dada and Futurist publications. But, like Klutsis in his photomontage Spartakjada Moscow, here Lissitzky manages to assert some sort of control over the Dadaist chaos, creating a hybrid work that combines the frenetic energy of Dada with the discipline of Constructivism.

Lissitzky returned to Russia in 1925, although he continued to travel and maintain his contacts among the European avant-garde. In a photomontage of 1926, he took up the theme of the athlete as hero in a dynamic work that combines a hurdler with a double exposure of Times Square in New York City (fig. 5.41). That American city, a continual source of inspiration for the avant-garde who romanticized its brilliant displays of night-time illumination and its iconic status, was at the heart of the most technologically sophisticated nation in the world. Lissitzky has stretched the image on the horizontal axis by cutting the montage into strips and pasting them down with slight spaces in between each column. Showing a concern with the speed of the modern city that matches Vertov's, Lissitzky created an image that captures the simultaneity favored by Futurism.

On his return to the USSR, Lissitzky was instrumental in the production of Russian exhibitions in Europe. In 1929, he designed a poster advertising an exhibition of Russian applied arts to be held at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Zurich, Switzerland (fig. 5.42). The image displays Lissitzky's continuing commitment to the Soviet cause, despite his international interests. It shows two robust young Russians, male and female, merged to symbolize the state's gender equality, staring out into a hopeful future. Below them, the words "Russian Exhibition" have been neatly integrated with a photograph of the exhibition building (also designed by Lissitzky) so that the letters form a banner that recedes into space in the same perspective. These words and the building itself appear to be cantilevered off the red band that runs vertically up the left margin.

In Russia itself, the Constructivist artists faced increasing political pressure throughout the 1930s to conform to Stalin's call for greater realism in the arts. It is obvious in the photomontages of Klutsis, for example, that he is attempting to temper his Constructivist aesthetic with heroic images in the style of "Socialist Realism." While Russian Constructivism was gradually suppressed by the increasingly totalitarian government in the USSR, the "International Constructivism" of Europe was only just beginning to flex its muscles. International Constructivism was especially powerful in Germany, a cultural base for many expatriates such as Van Doesburg and Lissitzky. In addition, a number of native German artists dedicated themselves to an exploration of the potential of universal abstract form. The next chapter will consider the Constructivist movement in Germany.
 

5.38 El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters, Merz 8/9, 1924. Journal.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

5.39 El Lissitzky, "Our March" from For the Voice, poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1923.
Book. Letterpress. Merrill C. Berman Collection.

5.40 El Lissitzkv, Pelican Drawing Ink, 1925. Advertisement. Color lithograph.
Merrill C. Berman Collection.

5.42 El Lissitzkv, Russian Exhibition, 1929. Poster.
Gravure. Museum of Modern Art, New York.