5 Revolutions in Design
 

Britain, France, Italy, and the United States were not the only countries in which avant-garde art movements had a major influence on graphic design in the period after the First World War. The two major developments introduced here, Dutch De Stijl and Russian Constructivism, had a long-lasting impact on graphic design. Both these artistic trends were indebted to Cubism and emphasized geometric abstraction. For this reason, they also had an indirect impact on the Art Deco style However, De Stijl and Russian Constructivism were less closely tied to the Paris art scene, which included Cubism, Futurism, and Purism; and Art Deco was by no means the most  far-reaching consequence of De Stijl and Russian Constructivism in terms of graphic design. Some special circumstances informing the creation and dissemination of De Stijl and Russian Constructivism, especially considering the latter's revolutionary context, merit that they be considered separately. The work of both groups can only be understood in the context of the conclusion and aftermath of the First World War. Out of that conflict arose new trends that established a visual language that would eventually come to dominate the graphic design field for decades to come.

see also:

De Stijl

De Stijl

The post-war De Stijl movement in the Netherlands embraced a sense of order that was in many ways a response to the trauma of the First World War. "De Stijl" means "The Style," and the sense of impersonal, universal principles conveyed by that bland name was an important part of the group's ideology. Founded in the city of Leiden in 1917 by a group of artists and architects that included Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931), Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Bart van der Leek (1876-1958), and Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964), De Stijl mixed admiration for the modern machine world with an at times mystical asceticism. Van Doesburg, in many ways the driving theoretical force behind De Stijl, had returned to Leiden after serving in the Dutch army for three years. The artists of De Stijl felt that rampant individualism as well as nationalist egotism was responsible for the savagery of the conflict that began in 1914, and they offered a universal lan­guage of geometric abstraction as a salve for Europe's wounded psyche. Van Doesburg wrote, "The old is connected with the indi­vidual. The new is connected with the universal." In their view, reductive geometric abstraction could not be identified with any one country or individual and therefore stood as the most suitable universal style for the new post-war era. The Dutch words nieuwe beeld'tng ("new imagery") served as a sort of catch-all term, indicat­ing the group's desire to spur on a fresh start in the visual arts as well as in society in general.

Seeking Universal Harmony

The De Stijl artists shared with the Purists and others a strong Neoplatonist bias: their an was guided by the concept of an abstract ideal of universal harmony. By limiting the number of expressive elements in their work, they believed that they could effectively represent their communal, abstract ideals in material terms. De Stijl features a strong Utopian theme, as its members purified an of representation and emotion in the hope of effecting broader social change. As was the case with a number of modern art movements, the messy details of social change were brushed over, and outside vague notions of universal peace and harmony, it was never clear what specific Utopia the De Stijl artists hoped to gain. It should be noted that the puritanical attitude toward art promulgated by De Stijl as a universal doctrine resonates, in fact, with a Dutch national tradition that values sobriety and Calvinist discipline. As was the case with the French Purist movement, it proved impossible for De Stijl artists fully to embrace universal-ism in a way that shed their national identity. Furthermore, it should be noted that the various artists who founded or later passed through the group did not all share one homogeneous vision of art or of society.

     Piet Mondrian used the term "neoplasticism" to refer to his aesthetic, one that rejected the decorative excesses of pre-war an as well as the emotionally laden complexity of contemporary Expressionism. While Mondrian had progressed through a Cubist phase after moving to Paris in 1911, in De Stijl, although still clearly influenced by Analytic Cubist strategies, he advocated a more radical type of simplification than that of Pablo Picasso or George Braque. A mature work from 1922 by Mondrian, Tableau 2, is completely "non-objective," meaning that it does not represent anything from the natural world, only Mondrian's abstract ideals (fig. 5.1). For Mondrian, a painting such as this demonstrates a series of balanced forms suggestive of the inherent harmony of the universe. He has limited his use of formal ele­ments to straight lines, orthogonal compositions, and an austere palette of primary colors along with white, black, and gray. Despite its non-objective quality, Tableau 2 displays the precision and hardedged geometric shapes consonant with a commitment to the machine aesthetic.

     A series of three images by Theo van Doesburg indicates how an apparently non-objective painting can be derived from the artist's study of nature (fig. 5.2a,b,c). Through the systematic process of simplification and the gradual introduction of geometric structure, van Doesburg manages to transform a drawing of a cow into a total abstraction. This process indicates how De Stijl artists felt that natural forms contain the essence of universal harmony, so that even as mundane a creature as a cow is represen­tative of a higher plane of Neoplatonist transcendence. It should also be noted how this series of images betrays De Stijl's roots in Analytic Cubist faceting, as the image of the cow passes through a Cubist phase before it is further simplified. Van Doesburg explicitly endorsed this Cubist connection, although he asserted that De Stijl artists had gone farther in considering the formal implications of the style that had originated with Picasso and Braque. Of course, De Stijl was created as a universal design style that was not to be limited to the fine art realm; rather it was to unify all types of visual culture under one set of harmonious principles. It is important to remember that De Stijl was not simply an art movement, but comprised a group of people who wanted to act as agents of social change.
 

5.1 Piet Mondnan, Tableau 2, with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray, 1922.

Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Typography and Journal Design

Of all of the postwar avantgarde art movements, De Stijl had one of the most immediate impacts on graphic design and typog­raphy in Europe. In October 1917, the same year that the group was first established, van Doesburg began publishing a journal also called De Stijl. In many ways De Stijl was at the core of the movement, because it allowed the members to promote their art and ideology to a wider public. During the years 1917-32, De Stijl established itself as a consistent vehicle wherein the ideas of the European avant-garde could be discussed and critiqued. At the same time, the journal served as a visual example of the group's aesthetic principles in the realm of typography and graphic design. During its first three years, van Doesburg published thirty-six issues of De Stijl, featuring a series of articles about the move­ment's philosophy and aesthetics. The overwhelming majority of these essays were written in Dutch. These early essays mainly con­cerned the aesthetic and quasi-philosophical principles espoused by Mondrian, who it is estimated wrote over 70 per cent of De Stijl's content before 1920. In a letter to another founding mem­ber of De Stijl, Bart van der Leek, van Doesburg outlined his plans for the journal: "The magazine will only concern itself with the modern style ... Typographically and aesthetically it will be austere, without any trappings." Van Doesburg followed through with this plan, and the resulting journal was for the most part nondescript from the standpoint of graphic design. However, a cover page combining a logotype at the top by van Doesburg with a woodcut design by Vilmos Huszar (1884-1960) is more aggressive in asserting the artistic principles of De Stijl (fig. 5.3). Reproduced via letterpress, van Doesburg's logotype features letters that are made up of squares and rectangles, each letter's horizontal and vertical elements separated into discrete units.

     While each letter is itself defined by its rectilinear and orthogonal elements, the overall word also forms a tight rectangular block. The logotype produced for the journal did not have legibility as its prime feature, but rather represented an attempt to establish a dramatic form with immediate impact on the viewer. Note that the explanatory text at the bottom is composed of more legible letterforms, declaring De Stijl a "monthly journal of the expressive professions."

     In 1919, van Doesburg completed an experimental alphabet in which the letters were similarly determined by an underlying geometric scheme, in this case the shape of a square box—like an em box—that had been divided into twenty-five equal parts, five rows of five (fig. 5.4). In designing this alphabet, van Doesburg look exceptional liberties with the rules of proponion that govern traditional typography. In this uppercase alphabet he distorted letters on both the horizontal and vertical axes in order to make them fill out the shape of the square. This investigationl endeavor demonstrates how an imaginary grid underlies much of De Stijl's graphic design and typography. For most of the avantgarde artists discussed in this chapter, the grid was a fundamental underlying structure, serving both as a representative of pure, Neoplatonic forms and as a key design element.

    Huszar's abstract design is centered on the cover along with the logotype, although the fundamental aesthetic principle it illus-trates is asymmetry. Here, Huszar shows how simple geometric elements can create expressive tension when they are composed with an exquisite sense of contrast. This fundamental element of modern graphic design and typography is manifest not only in the differing shapes and their alignment on the horizontal and vertical axes, but also in the drama created between solid and void. The startling asymmetry of the design makes a perfect counterpoint with the tight rectangular block of text—a rectangle that itself plays off the proportions of the overall page and the surrounding empty space. For the artists of De Stijl, the aesthetic principle of contrast, visible in terms of composition as well as color, was suggestive of the elemental forces of the universe. In accordance with the ideas of the Dutch spiritual philosopher M. H.J. Schoenmaekers (1875-1944), members of De Stijl believed that they could express universal truths through the employment of contrasting elements.
 

5.3 Theo van Doesburg (logotype) and Vilmos Huszar (woodcut), De Stijl.

5.4 Theo van Doesburg, Alphabet, 1917.

see also:

De Stijl

De Stijl Redesigned

Early in 1921, van Doesburg along with Mondrian completely redesigned the journal De Stijl as part of a new effort to appeal to a broader European audience. The subtitle was changed to include the words "International Monthly," and the publication sites, now including Paris and Rome as well as the original Leiden, were listed on the cover. Articles were to be published in more widely known languages than Dutch, especially French. Despite Mondrian's participation in the initial makeover—which had actually been spurred by his visit to Paris and surprise at De Stijl's limited penetration into the art world there—the new De Stijl was primarily a mouthpiece for van Doesburg.

     The new design for the cover featured the title, De Stijl, printed in black on top of the red letters "NB," an acronym for the slogan nieuwe beelding (fig. 5.5). The most noticeable break with the earlier design resides in the asymmetry of the composi­tion, which deviates from the axial centering of the first three volumes. There is a broad, blank space in the center of the cover, which for De Stijl artists did not represent "absence" of design, but was an intrinsic element that was balanced with the filledin parts of the composition. The typeface is fairly nondescript, a rather bold grotesque of nineteenth-century origin with the proportions of roman capitals. The overprinted black letters seem to float on top of the larger "NB," creating a slight illusion of three-dimensional space. This use of color as a structural element in design was another important contribution of De Stijl to modern design. While in the current example Mondrian and van Doesburg were limited to red and black, they are able to get the most out of even this inexpensive palette through careful juxtapo­sitions. The design of De Stijl is also representative of one type of avantgarde letterpress printing, the use of standard types, ornaments, and rules in new dramatic combinations. Some contemporary designers were dogmatic in wanting to develop their new, abstract language out of the everyday elements of an average printer's typecase, thus showing how beauty can be found in the most mundane aspects of the modern world. Van Doesburg had first used this technique in the third volume of De Stijl, when he had published an article that mixed different type sizes in order to create visual and conceptual emphasis.

The new phase of De Stijl prospered under van Doesburg's editorial guidance, mainly because of his openness to emerging artistic trends that shared many of the same interests as those of De Stijl's membership. For example, in 1922, he published a Dutch version of the children's poem "Of Two Squares" (fig. 5.7), by the Russian artist El Lissitzky (1890-1941). Informed by both the Suprematist and Russian Constructivist movements (see below), Lissitzky's design showcases an experiment in the same fundamentally reductive abstract language as that used by the artists of De Stijl. In addition, he displays an inventive use of typography as a signifier of meaning that demonstrates awareness of Apollinaire's "Cubist" Calligrammes. Lissitzky demonstrated a much more sophisticated use of existing type, transforming it into a breathtakingly novel and dynamic composition. In the page reproduced here Lissitzky does not limit himself, as De Stijl artists did, to the horizontal and vertical axes, but includes asymmetrical, diagonal elements as well. It is arguable that De Stijl's greatest contribution to graphic design lay in the popularization of Lissitzky's graphic work.

     Oblique designs such as Lissitzky's were eventually adopted by van Doesburg in 1924, when he made a series of paintings in which the familiar rectangular blocks have been turned 45 degrees. Van Doesburg called these new, more dynamic forms "Contra compositions," and argued that they increased the vitality of the overall composition while still maintaining the rigorous geometry of De Stijl. The oblique allowed for van Doesburg to explore new relationships while continuing to abide by the founding principles of asymmetry and contrast. Mondrian staunchly disagreed with van Doesburg's new strategy, as he felt that diagonal compositions introduced an element of personal expression that violated the universal precepts of De Stijl. This dispute led to the break-up of De Stijl as a unified group, resulting in van Doesburg's ascendance to a position of unqualified control. As editor of De Stijl, he was the most well-known figure in the movement and the one most able to dictate in print where it was headed in the future.

     A few of the members of De Stijl quickly adopted its principles for the purpose of completing advertising commissions. It is  significant to note that despite its Utopian aspirations, the members of De Stijl were not antagonistic toward modern society, and in fact hoped to promulgate De Stijl principles as much as possible through a variety of fine art as well as commercial proj­ects. In 1919, Piet Zwart (1885-1977) became acquainted with De Stijl ideas when he joined the architectural firm of Jan Wils (1891-1972), a founding member of the movement. In 1921, Zwart designed a letterhead for Wils's firm that demonstrates all of the qualities of De Stijl design: orthogonal structure; contrasts of solid and void, horizontal and vertical; dynamic asymmetry; and sans serif lettering composed into block-like rectangles (Jig. 5.6). Zwart further refined his use of this basic design language in a series of logos for the loco Corporation beginning in 1922. In this design, the monumental quality of the shapes, as well as their architectonic relationships, shows Zwart's grounding in the practice of architecture.
 

5.5 Theo van Doesburg, NB De Stijl, 1921. Art journal. Letterpress.
University College London (UCL), Special Collections.

5.6 Piet Zwart, Jan Wils Logo, 1920.
Letterpress. Collection Elaine Lustig Cohen.

5.7 El Lissitzky, "Of Two Squares " from De Stijl. 1922.
Book frontcover and aackcover. Private collection.

see also:

De Stijl

De Stijl Architecture

The exploration of architectonic form was in many ways at the heart of the De Stijl enterprise. Architecture's centrality came about partly because of the abstract geometry that underlies most architectural projects. However, its central role was mainly based on the fact that it represented the most complete opportunity for an artist to synthesize many arts into a unitary whole. This relates again to the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total work of art," first discussed in Chapter 2. Modern artists with a Utopian bent had long sought to build a complete environment, one that in Dc Stijl's case would serve as a visual manifestation of the "new har­mony" in art and society that was the ultimate goal of the group. Van Doesburg had become interested in color in architecture as early as 1917, when he began a series of studies that demonstrated how color contrast could be used in building design. Beginning in 1922, he started to collaborate with the architect Cornelis van Esteren (1897-1988) on a model house called the Maison Particuliere. The "axonometric" drawing, a type of three-dimen­sional projection (1923; fig. 5.8), displays the De Stijl principles of contrast and asymmetry in both the overall composition as well as in the color relationships.

For the most part, van Doesburg's architectural work remained speculative, and it was another De Stijl architect, Gerrit Rietveld, who was first commissioned to make the neo-plastic style into an architectural reality. Rietveld's Schroder House, the fruit of a collaboration with his patron, Mrs Truus Schroder-Schrader of Utrecht, shows the potential of De Stijl design to serve as the basis for a dynamic new architecture (fig. 5.9). The Schroder House appears less like a series of solid volumes than as a conglomeration of individual planes that pass through one another. The brightly colored planes of the building interpene­trate in a manner indebted to Cubism and Futurism, seemingly unattached to a solid volume. Rather, a sense of weightless open­ness pervades the structure. The contrasting bold primary colors also add to this effect, as certain details, such as the yellow steel post that supports one corner of the front balcony, seem almost detached from the overall building. In some important ways, the extravagant stylization of Rietveld's work can be compared to the illegibility of van Doesburg's original De Stijl logotype. It is the case with both these works that an attempt to convey universal principles of harmony was essentially overshadowed by the star-tlingly idiosyncratic nature of the finished work. Rather than appearing as the anonymous harbingers of a new, international style, they both come across as radically unique, paradoxically the product of a startling, individual vision that fundamentally contradicts the core beliefs of the whole group.
 

5.8 C.Esteren and Theo van Doesburg, Axonometnc drawing, Maison Particuhere, 1923.
Pencil and watercolor on tracing paper. Netherlands Architecture Institute.

5.9 Gerrit Rietveld. Schroder House,
Utrecht, 1924-5. Het Utrechts Archief

see also:

De Stijl

De Stijl Poster Design

The graphic designer Bart van der Leek's commercial work and painting both served as an important precursor of De Stijl around the time of its creation. His 1915 poster for the Muller shipping line, one of a variety of design projects he completed for the powerful Kroller-Miiller family, features a highly structured geometric clarity that was soon integrated into the broader De Stijl vocabu­lary (fig. 5.10). While the illustration of the ship is conventional in many details, its overall effect is one of horizontal mass. Its black shape is reinforced by the bold horizontal and vertical rules, which introduce an element of contrast. The lettering that Van der Leek devised for this lithograph shows some of the tendency to "find the frame" in the way in which the letters are distorted horizontally so that their widths will all be equal. Finally, his uncomplicated palette of mainly primary colors shows his embrace of simplicity at a time before it had been allied with De Stijl's sometimes obscurantist ideology.

As much as his work and friendship with Mondrian made Van der Leek a key figure in De Stijl, he soon tired of the dog­matic assertions of van Docsburg and Mondrian, and by 1919 was already starting to separate himself somewhat from the group.

It was in 1919 that Van der Leek made his most overt De Stijl commercial poster, a design for the Delft Salad Oil Factories (fig. 5.11). The Delft factories had a long history of commissioning edgy new designs for their advertisements, most famously an 1894 Art Nouveau poster by Jan Toorop (1858-1928). That poster had been such a stunning success that the phrase "Salad-Oil Style" became a Dutch synonym for Art Nouveau. To produce his design, Van der Leek passed through a series of twelve graduated images, each one showing more of a transformation from illustration to geometric abstraction. Beginning with a drawing that shows the strong black outlines he had long favored, Van der Leek sequentially removed the outlines and filled in the former empty spaces with primary colors. In the final maquette, the figure has been reduced to a series of discrete geometric shapes, including squares, rectangles, and trapezoids. While a human shape has been maintained, the body of the figure has been transformed into a solid block. As in the first cover of the journal De Stijl, Van der Leek has created a letterset made up of separate geometric shapes, sacrificing much in the way of legibility.

Unfortunately, Van der Leek's final design was rejected by the Delft Salad Oil Factories' leadership, and therefore it was never reproduced. This fact points to the difficulty that De Stijl designers had in convincing the general public at large that their elemental vocabulary was a viable form of commercial communication. In contrast to Art Nouveau, for example, overt De Stijl works never made the transition that had made the former style an accepted part of the graphic design industry. However, De Stijl designers and their work did form part of a constellation of avantgarde art groups devoted to geometric abstraction that together would have a decisive impact on commercial graphics later in the twentieth century.
 

5.10 Bart van der Leek, Rotterdam-London, 1915. Poster. Merrill C Berman Collection.

5.11 Bart van der Leek, Delft Salad Dressing, 1919. Merrill C. Berman Collection.

see also:

De Stijl

De Stijl and Dada

see also:

Dadaism

While it may seem that De Stijl and Dada artists would have very little in common—the Dadaists' embrace of absurdity and ran­dom chance would seem to stand in direct opposition to the De Stijl commitment to rational structure—there were some interest­ing collaborations in the 1920s involving members of the two groups. The most important collaboration grew out of the visit that the Dada artists Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, and Jean Arp made to the Kongress der Konstructivisten, or Constructivist Congress, held in Weimar Germany in 1922 (fig. 5.12). The term "Constructivist" can refer broadly to avant-garde artists who pur­sued geometric abstraction as a means to a Utopian end, including the artists of De Stijl and Russian Constructivism. At the Congress, the Dadaists met their host van Doesburg (Schwitters and van Doesburg had been acquainted the previous year), who had organized the gathering in the small German city of Weimar, where he lived from 1921 to 1923. Importantly, Weimar was the home of the German art school known as the Bauhaus. Van Doesburg, who had strong interests in Dada aesthetics himself, had organized the Congress in order to explore possible synergistic connections between Dada and Constructivist principles. A number of the Constructivist participants were initially scandalized by the arrival of the Dada artists, but van Doesburg managed to negotiate a detente of sorts. De Stijl principles subsequently influenced Schwitters's adoption of a Constructivist style in the 1920s.

It is important to realize that Dada after 1918 had in some ways lost its original raison d'etre—protesting the First World War—and Dada artists had become more invested in pursuing art and design professionally. While still vaguely amiauthoritarian in outlook, Dada as practiced by Schwitters or van Doesburg in 1922 had been transformed into a recognizable set of aesthetic principles. With less emphasis on the nihilistic politics of the war years, Dada ideas of unfettered creativity and artistic rulebreaking could be broadly infused into avant-garde art. Also, both Dadaists and Constructivists shared a disdain for past tradition, the "old" forms that lacked a creative spirit and were representative of the authorities that led European civilization into war. Both groups also tended to submerge the individual artistic personality into a depersonalized matrix, Dada celebrating the irrational while De Stijl and Constructivism sought to build a new rationality.

In several issues of his publication Merz, Schwitters developed a unique hybrid style that successfully reconciled Dada rule-breaking with the geometric abstraction favored by De Stijl and Russian Constructivists (see below). In 1923, Schwitters and van Doesburg traveled around the Netherlands promoting "Dada-Merz Evenings," a return to the Dada tradition of provocative performances. At the first evening, Schwitters interrupted van Doesburg's introductory lecture by letting loose with a series of barks—and then the absurdity and iconoclasm really got started. The two Dadaists created a poster (fig. 5.13) to advertise their performances. It displays recognizable Dada elements of chaos, and it is hard to reconcile the promoter of the "new harmony" taking part in such a disharmonious endeavor. Mixing type styles and scale, overprinting on a variety of axes, the red word "Dada" repeatedly cropped where it runs off the page—all these elements complement the confusing text, which itself combines quotes from Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia with the nonsense sayings favored by Schwitters.

Despite the sense of communality engendered by the Weimar Congress, the distance separating De Stijl and Dada strategics is manifest in the fact that van Doesburg used a pseudonym, I.K. Bonset, when he was working in a Dada idiom. The name is in fact a phonetic joke, because to a Dutch speaker it sounds like the phrase "I'm crazy." Between 1922 and 1923, van Doesburg, or "Bonset," briefly published a new journal devoted to his Dada work. Called Mecano, the journal featured the same sort of topsy-turvy Dada designs that were featured in other similar publications. The cover of the third issue {out of a total of four) of Mecano appears to be a hybrid of De Stijl-type orthogonal structure and a whimsical use of letters rotated on to different axes, forcing the reader to rotate the page in order to make sense of the words (fig. 5.14). The saw blade in the center served as an emblem of Mecano, representing the destruaive force of Dada satire. This "red" issue—the second one had been the "blue" issue—was published in both Dutch and French in an attempt to attract a broad international audience. Of course, the penchant for primary colors speaks to the aesthetic of the De Stijl movement.
 

5.12 Constructive Congress, Weimar, Sept 1922. Photograph.

5.13 Theo van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters, Kleine Dada Soiree (Small Dada Evening), 1922. Lithograph.
Gift of Philip Johnson. Jan Tschichold Collection.

5.14 Theo van Doesburg, Mecano, no. 3, 1923. Magazine cover.
International Dada Archive, University of Iowa Libraries.

Revolution in Russia

Perhaps the most spectacular outcome of the First World War was the collapse of four imperial governments: those of the Ottomans, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. In terms of impact on the visual arts, it was the disintegration of imperial Russia that proved to have the most lasting effects. When the war began in 1914, Russia was ruled by an autocratic monarch, Tsar Nicholas II (1868-1919). Unpopular because of widespread corruption and inefficiency in the government, as well as a failing economy, Nicholas further eroded his credibility when he sent Russia's unprepared and illsupplied army to fight against the Central Powers, with disastrous results. The war made the Tsar's rule increasingly untenable as the economy collapsed and the military weakness of Russia became more apparent as its losses mounted. When riots broke out in the capital city of Petrograd (now St Petersburg) early in 1917, the Tsar was forced to abdicate.

After the dissolution of the Romanov government in the so-called February Revolution, two competing groups of citizens tried to take control of Russia. Members of the Duma, a parliamentary body, established a Provisional Government while other groups banded together to establish the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. Additional Soviets, or workers' councils, were soon established in other Russian cities, although those in Petrograd and later Moscow took the lead in civil affairs. Throughout 1917 the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet clashed repeatedly over the conduct of the war (the Soviets wanted an immediate end to Russia's role in the conflict) and the form of Russia's next government. This period of near anarchy ended in the fall of 1917, when one of the constituent parties of the Soviet, the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), managed to seize control of the country. This second revolution, called the Bolshevik (or October) Revolution, was followed quickly by a peace treaty with the Central Powers, as the Bolsheviks were willing to make large territorial concessions to the west in order to focus on the consolidation of power in Russia itself.

Soon after the Bolsheviks' formation of a new government, anti-Bolshevik forces began organizing in an attempt to displace the regime. The subsequent Russian Civil War of 1918-20 was fought between the Red Army, representing the Bolsheviks, and a loose coalition of forces led by eximperial military officers collectively known as the "Whites." The anti-Soviet Whites were assisted by Allied governments, including Britain and the United States, in a bloody yet unsuccessful attempt to forestall the Bolsheviks' establishment of a Communist state. For this reason, the civil war led to increasing hostility between Russia and Western democratic states.

In January 1918, Lenin had overseen the writing of a new constitution that explicitly voided the property rights of those he called "exploiters"—Russia's nobility, capitalist bourgeoisie, and clergy. The Bolsheviks claimed that they would replace these oppressive ruling classes with a new form of government that would privilege the rights of urban workers and landless peasants. Based loosely on the theories of the German philosopher and social activist Karl Marx (1818-1883), the Bolshevik government espoused Communism—a doctrine whereby private property was abolished and the "means of production," which encompassed all aspects of economic life, were held communally by all citizens—as a panacea for all of Russia's social problems. Under the Bolsheviks, Communism was essentially a Utopian promise, because as early as 1918 the Bolsheviks had begun centralizing state power in the hands of a small group of party leaders. While offering a greater voice in political affairs to formerly dispossessed groups of workers and peasants, the promise of a classless society of plenty proved to be always just around the corner, tantalizingly out of reach. Partly in response to the civil war of 1918-20, the Bolsheviks quickly began relying on a state apparatus of powerful domestic security forces that used violence and intimidation to suppress dissent.

The Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Poster

In order to explain Russian graphic design in the twentieth century, it is necessary to introduce two important traditions that played a part in the country's popular visual culture. Beginning as early as the seventeenth century, a type of inexpensive illustrated woodcut called a lubok (plural: lubki) become a pervasive part of Russian life. The mechanical production of lubki gradually advanced, shifting from woodcut to copper engraving and, in the nineteenth century, lithography. With tremendous variations in quality, lubki artists combined text and image to convey religious parables, folklore, and even political satire to a wide audience. Stylistically, the exuberant use of color and horror vacui composi­tions—allowing little or no empty space—became an influential force in Russian art. In the twentieth century, lubki also served as symbols of patriotic sentiment because they invoked a unique national tradition. The lubok Give Me the Bucket displays the quintessential characteristic of the genre, making up for its lack of polish with an overall high-spirited vitality (fig. 5.15).

Another important influence for Russian graphic design was the Orthodox Church's promulgation of religious icons. These tempera and gold leaf paintings generally feature figures from the history of Christianity, especially Mary and Jesus, surrounded by a field of gold. These images were designed to promote religious piety in a largely illiterate population, facilitating each figures identification with consistent color and stock poses and facial features. Icons were important in terms of familiarizing the popu­lation with the techniques of symbolism and allegory. Under the Bolsheviks, there would be a similar need for images that conveyed strong messages through color and simple actions so that they were understandable to the broadest swath of the population.

The twentieth-century Russian poster artist Dmitri Moor (1883-1946) claimed that religious icons had a substantial effect on his own art, mainly because of the effective use of simple, bold color and easily comprehensible narratives that appeal directly to the viewer on an emotional level.

In 1918, amid the turmoil of the civil war, the Bolshevik government recognized the need to keep popular sentiment on its side. In fact, the Bolsheviks considered state-sponsored use of the mass media to be a key element of the successful organization of a modern state and to the spread of Communist ideology around the world. In the battle to define the meaning of the new Communist state, the situation was made difficult by the fact that Russian industry was at a low point because of the war. There were very few means of communicating with people who lived across the country's vast land mass. In pursuit of their goal of influencing the public, the Bolsheviks sought quickly to replace tsarist monuments with images of their own leaders, while also organizing numerous public festivals and parades.

As early as the time of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, a thriving community of Bolshevik poster artists had also sought to influence public opinion about the conflict. As a pan of this effort, the Bolsheviks established the concept of "agitation-propaganda," sometimes shortened to "agitprop," as a key strategy in service of the revolution. Under the doctrine of agitprop, the government devoted significant resources to the "selling" of Communist propaganda to its own citizens as well as to foreign sympathizers. This tactic included the state-sponsored production of propaganda posters. An innovative aspect of the Bolsheviks' poster campaign was the way in which the government supplemented the posting of images on urban hoardings in Moscow and Petrograd with the employment of trains, boats, and even horse-drawn carts to travel the countryside plastered with posters. These images circulated throughout Russian territory celebrating the revolution and exhorting the population to defeat the combined forces of Russian counter­revolutionary imperialism and Western capitalism.
 

5.15 Anonymous. Give Me the Bucket. mid-18th century. Colored woodcut.
Courtesy Professor Stephen White, Glasgow University.

Alexander Apsit, Boris Zvorykin, Dmitri Moor

The most prominent poster artist of the revolutionary years, roughly 1917-22, was Alexander Apsit (1880-1944). A Latvian, Apsit had learned his trade as a book illustrator, later coming to the attention of the prominent painter Lev Dmitriev Kavkazskii (1849-1916), who employed him as an assistant. Apsit, like wartime graphic designers in Britain and the United States, worked in a fairly straightforward, realistic style. While by no means the most accomplished draftsman of this era, he intuitively grasped very effective ways of appealing to popular sentiment. During the civil war years, he produced around forty lithographs, many of which were designed in less than a day as events in the war shifted back and forth between the Reds and the Whites. Apsit's posters were well known because they were featured in runs of up to 50,000, making him the ostensible "father" of the Bolshevik poster.

     Apsit demonstrated a good grasp of the Bolsheviks' favored theme of heroism in To Horse, Proletarian! (fig. 5.16). In this image, a cavalryman charges toward the viewer, his foreshortened horse and billowing red flag seemingly having broken through the picture plane into the viewer's space. The direct appeal to the viewer's emotions and the simple color symbolism tie this image to the popular art of the lubki and the icon. Stressing the theme of war as adventure, Apsit's rider anticipates the widespread theme of heroic individuals whose militant revolutionary fervor makes them stand out from the collective citizenry. In later years, the state would transfer this military symbolism to the domestic front, and images of "hero workers" and "hero farmers" would become a staple of Soviet propaganda. Apsit's poster, like the First World War posters of the Allies, was in fact a collaborative effort; his rider was in this case conjoined to text written by the Bolshevik leader and theorist Leon Trotsky (1879-1940).

In another group of works, Apsit eschewed realistic subject matter in favor of inventive dramas that rely on symbolism and allegory. These images caricature the enemies of the revolution, both domestic and foreign, in an outlandishly inflammatory manner. The Tsar, the Priest, and the Kulak {fig- 5.17) shows three icons of the "exploiting" classes being carried on a litter by an emaci­ated, despairing group of workers, who are literally chained to their jobs. Here, Apsit is working within the confines of a long tradition of satirical political speech that had arisen in the early twentieth century in the service of popular opposition to the tsarist regime. The Kulak, symbolic of bourgeois capitalism, bran­dishes a whip while a bloody sword is fastened to his waist. The bright color and graphic detail of this poster witness Apsit's awareness of the power of the lubki to grab the public's eye and provoke their imagination. This poster was one of many Apsit produced under the authority of VTSIK, the Soviet parliamentary body responsible for the agitprop campaign.

The Struggle of the Red Knight with the Dark Force, by Boris Zvorykin (b. 1892) transforms Apsit's heroic cavalryman into a militant worker, shown here fighting the "dark force" of capitalism while at the same time trampling on a representative of the counter-revolutionary Whites (fig. 5.18). The simple red versus white symbolism, dynamic movement, and densely filled compo­sition are all indicative of the poster's roots in the lubki tradition. In this image, the worker fights not with a weapon but with an anvil, further tying together the themes of militant industry and military service. This concept was important because one of the greatest challenges faced by the new government was the unso­phisticated and dilapidated state of Russian industry. The economy under the tsars had remained an essentially agrarian one, and the gap between Russian and European industry had been made even more manifest by