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| Passion Investments: Art |
Soviet Sophisticates
Lee Sherman
12/01/2005
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Girl Meets Tractor
Soviet-era posters fall into two broad styles: the
early avant-garde posters of Rodchenko, Lissitzky and the Stenberg brothers,
Vladamir and Georgii, and the later Social Realism style typified by Boris
Vladimirski.
The Russian avant-garde movement paralleled the developments in
Western Europe (at the Bauhaus in Germany, for example) featuring the use of
abstract images, geometric shapes, bold colors and typography as a graphic
constituent. While perhaps less known in the West at the time, more recently
uncovered avant-garde works reveal a mastery of modernist technique and artistic
vision equal, if not superior, to that found in Western graphic arts. “The
interest in the avant-garde was always there because it was a very important
period in art history from the ’20s to the ’30s,” Grigorian says.
The
Russian avant-garde artists experimented with typography, collage and
photomontage in ways that presaged today’s computer-based graphic design. “What
the Russians were doing by hand in the 1920s and ’30s is what artists are
doing with Photoshop today,” says Nicholas Lowry, president and director of
posters at Swann Galleries in New York. “It makes me wonder what these artists
would produce with today’s technology.”
The Social Realism period lasted
much longer, about six decades, making posters of this type more readily
available. Decreed by Stalin in 1932, Social Realism required all art to
reflect “realistic” portrayals of Soviet life intended to promote communist
goals and values. Whereas the art of Russia’s czarist period reflected
aristocratic values, Social Realism had as its aim the elevation of the common
worker, both in factories and on farms.
In their efforts to depict everyday
life and values, however, the Soviet artists invented a world that seems as
devoid of realism as the work of American painter Norman Rockwell. As propaganda, Social
Realism posters often carried both anti-capitalist and anti-fascist themes;
later posters moved away from a pure realist style to include deliberately
unappealing caricatures of foreign leaders.
Ironically, while Social Realism
posters promoted the proletariat, the period represents a decline into more
bourgeois artistic values. Still, its imagery holds widespread appeal. For
Westerners, the images have a certain kitsch appeal. For Russians, their
interest lies primarily in documenting a period in their history. As Lowry puts
it, “One man’s kitsch is another’s living nightmare.”
A 43-year-old American
expat collector living in Prague, who asked Worth not to use his name, explains
his attraction to Soviet-era posters stems from what he refers to as the
“aesthetics of critique.” He adds: “I do it to preserve the history of a grand
idea spoiled by miserable humans. History will do its best to edit into the
absurd, but I find in the face of Lenin, and even Stalin, the failure of hope;
and a criticism, a just criticism, of the not-much-better victors.”
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