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| Passion Investments: Art |
Soviet Sophisticates
Lee Sherman
12/01/2005
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Capitalist Revolution
In April, an auction of rare modernist posters
organized by Swann Galleries drove home the increasing value of Soviet
propaganda posters. Several posters brought more than double their previous
record prices when private collectors outbid dealers on the top
lots.
Lissitzky, one of the foremost avant-garde artists of the ’20s and
’30s, is also considered one of the founding fathers of the constructivist
movement; he is renowned for his use of photomontage and new typography styles.
At the Swann auction, Lissitzky’s constructivist composition, Beat the Whites
with the Red Wedge, printed in 1926, sold for $41,400, and his photomontage
advertisement for the Russian exhibition at the Kunstgewerbe Museum in Zurich,
USSR Russische Ausstellung, Zuruch, printed in 1929, sold for a record $64,400.
Both surpassed estimates.
Anton Lavinsky’s photomontage for Sergei
Eisenstein’s first film, Strike, printed in 1924, sold for $12,650; Rodchenko’s
advertisement for the film, One Sixth of the World, printed in 1926, sold for
$29,900; N. Chelovsky’s Man with the Movie Camera, printed in 1928, sold for
$34,500; and Klutsis’ Development of Transportation Under the 5-Year Plan,
printed in 1928, sold for $7,475. Klutsis is considered the most prolific
practitioner of the art of photomontage, and his posters are becoming
increasingly collectible. Despite his contributions to the communist cause
throughout the ’20s and ’30s, however, Klutsis was arrested and executed by
Stalin in 1938.
The recent five-figure sales notwithstanding, there remains a
general consensus among dealers and collectors that these artists are still
underappreciated, and that values will continue to rise. “The material is
phenomenal,” Lowry boasts. “Good Russian constructivism is among the most
sophisticated and exciting graphic design of the 20th century.”
According to
Lowry, the market for Soviet poster art saw a bubble form in the late 1980s. But
that bubble soon burst as a handful of collectors flooded the market. “Prior to
the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, this material
was hard as hell to come by,” he explains. “A couple of daredevil, genius
dealers in the ’80s really created this market. The material was selling for a
lot of money and soon found its way into the collections of the MoMA [in New
York] and the Getty [in Los Angeles].”
Unlike contemporary art, wherein the
artist’s fame and reputation can often overshadow the work itself, Soviet-era
poster art is first and foremost about the images. Iconic symbols such as happy
peasants, tractors and trains by unknown artists often sell for as much or more
than lesser images from well-known artists. “None of these names are
mainstream,” Lowry says. “They are known only to connoisseurs.”
But this is
changing as the public becomes more aware of what Lowry refers to as the
blue-chip artists and starts to see their work exhibited side-by-side with the
most famous French, German and British graphic artists. “As the market grows,
more importance is being given to the lesser-known artists as well,” Bartow
says.
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