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| Passion Investments: Art |
Soviet Sophisticates
Lee Sherman
12/01/2005
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Once considered the zenith of communist propaganda, Soviet-era poster art has
ironically taken on a new currency with capitalist collectors. They are drawn to
their kitsch utopian imagery of a workers’ paradise, but, increasingly, are
ever-more taken by what has become an outstanding investment
opportunity.
Virtually unavailable in the West until perestroika, the decline
of communism only increased interest in these artifacts from behind the Iron
Curtain. Most Soviet posters were issued in editions of 5,000 to 50,000 but are
extremely rare today simply because of the ephemeral nature of the medium and
because they were never considered particularly collectible at the time they
were printed. Many of them were destroyed as political winds shifted. The
earliest avant-garde posters were anti-Soviet. Many of the artists either
emigrated to the United States or to Western Europe (where some joined the
Bauhaus) or they veered sharply to the left and became Soviet
propagandists.
In the past decade, the market for Soviet poster art has taken
off faster than Sputnik. Posters by early Russian masters such as Gustav
Klutsis, Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky now fetch between $10,000 and
$100,000. Ten years ago, a poster by Klutsis sold for £17,000 ($26,300) in
an auction at Sotheby’s. Today the market value of a highly sought-after poster
by an artist such as Lissitzky exceeds $100,000.
In March 1994, Sotheby’s
held its first sale of Russian posters, a single-owner collection that met with
mixed results from the fledgling market. “Only the really well-known artists did
well; the lesser ones did not,” recalls Mary Bartow, director of Sotheby’s print
department. The market for posters by the better-known Russian artists has
always been strong, she adds, at least among savvy print collectors who were
familiar with the artists and could understand the intellectual appeal of much
of this art.
Collectors are often attracted to the themes expressed in these
posters, which present an appealingly romanticized vision of a world that never
actually existed. Much of their appreciation is rooted in the idea of art as a
catalyst for social change, a notion often shown in bold, graphic images,
inventive use of typography as a graphic element and the juxtapositions of
photos and other components, as in photomontages.
One of the first
collectors to recognize the value of these posters was Sergo Grigorian, a former
member of the communist party, who came to London as Russia’s foreign trade
ministry attorney in 1991. In 2002, he organized a major exhibition of original
Soviet-era poster art at the Air Gallery in the British capital. That exhibition
included 70 posters produced between 1918 and 1981 by artists including Klutsis,
Viktor Deni and Nikolay Kochergin. His collection numbers some 300 posters,
which he values at approximately $180,000.
A stamp collector from childhood,
Grigorian anticipated the interest in the historical documentation of the Soviet
period that the posters represent. Like stamps, these posters were designed to
appeal to the masses rather than gallery attendees. “The socialist era was a
great human experiment,” he says. “It didn’t work, but it is a part of history
that we shouldn’t forget.”
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