Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
It’s revolutionary
Soviet propaganda posters on display at Wolfsonian.
Nearly 100 years ago, as the former Russian Empire was engulfed in a civil war that would result in the creation of the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks’ state news agency, seeking to shape public opinion on tumultuous events of the day, enlisted the help of an avant-garde poet and artist, Vladimir Mayakovsky.
In his work for the government-information arm, called the Russian Telegraph Agency, Mayakovsky and a workshop of other artists developed a unique process for quickly turning government reports into posters to be put up in storefront windows. Taking the name from an acronym for the Russian Telegraph Agency, they became known as ROSTA Windows.
Aimed at a semi-literate population, the posters delivered inspiring dogma through simple, direct graphics, with short lines of text. Using an assemblyline process to create posters by hand from a stencil of Mayakovsky’s design, a poster could be in a Moscow storefront 40 minutes after the news came in.
Snapchat and Twitter have nothing on Vladimir Mayakovsky.
“The idea of creating an image and a very short, easily understood text that would reinforce the image, it does anticipate a lot of what’s come since, including what we see around us today,” says Jon Mogul, associate director of curatorial and education at the Wolfsonian-FIU museum. “They weren’t avid readers, so that kind of visual communication and simple text was very powerful, compared to a manifesto or something like that. Which is a reason that film and radio were also very important propaganda tools around the same time.”
The Wolfsonian exhibition “Constructing Revolution: Soviet Propaganda Posters From Between the World Wars,” surveys works mostly created between 1918 and 1932, a period of rare, pre-Stalin aesthetic freedom for avant-garde Constructivist artists, who took techniques such as photo montage out of the galleries and onto the streets.
Mogul says it was a period of great “visual energy,” when Gustav Klutsis began working with an iconic red, black and white color scheme that has become a signature of Russian graphics; when painter Alexander Rodchenko began to explore color, geometry and photo montage on posters; when Valentina Kulagina designed messages that trumpeted the Communist Party’s plans for women’s liberation.
Mogul hopes that visitors will be impressed by the techniques on display and the excitement and visual tension created by some of the most important designers of their time. But he does point to a “troubling” dichotomy in these works.
“You can see very sincere idealism being expressed, people creating these images and slogans because they think they are building, not only a new society, but a better, fairer, more equal and free society,” he says. “And at the same time, these posters that they’re creating are being used by a state that is increasingly becoming not only a dictatorship, but a pretty murderous one that ends up killing hundreds of thousands of its own citizens.
“It’s not enough to create a powerful poster. You need to think about why you’re doing it and what the consequences are going to be. And very often the powerful, simple, straightforward message is going to be the one that’s easily exploited and abused.”