STENBERG BROTHERS
CONSTRUCTING A REVOLUTION IN SOVIET DESIGN
Christopher Mount
[Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg] Christopher Mount: STENBERG BROTHERS: CONSTRUCTING A REVOLUTION IN SOVIET DESIGN. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997. First Edition, second printing. Slim quarto. Thick printed wrappers. 96 pp. 63 color plates and 12 text illustrations. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A nearly fine copy.
9 x 12 softcover book with 96 pages and 75 illustration, including 63 color plates of film and political posters, design sketches for the posters, journals, and stage and costume designs, as well as a small selection of the Stenbergs’ early Constructivist experiments. Includes an essay on early Soviet film culture by Peter Kenez. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, which was the largest museum exhibition to date devoted to the work of an individual or collaborative team of graphic designers.
"The Stenberg brothers, like their contemporaries Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, were artists of immensely varied interests and eclectic skills. They were sculptors, architects, and stage and costume designers, and were enamored of the film and montage theories developed in the suddenly burgeoning Soviet film industry. As seen in this book's superb colorplates, they brought to film poster design an extraordinary compositional dynamism, originality, and contrast of scale, employing many of the artistic conventions of the Constructivist movement to great effect."
From the book; “The Stenberg brothers produced a large body of work in a multiplicity of mediums, initially achieving renown as Constructivist sculptors and later working as successful theatrical designers, architects, and draftsmen; in addition, they completed design commissions that ranged from railway cars to women’s shoes. Their most significant accomplishment, however, was in the field of graphic design, specifically, the advertising posters they created for the newly burgeoning cinema in Soviet Russia.”
“In a country where illiteracy was endemic, film played a critical role in the conversion of the masses to the new social order. Graphic design, particularly as applied in the political placard, was a highly useful instrument for agitation, as it was both direct and economical. The symbiotic relationship of the cinema and the graphic arts would result in a revolutionary new art form: the film poster.”
“The film posters of the Stenberg bothers, produced from 1923 until Georgii’s untimely death in 1933, represent an uncommon synthesis of the philosophical, formal, and theoretical elements of what has become known as the Russian avant-garde. These posters, radical even from current perspectives, are not the consequence of some brief flame of eccentric artistic creativity, but rather a consolidation of the Stenbergs’ own eclectic experience-possible only in this era-and the formal artistic inventions of the time. Their intimate knowledge of contemporary film theory, Suprematist painting, Constructivism, and avant-garde theater, as well as their skill in the graphic arts, was essential to the genesis of these works.”