FILM POSTERS OF THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE
Susan Pack
Susan Pack: FILM POSTERS OF THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE. Koln: Taschen, 1995. First edition. Parallel text in English, French and German. Folio. Black paper covered boards decorated in white. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 319 pp. 250 color reproductions of film posters by 27 artists of the Russian avant-garde from the private collection of Susan Pack. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket.
Exploration of the one place and time in the 20th century (except, briefly, for the linkage of Italian Fascism and Futurism) when radical art actually did become the house style of a revolution.
9.5 x 12.75 hardcover book with 319 pages and 250 color reproductions of film posters by 27 artists of the Russian avant-garde from the private collection of Susan Pack. Biographies of the Artists, Index, Works Consulted. A magnificent collection of Soviet film posters reproduced in full-color with text in three languages.
Many of the posters appear for the first time in any book. Films range from the avant-garde "Man With a Movie Camera" to the commercial (Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lloyd) to the Russian (Gorki's The Mother) to the obscure "Victim of Stock Speculation,", documentaries and comedies, like “Strength and Beauty” and “Song of the Tundra.”
"A sweeping survey of these profoundly imaginative works which, even today, have lost none of their fascination."
Features posters by Natan Altman, Anatoly Belsky, Grigori Borisov, Mikhail Dlugach, Iosif Gerasimovich, Max Litvak, Alexander Naumov, Yakov Ruklevsky, Semyon Semyonev, Georgii & Vladimir Stenberg, Leonid A. Voronov, Alexander Rodchenko, Anton Lavinsky, and Nikolai Prusakov. Excellent volume dealing with the collision between Constructivism and Commercial art. Recommended.
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 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.
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.
"Since the publication in 1962 of Camilla Gray's pioneering study of the Russian avant-garde, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922, over 130 books and catalogues on the subject have appeared in English, French, German, Italian and Japanese. And since the comprehensive exhibition "Paris-Moscow, 1900-1930" organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1979, and then hosted by the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow two years later as "Moscow-Paris, 1900-1930," there have been over 100 exhibitions devoted to the Russian avantgarde in public and private venues throughout the U.S., Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan.
"These statistics alone indicate that the Russian avant-garde -- the mosaic of personalities and events that transformed the face of Russian art, literature and music in the 1910s and '20s -- has already received wide coverage. True, a decade or so ago, the subject was still fraught with the difficulties of territorial access and political bias, but the early and mid '80s witnessed the general recognition in the Soviet Union of the avant-garde as a valuable component of the Russian cultural heritage, and the result was a series of major exhibitions in Europe and Japan that drew substantially on Soviet holdings." [From John E. Bowlt’s review of the Guggenheim's The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932: Art in America, May, 1993 ]
Susan Pack began collecting rare advertising posters in 1973, eventually amassing one of the foremost collections of French Art Deco posters ever formed. When an institution in the late 1980’s ultimately acquired this collection, Susan embarked upon a systematic accumulation of Russian avant-garde film posters. She started with the purchase of a small group of posters by the noted Stenberg Brothers and since then has collected posters by all the prominent Constructivist artists of the period, assembling one of the most comprehensive collections of its kind to be found anywhere in the world. Among the works on display at Ubu will be the famous poster by Aleksandr Rodchenko for the Sergei Eisenstein Film, “Battleship Potemkin,” as well as classic examples of graphic design by Gyorgii and Vladimir Stenberg, Nikolai Prusakov (alone and in association with Grigorii Borisov), Anatoli Belski and others. Russian Constructivist film posters have long been recognized by the graphic designers and design curators as among the most significant examples of graphic design of the twentieth century.