I went to the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis to see an exhibit that's just about to close (more on that soon), but first I'm going to write today about a few posters from the larger exhibit, TMORA: 20 Years. It's on view through February 20.
I didn't even know they had this exhibit up; one of the things I like about TMORA is its size, which means I can take in the whole place without mentally preparing myself or researching it ahead of time. So I blundered into the museum's double-stacked gallery of vignettes highlighting different aspects of its collection.
I was drawn most to the posters.
The title of this one is "Farmhand and Peasant Women, All to Vote!"
The accompanying card read:
Association of the Artists of the Revolution Publishers
Workers' Cause Printers, Moscow, 1928–1932
Approved for the Central Election Committee
The text at the bottom of the poster urged women to attend
pre-election meetings and monitor the work of local councils (Soviet governmental bodies) in the areas of economic reforms, children's education, elimination of illiteracy, improvement of the healthcare system, protection of women farm hands, and access to schooling for the children of the poor classes. The bottom line text reads: "Defend your needs, express your demands!"
I loved the faces of the women and the fabrics of their clothes.
My companion at the museum, Daughter Number Three-Point-One, noted that it's a lithograph and most likely was done in just three ink colors.
More typical of Soviet messaging, but still interesting, was this poster:
Its card read:
"Achievements in Socialist Construction!"
Izogiz Publishers, Moscow-Leningrad, 1930
This poster was created during the First Five-Year Plan. The worker's banner reads "Great Work." The text at the bottom of the poster reads:
The USSR achievements in socialist construction make our enemies bond in their rabid anger against the first proletarian state in the world. Let us unite even more in our great work.
Enemies of the USSR are stacked vertically (on skyscrapers) on the left, and appear to include England, the Pope, Germany (as a Nazi... an interesting choice given that the poster is from 1930 during Weimar), and maybe France?).
In contrast, the people's buildings are horizontal, ground-level accessible, factories and hydropower.
You can tell the artist had more fun drawing the villains than the hero.
The final two posters are from much later, the late 1980s, during what the museum calls the Perestroika Period. Both are by an artist named Boris Efimov:
The one on the left (text by Grigorii Cherniavskii) is titled "Law" and translates as:
Law is needed by the people,
But bureaucrats obstruct it.
(The bureaucrats' tags read Application, Clarification, Explanation, Interpretation.)
The one on the right is titled "Shadow Economy, Corruption, Crime" and translates as:
Shadow economy and bribes
Are linked organizationally,
We now need to organize
And eliminate them completely!
It seems clear that the face at the center of the sickly green figure is Boris Yeltsin.
The museum card describing the Perestroika posters generally says they "mark a sharp departure from earlier poster art," very different from the Soviet monotonousness, and often difficult to interpret now. They "call for a revolution as a continuous open-ended task, encourage people to participate in government, and empower citizens to defend their rights and freedoms. They are full of hopes and dreams, thwarted by the ignominious 1990s."
There were half a dozen other Perestroika posters grouped with these two, but DN3.1 and I were particularly taken with the visual strength of these two. Then we noticed they were by the same artist.
Who was Boris Efimov?
Well, he lived to be 108 years old, born in 1900 (or 1899) and dying in 2008. He was a Ukrainian Jewish cartoonist and caricaturist who made his way through Stalin's USSR by focusing on German Nazis instead of the evil that was right in front of him. He was the chief editor of Agitprop, chief artist for Izvestia, and finally chief of the Political Propaganda Department of the Russian Academy of Arts.
Efimov stayed active in illustration and public work until his death. However, there is nothing I could find accessible online about these Perestroika-era works. He published memoirs that have not been translated.
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A couple of background pieces on Efimov (note that his name is sometimes spelled Yefimov, though the museum — and many others — spelled it Efimov):
- His Wikipedia page
- Boris Yefimov: The political cartoonist who outlived both the Tsar and the Politburo
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