An eye-opening new exhibition, "Views and Re-Views: Soviet Political Posters and Cartoons," invites viewers to reconsider overly simplistic characterizations of the style of Soviet art known as Socialist Realism. On view until Oct. 19, the show encourages a recognition of the considerable artistic value and enduring relevance of political art from the former Soviet Union, which is too often dismissed as simple propagandistic depictions of flag-waving proletarians and smiling peasants.
Featuring over 160 works, the sprawling exhibition fills List Art Center's David Winton Bell Gallery and extends to the John Hay Library and satellite spaces in the Rockefeller Library and the Cogut Center for the Humanities. Bell Gallery Director Jo-Ann Conklin and Professor Emeritus of History Abbott "Tom" Gleason curated the show.
"Views and Re-Views" presents a tremendous breadth of material, from delicate ink-and-pencil drawings to enormous posters in bold, geometric designs that dominate whole walls with swaths of vibrant red. The show is primarily organized into niches devoted to a particular artist or theme, with wall text providing helpful historical context. As Gleason explains in his catalog essay, the exhibition strives to highlight an absolutist strain in these works that broadcasts a certainty about the boundaries of good and evil.
The show's cartoons and caricatures employ these strong dualities as a source of humor. The works of Viktor Deni, Dmitri Moor and Boris Efimov offer widely accessible visual jokes, many of which are still genuinely funny despite the large shift in time and context. The political photomontages of Alexander Zhitomirsky pack enormous visual punch, and the delicate ink-and-watercolor caricatures by the three-artist collective known as the Kukryniksy are among the most striking works in the exhibition. A 1943 drawing of Heinrich Himmler, for example, offers a clownish depiction of the Nazi SS director beaming a gap-toothed smile. It's funny at first, but the chilling juxtaposition of Himmler's foolishness with the barely-visible bloodstains on his coat and hands stifles any laughter.
The poster as an art form seems to have been designed specifically with the Soviet Union in mind. Both populist and popular, and easy to reproduce, posters were an effective way to communicate with a largely illiterate or semi-literate society. "Views and Re-Views" features several masters of the genre, including Gustav Klutsis, Nikolai Dolgorukov and Viktor Koretsky. Klutsis's story demonstrates the perils of the artist's role in Stalinist Russia. Despite his great contributions to art through his pioneering of the photomontage - a style of juxtaposing photographs that became a near-universal trope in the Soviet poster - Klutsis was nevertheless executed in the purges of 1938 for alleged dissident activities.
In the remarkable posters of Valentina Kulagina, Klutsis' wife, human figures are iterated and abstracted into heroic, machine-like forms, alive with kinetic energy. The inclusion of Kulagina - and of other female artists - adds a welcome perspective to the show.
Many of the posters deify Soviet political leaders, but Gleason hoped that the exhibition would provide viewers with the chance to re-evaluate the work from a post-Cold War political perspective.
"When it's not 'Communist art' any longer, it becomes 'art of the mid-20th-century,'" he said. "I think we'll see the political contrast may be somewhat lessened. We may see these things more with our eyes and less with our political antennae."
Lynne deBenedette, senior lecturer in Slavic languages, felt that "Views and Re-Views" succeeded in re-contextualizing the posters and cartoons for those who had only seen this work through the lens of politics.
"When you began to learn Russian during the Cold War, as I did, these images were so much a part of the way we experienced the Soviet Union that to see them in this new context is really refreshing," deBenedette said.
The exhibition represents more than a year of work on the part of multiple University offices, including the Bell Gallery, the University Library, the Cogut Center and the Office of the Vice President for International Affairs. All of the materials in the show are on loan from a rarely exhibited collection of some 15,000 to 20,000 works held in Prague by an anonymous collector whom Gleason and others refer to as "D." Gleason believes that "Views and Re-Views" is the largest exhibition of this collector's holdings to appear in the United States.
Gleason added that one of the advantages of seeing these works in an exhibition so extensive is the opportunity it provides to notice some surprising elements. The use of photomontage, the powerful geometry and the exaggerated or strange imagery in these posters subtly connect them to avant-garde movements like Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism, rarely associated with Socialist Realist art.
Gleason will lecture on the exhibition on Oct. 8, which will probably address visual sources for the material, and the Cogut Center is offering a symposium, "Political Art and Its Paradoxes," on Oct. 10.
The presence of so many of these works at Brown also provided Gleason with the opportunity to design a course, HIST 1973D: "Friends, Enemies, and Heroes: Reading the Soviet Poster." The class will address issues of propaganda, as well as the Soviet poster's historical precedents in Russian art. Students will have access to a database of the larger collection - which is not currently available to the public - in order to do research.
Cogut Center Director and Professor of History Michael Steinberg, who organized the Oct. 10 symposium, was thrilled that a curriculum could be fashioned around the exhibition. "It's not only a fantastic treasure trove of art," he said. "It's also a wonderful teaching tool."
