Bowdoin College Museum of Art | - Under the Banner of Lenin for Socialist Construction

Preview image of work. lithograph on paper, Under the Banner of Lenin for Socialist Construction 33049

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Under the Banner of Lenin for Socialist Construction

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Artist

Gustav Gustavovich Klutsis (1895 - 1938)

Title

Under the Banner of Lenin for Socialist Construction

Creation Date

1930

Century

mid-20th century

Dimensions

42 1/2 x 32 1/2 in. (107.95 x 82.55 cm)

Object Type

Creation Place

Asia, Russia

Medium and Support

lithograph on paper

Credit Line

Generously lent by Svetlana and Eric Silverman ’85, P’19

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

Avant-garde artists questioned painting’s ability to represent reality in a moment of flux. They searched for the most effective modern communicative means while simultaneously waging a war against outlived bourgeois and aristocratic aesthetics. Photomontage provided a viable new language. Combining camera-derived factual content with political function, it delivered a new aesthetic possessing the pathos, impulse, and technical precision necessary for expressing the Socialist “truths.” Reprinted quickly, cheaply, and in large print runs, posters designed with the photomontage technique were the opposite of “fine art.” Iconoclastic artists welcomed the October 1917 events and initially identified with the regime, making organizational, institutional, and theoretical commitments to the new Soviet ideology. “A new artistic form is a protest against the old, and in that struggle, lays the life and development of art,” wrote Roman Jacobson, a Futurist and theoretician, in 1919. Like him, Gustav Klutsis was an avant-garde artist. Until the Revolution denounced the avant-garde as “formalism,” he created versatile and inventive posters that went beyond the jingoistic state propaganda.