Cultura: ’40s Propaganda Posters: Soviet Morale Boosters
A 1943 poster (“The Red Army Broom Will Completely Sweep Away the Scum”) by Viktor Deni at the Art Institute of Chicago.
By EVE M. KAHN
Published: July 28, 2011
During World War II, Soviet artists stenciled posters to keep up public morale. They drew scenes of Russian heroes overwhelming Nazi cowards under slogans like “The Time for Vengeance Is Approaching” and “Sweep Away the Scum.”
Tass, the Soviet press agency in Moscow, produced the newsprint sheets, up to 10 feet tall, in editions of a few hundred each. A new design emerged almost every day. The government hung them in storefront windows and occasionally sent them as gifts to leftists in Britain and America.
Not much of the propaganda survives, partly because the cheap wartime paper did not age well. A handful of museums in the United States own batches, sometimes donated by original owners who wanted to dispose of evidence of 1940s sympathies for besieged Communists.
“The tide turned so quickly after the war,” said Jill Bugajski, an art historian and one of the curators of a show that opens on Sunday at the Art Institute of Chicago, “Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945.” The exhibition of about 150 pieces, with a catalog from Yale University Press, is the first major scholarly study of the topic in English. A trove of Tass posters was discovered at the Art Institute in 1997, rolled up in a closet. They had scarcely been looked at since they arrived from the Soviet Union in the 1940s.
Some of the sheets, when finally unwrapped, “exuded a strong odor of solvents and decaying paper,” the catalog’s editors, Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, write in the introduction.
Tass designed its posters to reflect the latest news from the front, whether of successful Soviet airstrikes or of Nazis fleeing to Argentina as Hitler crumbled. The proposed designs had to go through layers of bureaucracy and potential censorship, and the delays frustrated the painters.
“I can give you examples when a theme is not approved for production for 5-6-7 days,” a Tass staff member complained to the government in 1942.
A single image required dozens of stencils, outlining curly tresses on murdered babies and gleams on bayonets. “Works representing dire, despicable or terrifying subjects were lovingly crafted,” Ms. Bugajski and Cher Schneider, a paper conservator, write in a catalog essay. As the war dragged on, the quality of the painters’ materials declined. When stockpiles of paint thinner and turpentine ran out, Ms. Bugajski and Ms. Schneider write, “the studio tried acetone and finally bedbug pesticide.” Stubbly, hand-ground pigments and air bubbles in the brush strokes created “a subtle pockmarked appearance,” they note.
The artists kept up their spirits with black humor. In the Art Institute show, a 1943 image of a German medic callously shooting a fallen compatriot in the head is titled “First Aid.” In a 1944 beach scene, scrawny Nazis cower behind a rowboat under the headline: “The End of the Resort Season.” Both posters belong to the main lender for the Art Institute show, the Ne boltai! Collection of Soviet propaganda, based in Prague. Its Russian name (pronounced nyeh ball-TYE) means “Don’t chatter.” The owner, an anonymous American, is lending pieces to a half-dozen exhibitions around Chicago in the next few months as part of the Soviet Arts Experience festival.
The shows, at museums including the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University and the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, range from the glamorizing of peasants in the 1910s to the photomontages demonizing C.I.A. spies in the 1980s. The Ne boltai! Collection is still growing, and the owner will most likely donate it to an institution eventually.
“We are searching basically all over the world for good pieces,” said Anna Loginova, the collection’s curator.
One major supplier over the years has been Swann Auction Galleries in New York. On Wednesday Swann will offer a Tass poster showing two guards at the Finnish border. (Its value is estimated at $700 to $1,000.) The men, with chiseled features and drab uniforms, gaze westward from a red U.S.S.R. signpost.
POLLOCK’S ART THERAPY
Jackson Pollock occasionally found solace in making useful objects out of ceramic and copper. He turned to those materials when he was distraught and desperate for ideas.
“I have started doing some thing with clay and have found a bit of encouragement from my teacher, my drawing I will tell you frankly is rotten,” he wrote to one of his brothers in 1930. He was a teenager at the time, studying at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles. Already drinking heavily, he kept being expelled.
In his 20s he was briefly confined to a suburban New York asylum for detox. “As part of his therapy, he drew and made some hammered copper bowls and plaques,” the historian B. H. Friedman wrote in a 1972 biography of Pollock.
Two utterly functional Pollock works have emerged at Cowan’s Auctions in Cincinnati: a pair of 1929 ceramic bookends with Cubist slabs and hemispheres glazed in cream and mulberry streaks. Cowan’s estimates that they will bring up to $15,000 in its November ceramics sale.
The bookends are unsigned but come with a letter certifying authenticity from their original owner, Alice Crosby. She studied at Manual Arts with Pollock, as did their friend Phillip Goldstein (who later changed his name to Philip Guston). Both men were smitten with her and sketched portraits of her as love tokens. Guston rendered her realistically, and Pollock depicted her as a burst of curls and spiky mascara. She kept the drawings, which are included with the Cowan’s lot. Pollock apparently hoped to outshine Guston with the ceramics experiments. How far either man’s relationship with Ms. Crosby progressed is not known.
“It would seem to be impolite to speculate,” said Garth Clark, a ceramics dealer who collaborates with Cowan’s on ceramics auctions a few times a year.
The mottled drips on the bookends inevitably bring to mind Pollock’s mature work, but he did not master the art of splattering paint until the late 1940s. To call them forerunners of the abstract canvases would be too brazen an act of scholarship, Mr. Clark said.
“Even for an opinionated man like me,” he added, “that would be a step too far.”
What is certain is that Pollock remained friendly with Guston despite some fits of drunken rage. At one point, Mr. Friedman writes in the biography, “he tried to throw Guston off a roof.”
Comentarios