In a year where the
Bauhaus seems to impregnate everything, it is worth remembering titles and publications that also revolutionized the design and printing from the
Soviet Union, using in a new way geometries, diagonal compositions and red and black as dominant colors.
The images of a revolution, and of the different stages of that same revolution, in which words, its typography becomes powerful images with artists like Ródchenko, El Lissitzky, Varvara Stepánova, Lariónov...
As its curator, Oliva María Rubio, comments: "The art of books and magazines reaches its maximum splendor with the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century and is particularly relevant in the Soviet Union." The alliance between artists and graphic designers and the close connections of these with the poetic-literary scope contributed to the transformation of publications."
Among the exhibits, Lafuente highlighted an extraordinary photomontage "Pro eto. Ei i mine" (About this: her and me), a poem book dedicated to her beloved by Vladimir Mayakovsky and that Ródchenko illustrated with eight photomontages, creating an enigmatic universe with images of lovers, tableware, bottles, bridges or animals, creating an incredible collage of clippings from magazines.
With the imposition of social realism, artists like El Lissitzky and Rodchenko were not able to continue unfolding their creativity. They were required to develop an epic narrative style that portrayed a positive image of the country, masking the great purges that were sending millions of people to their death, many of them intellectuals, artists, and writers.
The exhibition also presents a section dedicated to the issues of the USSR magazine under construction, founded by Gorky and published between 1930 and 1941, where realism becomes the dominant artistic guide. The magazine becomes the canon of Soviet propaganda, with full-page photos of the great infrastructural works, smiling men and women and portraits of a Stalin with a kind gesture looking at infinity. A publication that "was published in four languages, up to 10,000 copies of each and were sent to personalities and consulates," said the curator of the exhibition, Oliva María Rubio.
This show is the second part of the exhibition The Soviet Century that, held in the same gallery space in the context of
PHotoESPAÑA 2018, featured an ample selection of Soviet photography from 1917 to 1972. On this occasion they present diverse publications — photobooks and magazines, together with other documents — to survey the great outburst of typography, photomontage and the photobook in the Soviet Union between 1913 and 1941.
