The Artists Who Redesigned a War-Shattered Europe

 

For the dust jacket of the book “Ten Years Without Lenin” (1934), the designer Mikhail Razulevich montaged the Soviet revolutionary into a panorama of housing blocks, factories, and army detachments.

“... That’s the conclusion of ‘Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented,’ a momentous new show that papers the walls of the Museum of Modern Art with posters, magazines, advertisements and brochures from an earlier age of upheaval. Exactly a century ago, a cross-section of artists from Moscow to Amsterdam opened their eyes in a continent reshaped by war and revolution. Rapid advances in media technology made their old academic training feel useless. They were living through a political and social earthquake. And when the earthquake hit, what did these artists do? They rethought everything. They disclaimed the autonomy that modern art usually assigned to itself. They plunged their work into dialogue with politics, economics, transport, commerce. Nothing was automatic for these artistic pioneers, who took it upon themselves to recast painting, photography and design as a kind of public works job. ...”

NY Times

The designers Elena Semenova and Lydia Naumova collaborated on a suite of informational posters for trade unions, such as this one from 1929. The headline to Stalin’s right reads: “Every worker must keep a keen eye on how the net cost of production is lowered at their workplace.”