| Availability: | In stock |
The early years of the Soviet Union were marked not only social and economic upheaval but also by a revolution in the arts. Art and design, and their new practitioners, the "artist-engineers," acquired for the first time in history a conspicuous role in the building of a new society.
Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg were prominent members of this group, which was centered in Moscow and active throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. The Stenberg brothers produced a large body of work in a multiplicity of media, but their most significant accomplishment was in the field of graphic design, specifically, the advertising posters they created for the newly burgeoning world of Soviet cinema. These works merged two of the most important agitational tools available to the new Communist regime: the cinema and the graphic arts. In a country where illiteracy was endemic, film played a critical role in the conversion of the masses to the new social order.
The film posters of the Stenberg brothers represent an uncommon synthesis of the philosophical, formal, and theoretical elements of what has become known as the Soviet avant-garde. These posters, radical even from current perspectives, are not the consequence of some brief flame of eccentric artistic creativity, but rather a consolidation of the Stenbergs' own eclectic experience and the formal artistic inventions of the time.
Written by Christopher Mount. Published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1997. Paperback, measures 12 x 9 inches, 96 pages. ISBN 978 0870700510 and 978 0810961733
