Born to Sell

Ateliers Cheret (Jules Cheret and Georges Meunier), Specimen d’affiches artistiques, “Les Maitres de l’affiche,” 1895.

Assaulted by advertising images everywhere we look today, it’s hard to imagine a world not dominated by commercial imagery. The cartoonishly crowded look of ads plastered over every inch of racecars threatens to become the norm as America morphs into NASCAR nation. Advertising and Art: International Graphics from the affiche to Pop Art, edited by Claudio Salsi, helps us imagine a simpler time, when advertising art was just beginning to develop, and shows us how we got to where we are today. Delving into the mammoth print and poster collection of the Civica Raccolta delle Stampe “A. Bertarelli”, a team of Italian art historians trace the history of the advertising poster from the very beginning, starting with Jules Cheret,the “father” of the modern advertising poster. Cheret’s work (above) seems almost quaint by today’s brash standard, but it proved influential on more experimental graphic artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. As Giovanna Ginex explains in her essay, by the end of the nineteenth century, “[p]oster design became a profession” with “specialist printing houses” and “cities changed their appearance, welcoming—more or less knowingly—advertising material in their ‘modern’ urban fashioning.” Thanks to Cheret and others, advertising art grew from a poorly regarded corner of the art world to a new, distinct outlet for visual expression vitally linked to everyday, commercial life.

Alfons Mucha, Bisquit Dubouche & C. Cognac, 1899.

Advances in chromolithography removed the limitations of lithography, thus “leaving the artists’ prerogatives almost intact and rather bringing out their creativity,” Ginex asserts. The freedom to realize in reproduction almost anything they could paint attracts a new class of artists, including Alfons Mucha (above), who revolutionizes the look of the advertising poster, introducing elements of Art Nouveau into the common existence of European society and infecting every corner with a passion for that style so easily adapted to furniture, architecture, etc. Over time, the center of advertising visual innovation moves to Munich, where the Jugendstil branch of Art Nouveau flourishes. Thanks to the Raccolta Bertarelli’s vast collection to draw from, Advertising and Art supports each of its essays with a rich set of examples that show not only the well-known figures such as Mucha but also lesser-known but no less talented artists working in the field. These are commercials you don’t wish you could fast forward through.
Leopoldo Metlicovitz, Inaugurazione del Sempione. Esposizione Internazionale Milano 1906, 1906.

Much like early photography, early advertising found itself emulating the world of painting until it could develop a distinct language of its own. The work of Leopoldo Metlicovitz (above) shows how advertising art continued to resemble painting in terms of composition and style, perhaps even more so thanks to technological progress solving earlier problems in reproduction. At the same time, artists such as Leonetto Cappiello actively sought that new language for advertising. “The art of the poster has its own requirements and its own laws,” Cappiello said. “If the poster is good and successful, it is commercial and artistic, otherwise it is not a poster.” Giovanna Muri, in her essay on the poster’s development in the 1920s and 1930s, sees the influence of the Italian Futurists on the poster in a give and take process. “Futurist poetics.. not only used the means of advertising communication to promote the value of dynamism, progress, and technology, but also attributed a fundamental prominence to advertising as artistic experience,” Muri writes. Futurism lends only one of the many art dialects that merged into the larger language of advertising art taking shape in the first half of the twentieth century.

Nikolaj Petrovich Prusakov, The Calm Waters of the Volga, 1925.

Russian Constructivism and the vision of Alexander Rodchenko also played a role in the development of advertising art in Europe. When the new Russian cinema crossed Europe, it came twinned with equally new, striking advertising posters. Nikolaj Petrovich Prusakov’s poster for the film, The Calm Waters of the Volga (above, from 1925) stands as just one example of the new visual display of Russian Constructivism, which opened up another realm of possibility for advertising artists. In the 1920s a bevy of advertising-related specialist magazines emerged. Alessia Alberti examines in her essay the influence of those magazines on the industry and how they helped create the first advertising agencies as we know them today. Finally, the advertising world had finally broken free of the art world as a separate entity, yet it continued to borrow from the art world as the art world began to borrow from it.

Giovanni Pintori, Olivetti, 1953.

The years just before, during, and after World War II significantly changed the landscape of advertising art. As Anna Steiner points out in her essay on advertising from the 1930s to 1968, the techniques of Fascist and Nazi propaganda quickly crept into mainstream advertising imagery. “No strong difference was noticeable between advertising and cultural propaganda” after the war, Steiner writes. Members of the Bauhaus preached a new all-encompassing type of art that spread to America as Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and others fled Nazi oppression and took up teaching jobs. Scientific research on human behavior reveals that certain colors such as red more effectively reach the eye, spurring artists such as Giovanni Pintori to sprinkle red among the other colors of his 1953 poster for Olivetti typewriters (above). New fonts such as Helvetica come on the scene and suddenly define the “look” of a generation. As advertising’s language not only grew up but eventually grew amazingly powerful, artists in the conventional art world took note. The Pop Art movement of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, and others all addressed how the advertising world intersected with the “real” world. “The real is not ‘realism,’” Francesco Tedeschi writes in his essay, “The Phantasm of Reality: Advertising in the Art of the 1960s,” “but consists in the iconosphere and in the landscape determined and produced by the social and sociological dimensions of a reality made of images, commodities, and consumptions. It is not a matter of seeking a language that speaks to the masses, but of appropriating the language of the society of mass consumption.” The relationship had finally come full circle. In less than a century, where advertising had once emulated art, art now emulated advertising for its connection to the “real,” and what that might actually mean.

Leopoldo Metlicovitz, Madama Butterfly, 1904.

Advertising and Art provides a concise crash course in the development of advertising imagery over the last century. Part of me longs for the days of beautiful works such as Leopoldo Metlicovitz’s poster for the premier of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in 1904 (above), but the eventual separation between mainstream art and a distinct sphere of advertising proved mutually beneficial to both parties. Today’s fast-paced, television-driven advertising world no longer places a priority on print campaigns, but Advertising and Art keeps its priorities straight and provides a straightforward assessment of the long, strange trip advertising art has taken in finding a voice of its own.

[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with a review copy of Advertising and Art: International Graphics from the affiche to Pop Art and for the images from the book.]

From the Ground Up

When the people of Russia began their experiment in Socialism in the early twentieth century, they literally sought to build the world anew. Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution inaugurated an architectural revolution led by men such as Konstantin Melnikov and Vladimir Tatlin. Tatlin's Tower (above), designed to be a Monument to the Third International (aka, the Comintern), epitomizes the brand of architectural constructivism Tatlin and others patterned after the Constructivist art of Alexander Rodchenko and other Russian artists. Tatlin’s Tower, if it had been built, would have risen higher than the Eiffel Tower, surrounding work spaces shaped like a cube, triangle, and sphere with a network of iron, glass, and steel. In Architecture and the Russian Avant-Garde, writer-producer-director Michael Craig and Copernicus Films examine the concrete results and unfulfilled promise of that exciting time in architecture in Russia when all the rules of building were being rewritten as fast as the rules of society.

The same faith in the power of technology to forge a better life for all that marks all of early Soviet society marks the architecture of the time. Architects saw the old forms as “imprisoning” people yearning to be free. The same almost reckless experimentation seen in the innovative painting of Matisse and Cezanne in France and in Russia’s own Kandinsky helped inspire architects to think outside the boxy structures of the past. Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist art and it’s almost messianic desire to transform the world drove architects to reevaluate the role of geometric forms in the designing of living and working spaces. Melnikov’s Rusakov-House of Culture on Strominka Street (above, from 1927-1929) exemplifies this use-centered approach to building, keeping the needs and desires of the people inside as a central focus. Classical ideals fell by the wayside as architects designed using space and volume as their materials rather than stone, freed by the technical innovations of steel and glass. Buildings were now “living sculpture,” created not for the bourgeoisie elite but rather for the people. Architecture now interacted with people on an unprecedented scale, achieving a social relevance in such public works as Melnikov’s cultural center that helped generate a new sense of community.

Melnikov often worked, as he put it, “at the very edge of the possible,” but a surprising number of his “impractical” designs were actually built, including many multi-story parking garages in Moscow that alleviated the growing parking crunch as more people moved to the city and more automobiles hit the streets. (An example of one of those garages, featuring staggered entrances, appears above.) Although many of these buildings seem impractical fantasies today, they addressed many of the pressing needs of the day with such features as huge public kitchens in which meals could be prepared for the fast-growing population of workers. These architects often worked hand in hand with industry to create functioning factories that still left the individual worker empowered. Ample archival footage of these workers amidst huge, whirling machinery gives a sense of the thrilling energy of those places at the time, which became secular cathedrals to technological progress and the hope of a better standard of life for everyone.

Recognizing that those incoming workers needed a place to live, Melnikov addressed the need for cheap, efficient housing as well. Picturing a series of interconnected cylinders, in keeping with the geometric, Constructivist credo, Melnikov tried but failed to get his solution to the housing crunch built. Determined to prove his design’s feasibility, Melnikov build a home for himself following that idea. Melnikov, who was also a painter, appears above painting in the great living cylinder of his home, bathed in the light streaming through the series of decorative yet functional diamond-shaped windows climbing up the walls. This period of architecture marks a great cognitive leap in the ways buildings were imagined that rippled through all world architecture and continues to influence builders today. Melnikov’s willingness to “experiment” on himself and his own home shows just how personally committed and engaged these architects were in the mission to build this brave new world.

Craig’s film brings the spirit of innovation and community driving these people at this time vibrantly back to life. By showing a computer animation of a painting by Malevich transform into an architectural blueprint and then into a three-dimensional model and, finally, the real-life building, Craig bridges the same gap between art and architecture that these Tatlin, Melnikov, and others had to bridge. As with his other film I’ve reviewed, Alexander Rodchenko and the Russian Avant-garde, Architecture and the Russian Avant-Garde bristles with a kinetic energy thanks to the quick pace of the insightful narration and the endless parade of juxtaposed archival footage of the time and photography of the buildings that still stand today. Looking at many of these buildings today, a little worse for wear, it would be easy to pass judgment on them as failures because of their link to the broken promises of Socialism. However, as with the Rodchenko film, Craig resists editorializing on the political ideology and maintains a laser focus on the art and the architecture. By ignoring what never was, Architecture and the Russian Avant-Garde wonderfully presents what could have been.

[Many thanks to Michael Craig and Copernicus Films for providing me with a review copy of Architecture and the Russian Avant-Garde and for the images from the film.]

In Black and White

Few artists suffer from the “I can do that” syndrome more than Kazimir Malevich. Born February 26, 1878, Malevich toured the many styles en vogue in the early twentieth century, from Post-Impressionism to Cubism before arriving at the style of Suprematism in his famous/infamous first work in that style Black Square (above, from 1915). Suprematism sprung from Malevich’s head almost fully formed, an aesthetic of pure color on color, devoid of the busy designs of the earlier styles he had toyed with. Such icons of modern art as Black Square represent an iconoclasm of sorts—a dismissal of design in a search for pure spirituality as expressed in painting. Looking through a gallery of Malevich’s pre-Suprematist works, you realize that Black Square is not the work of a man who couldn’t paint, but rather the work of a man who could no longer paint the same way and remain honest to himself.

Noah Charney’s novel, The Art Thief, imagines Malevich’s White on White (above, from 1918) stolen. (My review of The Art Thief is here.) Charney uses Malevich’s work to examine the nature of representation in art versus the long history of realism. Malevich’s goals are revolutionary—the Russian Revolution, to be precise. Living in that same utopian dreamworld inhabited by other Russian avant-garde artists, Malevich saw other artists such as Alexander Rodchenko celebrate the materialist renovation of their country through photography and ran the other way, seeking a spiritual language to reflect the tenor of the times itself rather than its embodiment in architecture and technology.

Like so many other artists of the Soviet period, however, Malevich’s work was first misunderstood and then severely punished. In his Self-Portrait (above, from 1933), Malevich paints himself like a prophet, speaking a new gospel to the Russian people. Like most prophets, unfortunately, he was honored in his own country with both ridicule and imprisonment. Just three years before this self-portrait, Malevich’s incendiary writings on art and society earned him months in a Soviet jail. Friends burned many of his works to avoid further punishment. Just two years after this self-portrait, Malevich dies from illness borne of the toll that prison had taken on him. Malevich’s rejection of the standard subject matter of art made him seem dangerous to the Soviet regime, which saw all modern art as bourgeois and elitist. In reality, works such as Black Square and White on White deny all elitism in their simplicity, reaching out to even the most unstudied viewer and asking them to look, to think, and, perhaps, to believe.

Picturing the Revolution

“The road from the icon to the photograph is long,” says Alexander Rodchenko at the very beginning of Michael Craig’s 1999 documentary Alexander Rodchenko and the Russian Avant-garde, released just in 2007 on DVD by Copernicus Films. Using archival film footage as well as Rodchenko’s own art, all set to the strains of Dmitri Shostakovich and other Russian avant-garde composers of the time, writer-producer-director Craig recreates the spirit that drove Rodchenko and the Russian avant-garde to believe in the Socialist revolution and to create a whole new visual language to accompany that brave new world.

Craig begins by setting up not only Rodchenko’s development as a photographer but also the development of photography itself—a still-new medium in the early twentieth century. Just as Rodchenko came to photography after a career in painting, photography itself continued to borrow heavily from its fine art roots—until Rodchenko vowed to free both himself and his newly chosen field from that burden of the past, which came to represent all the burdens of the past that the glorious revolution strove to shake off. Craig shows how Rodchenko’s abstract painting, founded primarily on the use of lines, translated into Rodchenko’s photography, which sought out the lines in modern architecture. Rodchenko took that seeking of lines even further in his concept of “persepectives”—unique photographs taken down from or upwards to extreme heights, such as his photograph of a series of apartment balconies (above). Through these perspectives, Rodchenko hopes “to demonstrate the aesthetic of the urban world” and the new relationships forged in that world, all with the goal of serving those living under Socialism. Moscow becomes Rodchenko’s “laboratory,” Craig writes, within which he wandered, continually hunting for new and challenging angles to photograph and share with his comrades. Rodchenko disdained the intentionally staged photograph, always looking to photograph everyday life but in new ways to help further the understanding of the effects of the new ideology on the everyday Russian. Craig masterfully demonstrates the social mission and relevance of Rodchenko’s avant-garde art, bringing a sense of meaning and mission so often lacking in modern art. Using Rodchenko’s own words and images, one can’t help but believe in the sincerity of his ideals, even when doubting the possibility of their attainment.

By first showing Rodchenko’s photographs of different buildings and then slowly melting into footage of those same buildings today, Craig conveys a sense of Rodchenko’s art as something truly living and vibrant. The faces of the common people Rodchenko photographed back then (such as the woman shown above) could easily be seen on those same streets today. When the film turns to Rodchenko’s foray into advertising as a means of reaching the masses through his art, his influence on even the Western world becomes clear. Craig and Copernicus Films have created several other films analyzing different aspects of the Russian avant-garde, including Architecture and the Russian Avant-garde; Mayakovsky; Meyerhold, Theatre and the Russian Avant-garde; Kandinsky and the Russia House; and David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde. If the other films (which I have not seen) share the same detailed research and production values as Alexander Rodchenko and the Russian Avant-garde, they should add up to a significant scholarly contribution to the area.

For American audiences, I can only compare Alexander Rodchenko and the Russian Avant-garde to an American Masters special on PBS, except that the 40-minute film’s narration is much faster paced and literally jam-packed with detail. For anyone interested in photography, art history, or twentieth-century political history, this film will dazzle you with detail and make you want to watch it again. I only wish that I could find such challenging work on American television. Craig does make use of an actor to play Rodchenko (so often the downfall of so many historical projects), but never allows us to see that actor’s face, offering only glimpses in mirrors (above) and shots of his bald head from behind. Such elusiveness allows us to believe we’re actually watching Rodchenko ponder his next move as his own words “speak” through the narrator.

“Gentleness is a posthumous honor,” the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko once wrote of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian-avante garde poet who worked with Rodchenko many times and later took his own life after cracking under the pressures of creating revolutionary art. With Alexander Rodchenko and the Russian Avant-garde, Michael Craig and Copernicus Films have paid Rodchenko a similar honor in presenting his life and art gently and honorably—free of the ideological baggage so often superimposed by the historical hindsight of the Cold War and the fall of Communism. Rodchenko the avant-garde prophet, burning to lead his people to the promised land of Socialism’s ideals through the fresh eyes of his photography, emerges as a heroic figure. Despite his call for “workers not geniuses” to serve the cause, Rodchenko’s own genius left a body of work that still makes us see the world anew and wonder what could be.


[Many thanks to Michael Craig and Copernicus Films for providing me with a review copy of the DVD Alexander Rodchenko and the Russian Avant-garde and the images from the film shown above.]

For the Cause

As the Russian Civil War brought down the Czarist regime and opened the door to Socialism and Communism, Alexander Rodchenko stood by to offer his art for the cause. Born December 5, 1891, Rodchenko excelled in multiple media, including painting, graphic design, and photography. Rodchenko’s photography of the Shukhov Tower (above, from 1926) shows the 160-meter-tall steel tower, the pride of Russian engineering, as an aesthetically modern creation as well. Rodchenko founded the school of Constructivism, which took up the challenge of creating a whole new visual vocabulary for the brave new world promised them. His photography used unique new perspectives—looking up through the latticework of Shukhov Tower or looking down upon the heads of crowds gathered in the streets—to challenge the viewer and other artists to turn the world upside down and look at it anew.

Rodchenko’s pre-revolutionary work was equally daring. Dance: An Objectless Composition (above, from 1915) demonstrates his awareness of European modernism, especially the Italian Futurists and their penchant for depicting motion. Rodchenko’s Dance swirls with movement like a Futurist work but simultaneously dissects and explodes the subject itself. Although no recognizable dancer appears, the spirit of the dance comes across. Perhaps the turmoil of this painting reflects the turmoil of Russian society moving closer and closer to total upheaval.

Rodchenko collaborated with other leading artists of the Soviet state as part of the Constructivist ethos of a communal culture of the people. His film poster for Sergei Eisenstein’s silent film The Battleship Potemkin (above, from1926) captures the drama and propagandistic power of that landmark of early film. In 1929, Rodchenko joined an all-star team of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, actor and director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky to produce Mayakovsky's satirical play The Bedbug. The bold lettering style and eye-catching layout of Rodchenko’s designs still influence modern graphic design today. Looking back today, it’s sad to think of the creative energy and hope invested in this scheme to create an entirely new language of culture, completely divorced from all the sad baggage of the past. Like all utopian dreams, however, it was doomed to fail in one way or another. The art of that period, especially that by Rodchenko, still packs a punch that makes you believe, however briefly, that art can truly change the world.