Poster, Kunstausstellung der Sowjetunion,

1931

Valentina Nikiforovna Kulagina was part of the generation of Russian women who initially benefited from the revolution’s achievements. She participated on an equal footing with her male peers in the radical avant-garde of the early twentieth century, which turned away from easel painting to focus on new media and design strategies. When Kulagina was commissioned to design the poster for the Soviet art exhibition in Zurich in 1929, the situation in the young USSR had already changed. By then, the new art movements were frowned upon and no longer viewed as expressing a revolutionary spirit. Instead, calls emerged for a type of art that could be readily understood by the masses. With its monumental worker figure, rigorous division of space, striking oblique lines, and virtuoso incorporation of typography, Kulagina’s design brought new perspectives to the Swiss cultural poster. The sculptural rendering of the worker and the purely painterly execution, however, already herald the shift in Stalin’s propagandistic rhetoric that would soon outlaw any artistic experimentation.(Bettina Richter)