Oblomok Imperii, Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg 1929
I love poster design. Designing posters may be my favourite way to pass my time next to trawling the internet looking for things like… well, old posters. So when I happen upon a collection of 1930’s Avant Garde USSR movie posters, I got more than a little excited.
The Avant Garde movement in the USSR was fleeting. It existed in the pre-Stalin era of the USSR, just before the state made Soviet Realism the official art style. This meant the majority of the art coming out of the USSR from then on fit the uniformed aesthetic of the regime and the bold n bizarre world of Russian Avant Garde was no more.
“The Doll with Millions”, Kukla S Millionami 1929
These posters were created using stone lithography. The artist would initially draw the image on paper and then transfer it onto a large slab of sanded lime stone using a paper coated with iron oxide, similar to the carbon paper we still use today. They would then go over the design using grease crayons or a substance called "tusche" which can be applied with a brush or like ink in specialised pens.
3 colour passes on separate stone plates make up the completed poster (top left).
From there, an acid is applied to everywhere the crayon or Tusche isn’t, causing it to eat away at the stone. Once the acid has worked its magic it is washed off. The raised areas then have an oil based ink rolled over them and then the stone is sprayed with water, the inked areas repel the water into only the non-printing areas.
“Kafe Fankoni”, Yakov Ruklevsky 1927
When paper is laid over the stone and run through a press, only the raised inked areas are printed onto the paper. For one colour prints, the work is now done. However if you want multiple colours like we see in these posters, the artist needs to make another etching in the stone. This involves sanding the whole stone plate down until it is smooth again and starting the whole process again for just the areas you want the next colour to be applied.
The process allowed artists to get both bold, bright and solid colours, as well as some magnificently detailed. So detailed in fact, that they can often look like photographs. Indeed when I first saw these posters my initial thought was that they may be composites of photography and screen printing. However the texture you can see in the solid colours comes from the stone and is a dead give away to the process used.
"Saba”, Anatoly Belsky 1929
The posters use of solid colours against the textures of the lithographic shading, the often bold typography choices and use of solid geometric shapes and patterns is just delightful. It’s a shame we don’t see more of it in poster design today.
Considering I do not speak any languages besides English, I have no idea what the copy of these posters say making their composition even more bizarre and striking. Each poster gives you a little bit of a feel of what the film could be about while also still remaining a near total mystery. What I do know is that I could look at that golden yellow contrast against black or red all day long.
Luch Smerti, unknown artist, 1925
Mertvaya Petlya, Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg, 1928
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