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Russian Avant-Garde Books 1917-34
Illustrated throughout with examples from the British Library's extensive collections, and with a narrative chronology, Russian Avant-Garde Books is an important survey of Russian design and literature of the 1920s and 1930s. It emphasizes continuity with the preceding Futurist years and explores the development of graphic design and photomontage in books and journals about theater and architecture as well as in collections of poetry and prose by avant-garde writers, including the Constructivists.
From the February Revolution of 1917 to the Soviet Writers' Conference of 1934, the Russian book was at the forefront of avant-garde movements, notably Mayakovsky's LEF - "Left Front of Art. With inventive typography, the use of photomontage, and graphic styles rivaling political posters, "worker artists" set commercial standards in the design of book covers that have rarely been surpassed.
Among the best-known authors whose early books are represented here are the poets Pasternak, Kruchenykh, and Kamensky; the linguists Brik and Shklovsky; the filmmakers Eisenstein and Vertov; the theoretician Arvatov; and the artists Zdanevich, Rodchenko, Stepanova, and Lavinsky.
Susan Compton is an art historian and curator. She is author of The World Russian Futurist Books 1912-16 , which remains the standard reference on Russian avantgarde books of that period.
From the February Revolution of 1917 to the Soviet Writers' Conference of 1934, the Russian book was at the forefront of avant-garde movements, notably Mayakovsky's LEF - "Left Front of Art. With inventive typography, the use of photomontage, and graphic styles rivaling political posters, "worker artists" set commercial standards in the design of book covers that have rarely been surpassed.
Among the best-known authors whose early books are represented here are the poets Pasternak, Kruchenykh, and Kamensky; the linguists Brik and Shklovsky; the filmmakers Eisenstein and Vertov; the theoretician Arvatov; and the artists Zdanevich, Rodchenko, Stepanova, and Lavinsky.
Susan Compton is an art historian and curator. She is author of The World Russian Futurist Books 1912-16 , which remains the standard reference on Russian avantgarde books of that period.
- GenresArt
175 pages, Hardcover
First published October 16, 1992
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March 26, 2011
In order to evaluate Susan Compton’s Russian Avant-Garde Books 1917 –1934 in the context of an introductory typography class, I shall introduce a working categorization of monographs on artistic subjects that, while reductive, will serve well the goal of this review. There are those books, imbued with a formalist aesthetics, that focus a perceptive eye on an artistic object’s compositional elements, elements such as line, shape, color, and texture, books that work to place such elements in dialog with one another, fostering a critical conversation which debates how well the autonomous object holds together, examining whether or not it is buttressed by an internal harmony and self-consistency. Conversely, there are works that aim to situate a work of art within a social, historical, and psychological context, monographs that sweep the artistic object up into the narrative tide of art history, illuminating it under the clarifying light of humanist inquiry. My review of Compton’s work is heavily inflected by how readily her book can be assigned to my first category. Therefore, the primary question informing this review can be stated thus: in what critical capacity does Russian Avant-Garde Books 1917 – 1934 interrogate the formalist principles of Soviet book design developed in the early 20th century and how might such a critique inform a novice typographer? Before proffering an answer to this question, I shall present an overview of Compton’s treatment of those subjects most germane to typography.
Russian Avant-Garde Books 1917 –1934 is best described as an interdisciplinary study that situates Soviet graphic arts in a historically modern and politically revolutionary context. Compton attempts to make clear the methods of mechanical reproduction that fundamentally changed the face of Russian artistic practice in the 1920s. She also aims at elucidating the complex and chaotic political currents that served to engender or stifle artistic expression in post-revolutionary Russia. Most specifically, Compton relates book design to a broader set of artistic practices—film, photography, literature, theater, and architecture—in order to better clarify the productive cross-pollination between their practitioners. Throughout the book she produces focused analyses of disparate realms of art, continually embedding her insights on innovative artistic practice within a more general organizing matrix focused on material resources and political ideology, providing the reader with a well-reasoned, coherent, and wholistic narrative which details the birth of the Russian avant-garde.
Compton’s study is focused on the fertile post-Revolutionary period between 1917 and 1934. This time span bookends an era of intense creativity and innovation in the arts with regard to subject matter and means of production. Broadly speaking, prior to 1917 Russian art can be seated firmly within the aristocratic tradition of the Czars. And by 1937 the iron grip of Stalinism had “re-channeled” the country’s artistic energy into the tributaries of Socialist Realism, deviation from which brought severe consequences. Yet, for close to 20 years following the October Revolution, the Russian spirit found itself faced with an uncertain, open, and malleable future. Confronted with the prospect of cultivating a socialist utopia, Russian artists banded together to formulate a tangible agenda of cultural and political reinvention. Artistic movements such as Futurism and Constructivism, armed with a fresh visual and literary style, proffered a vision of a populous democracy buttressed by the twin hallmarks of Modernity—scientific rationality and an efficiently mechanized means of production. According to Compton, this environment of inchoate political structure and utopian idealism, coupled with technological innovations such as cinema and photography, formed the generative milieu that fostered the Russian avant-garde.
After presenting a synoptic exploration of the Russian avant-garde’s historical and cultural birthing ground, Compton narrows her focus on four specific topics—the artistic economy existing between writers and designers, a cursory formal analysis of book design and its material conditions, the innovations of Russian theater, and the expression of utopian ideals in Soviet architecture. Of the four topics, the first two are the most relevant to the reader interested in graphic design and typography and I shall summarize their presentation briefly.
If one artist stands out as a figurehead of the period it is certainly Vladimir Mayakovsky. His highly original and politically inflected poetic and literary oeuvre acted as a beacon, attracting to him young, innovative graphic artists. Through the formation of artistic alliances and partnerships, Mayakovsky’s seminal words were paired with the radical visual designs of men like Alexander Rodchenko, Anton Lavinsky, and El Lissitzky. Due to Mayakovsky’s prolific output and charismatic influence, a large number of these collaborative productions spread rapidly throughout Russia, eventually making their way into Western Europe. The book covers’ graphic design was hailed immediately as a harbinger of a radically new style, a revolutionary aesthetic exhibiting heretofore unseen formal purity, mechanical exactness, and inventive use of photomontage. The Constructivists, as the artists referred to themselves, were self-consciously creating an art based on a “machine-aesthetic.” Arguably an offshoot of Futurism, Constructivism likewise eschewed the notion of “art for art’s sake,” favoring instead a socially productive art mobilized in the service of building a new social order, an order favoring the collective and abstract over the individual and particular. It was, in short, a proletarian aesthetic informed by a dialectical interplay between form, function, and utility. Constructivism was dealt two major blows by 1930—the suicide of Mayakovsky and the stifled artistic environment found under Stalin’s censorial reign—and it dissolved as an organized movement shortly thereafter.
Compton proceeds to show how the Constructivists quite literally imbued their work with a “machine aesthetic.” Walter Benjamin famously characterized the 1920s as an era during which the artistic object lost its aura of originality, succumbing to the alienating processes of mechanical (re)production. Compton’s two representative graphic artists, Lissitzky and especially Rodchenko, exploited this situation to the fullest, employing the medium of photography to produce extremely original book designs. Lissitzky excelled in manipulating the process of developing photographs. Using techniques such as double exposure and the superimposition of negatives he produced a wide range of striking book and magazine covers. And while creating book covers for Mayakovsky, Rodchenko simultaneously worked in the film industry designing inter-titles for newsreels. The main function of these inter-titles was to disseminate information to a semi-literate audience. This forced Rodchenko to develop aesthetics of immediacy, which presented information clearly and quickly. The influence of this approach on his book designs is readily apparent. Additionally, Rodchenko adapted the Soviet style of film editing, which emphasized rapid crosscutting and blending between images, and developed a form of photomontage characterized by the combination of disparate and unusual images in unexpected spatial arrangements. When one sees the work of Lissitzky and Rodchenko he or she is immediately struck with its originality and cannot deny its influence on modern design.
To return now to the subjective question posed by this review—how well does Compton’s book provide a formalist analysis of Soviet book design and does that analysis supplement the education of a novice typographer? In my view, Russian Avant-Garde Books 1917 – 1934 is most appropriately categorized not as formalist critique but as art history. Compton’s skill as a researcher and cultural historian is beyond dispute. Nonetheless, the majority of the book’s textual content was not immediately helpful to one seeking insight as to why one book design is aesthetically successful and another is not. To be sure, Compton is able to orient the reader to the characteristic styles of the Futurists and Constructivists, as well as to individual artists. And while these orientations are informative, they are descriptive in nature rather than critical. It is one thing to discuss the work of Rodchenko as revolutionary and cite his general use of photomontage and bold lettering as the reason. It is another thing to examine a specific layout in detail to discover why it holds together as a noteworthy composition in and of itself. Despite its dearth of subtle formal analysis, Compton’s book does contain a wealth of visual information useful to the typographic student. Almost half of Russian Avant-Garde Books comprises stunning reproductions of Soviet graphic design, many of which are full-color plates. Any student interested in improving their design skills would do well to peruse the amazing collection of covers that Compton’s book binds together. In the end, the lack of formal analysis might be considered a boon as it forces the reader to conduct his or her own subjective analyses to understand why certain designs radiate an undeniable internal consistency and elegance.
To be fair, as a reader with a specific agenda, I have cast Compton in the role of formalist art critic—a role that she does not herself claim—and critiqued her performance as such. Therefore I shall also say a few words about how well Russian Avant-Garde Books functions as a member of my second descriptive category. Is Compton’s work good art history? Put pithily, yes. After reading only a short way through the introductory chapter, one sees Compton is an accomplished art historian who is able to deftly and comprehensively weave a complex narrative tapestry from the disparate threads of culture, politics, and personal psychology. The resultant explanatory matrix, which undergirds the following chapters, provides useful insight into why Russian book design of the early 20th century can be considered avant-garde. As evidenced in the text’s summary above, Compton’s more focused chapters adequately flush out her primary thesis that innovative Soviet design is directly correlated with the fecund artistic milieu found in post-revolutionary Russia.
And yet, even when taking account of the book as art history proper, there are two points of critique worth noting. Firstly, it is obvious that the book comprises a number of previously published and thematically related stand-alone essays, which are then capped with an introduction. There is a large amount of information among the individual chapters that is repeated wholesale, so much so the reader experiences a sense of literary déjà-vu. Also, the book ends abruptly after a final chapter on architecture. There is no epilogue or summary that ties together the varied content of the book. I found myself going back and rereading the introduction to compensate for this lack. Although a minor point, the book would have benefited from a bit of editing to reduce redundancy and tidy up the narrative’s end. Secondly, in spite of Compton’s stated goal of examining the intersection of artistic disciplines, her chapters on theater and architecture are a bit out of place. Yes, those Soviet artists who designed books collaborated closely with peer theater directors and architects. But does this general observation justify Compton spending a fourth of her work historicizing 1920s theater production and architecture? The final two chapters of Russian Avant-Garde Books lose focus and would more properly belong in a book on the Soviet avant-garde in general. Overall, the ostensible topic of Compton’s work is best served by its introduction and first two chapters, which deal in turn with a clarifying historico-cultural context, the working relationship between book authors and book designers, and finally a cursory examination of formal design techniques and the material construction of books.
In summary, Susan Compton’s Russian Avant-Garde Books 1917 –1934 is a well-researched historical investigation into the cultural, political, and personal currents that gave rise to a unique post-revolutionary artistic movement. I venture the book is not the most well suited supplement to an introductory typography class. The student will find the abundant color and black and white reproductions of Soviet design very useful as a visual archive, perhaps even inspiring. However, he or she will not find much in the way of sustained and critical examination of book cover design from a formalist perspective. Therefore a student hoping to ingest a set of guiding formal principles and practices might be left feeling a bit unsatiated.
Russian Avant-Garde Books 1917 –1934 is best described as an interdisciplinary study that situates Soviet graphic arts in a historically modern and politically revolutionary context. Compton attempts to make clear the methods of mechanical reproduction that fundamentally changed the face of Russian artistic practice in the 1920s. She also aims at elucidating the complex and chaotic political currents that served to engender or stifle artistic expression in post-revolutionary Russia. Most specifically, Compton relates book design to a broader set of artistic practices—film, photography, literature, theater, and architecture—in order to better clarify the productive cross-pollination between their practitioners. Throughout the book she produces focused analyses of disparate realms of art, continually embedding her insights on innovative artistic practice within a more general organizing matrix focused on material resources and political ideology, providing the reader with a well-reasoned, coherent, and wholistic narrative which details the birth of the Russian avant-garde.
Compton’s study is focused on the fertile post-Revolutionary period between 1917 and 1934. This time span bookends an era of intense creativity and innovation in the arts with regard to subject matter and means of production. Broadly speaking, prior to 1917 Russian art can be seated firmly within the aristocratic tradition of the Czars. And by 1937 the iron grip of Stalinism had “re-channeled” the country’s artistic energy into the tributaries of Socialist Realism, deviation from which brought severe consequences. Yet, for close to 20 years following the October Revolution, the Russian spirit found itself faced with an uncertain, open, and malleable future. Confronted with the prospect of cultivating a socialist utopia, Russian artists banded together to formulate a tangible agenda of cultural and political reinvention. Artistic movements such as Futurism and Constructivism, armed with a fresh visual and literary style, proffered a vision of a populous democracy buttressed by the twin hallmarks of Modernity—scientific rationality and an efficiently mechanized means of production. According to Compton, this environment of inchoate political structure and utopian idealism, coupled with technological innovations such as cinema and photography, formed the generative milieu that fostered the Russian avant-garde.
After presenting a synoptic exploration of the Russian avant-garde’s historical and cultural birthing ground, Compton narrows her focus on four specific topics—the artistic economy existing between writers and designers, a cursory formal analysis of book design and its material conditions, the innovations of Russian theater, and the expression of utopian ideals in Soviet architecture. Of the four topics, the first two are the most relevant to the reader interested in graphic design and typography and I shall summarize their presentation briefly.
If one artist stands out as a figurehead of the period it is certainly Vladimir Mayakovsky. His highly original and politically inflected poetic and literary oeuvre acted as a beacon, attracting to him young, innovative graphic artists. Through the formation of artistic alliances and partnerships, Mayakovsky’s seminal words were paired with the radical visual designs of men like Alexander Rodchenko, Anton Lavinsky, and El Lissitzky. Due to Mayakovsky’s prolific output and charismatic influence, a large number of these collaborative productions spread rapidly throughout Russia, eventually making their way into Western Europe. The book covers’ graphic design was hailed immediately as a harbinger of a radically new style, a revolutionary aesthetic exhibiting heretofore unseen formal purity, mechanical exactness, and inventive use of photomontage. The Constructivists, as the artists referred to themselves, were self-consciously creating an art based on a “machine-aesthetic.” Arguably an offshoot of Futurism, Constructivism likewise eschewed the notion of “art for art’s sake,” favoring instead a socially productive art mobilized in the service of building a new social order, an order favoring the collective and abstract over the individual and particular. It was, in short, a proletarian aesthetic informed by a dialectical interplay between form, function, and utility. Constructivism was dealt two major blows by 1930—the suicide of Mayakovsky and the stifled artistic environment found under Stalin’s censorial reign—and it dissolved as an organized movement shortly thereafter.
Compton proceeds to show how the Constructivists quite literally imbued their work with a “machine aesthetic.” Walter Benjamin famously characterized the 1920s as an era during which the artistic object lost its aura of originality, succumbing to the alienating processes of mechanical (re)production. Compton’s two representative graphic artists, Lissitzky and especially Rodchenko, exploited this situation to the fullest, employing the medium of photography to produce extremely original book designs. Lissitzky excelled in manipulating the process of developing photographs. Using techniques such as double exposure and the superimposition of negatives he produced a wide range of striking book and magazine covers. And while creating book covers for Mayakovsky, Rodchenko simultaneously worked in the film industry designing inter-titles for newsreels. The main function of these inter-titles was to disseminate information to a semi-literate audience. This forced Rodchenko to develop aesthetics of immediacy, which presented information clearly and quickly. The influence of this approach on his book designs is readily apparent. Additionally, Rodchenko adapted the Soviet style of film editing, which emphasized rapid crosscutting and blending between images, and developed a form of photomontage characterized by the combination of disparate and unusual images in unexpected spatial arrangements. When one sees the work of Lissitzky and Rodchenko he or she is immediately struck with its originality and cannot deny its influence on modern design.
To return now to the subjective question posed by this review—how well does Compton’s book provide a formalist analysis of Soviet book design and does that analysis supplement the education of a novice typographer? In my view, Russian Avant-Garde Books 1917 – 1934 is most appropriately categorized not as formalist critique but as art history. Compton’s skill as a researcher and cultural historian is beyond dispute. Nonetheless, the majority of the book’s textual content was not immediately helpful to one seeking insight as to why one book design is aesthetically successful and another is not. To be sure, Compton is able to orient the reader to the characteristic styles of the Futurists and Constructivists, as well as to individual artists. And while these orientations are informative, they are descriptive in nature rather than critical. It is one thing to discuss the work of Rodchenko as revolutionary and cite his general use of photomontage and bold lettering as the reason. It is another thing to examine a specific layout in detail to discover why it holds together as a noteworthy composition in and of itself. Despite its dearth of subtle formal analysis, Compton’s book does contain a wealth of visual information useful to the typographic student. Almost half of Russian Avant-Garde Books comprises stunning reproductions of Soviet graphic design, many of which are full-color plates. Any student interested in improving their design skills would do well to peruse the amazing collection of covers that Compton’s book binds together. In the end, the lack of formal analysis might be considered a boon as it forces the reader to conduct his or her own subjective analyses to understand why certain designs radiate an undeniable internal consistency and elegance.
To be fair, as a reader with a specific agenda, I have cast Compton in the role of formalist art critic—a role that she does not herself claim—and critiqued her performance as such. Therefore I shall also say a few words about how well Russian Avant-Garde Books functions as a member of my second descriptive category. Is Compton’s work good art history? Put pithily, yes. After reading only a short way through the introductory chapter, one sees Compton is an accomplished art historian who is able to deftly and comprehensively weave a complex narrative tapestry from the disparate threads of culture, politics, and personal psychology. The resultant explanatory matrix, which undergirds the following chapters, provides useful insight into why Russian book design of the early 20th century can be considered avant-garde. As evidenced in the text’s summary above, Compton’s more focused chapters adequately flush out her primary thesis that innovative Soviet design is directly correlated with the fecund artistic milieu found in post-revolutionary Russia.
And yet, even when taking account of the book as art history proper, there are two points of critique worth noting. Firstly, it is obvious that the book comprises a number of previously published and thematically related stand-alone essays, which are then capped with an introduction. There is a large amount of information among the individual chapters that is repeated wholesale, so much so the reader experiences a sense of literary déjà-vu. Also, the book ends abruptly after a final chapter on architecture. There is no epilogue or summary that ties together the varied content of the book. I found myself going back and rereading the introduction to compensate for this lack. Although a minor point, the book would have benefited from a bit of editing to reduce redundancy and tidy up the narrative’s end. Secondly, in spite of Compton’s stated goal of examining the intersection of artistic disciplines, her chapters on theater and architecture are a bit out of place. Yes, those Soviet artists who designed books collaborated closely with peer theater directors and architects. But does this general observation justify Compton spending a fourth of her work historicizing 1920s theater production and architecture? The final two chapters of Russian Avant-Garde Books lose focus and would more properly belong in a book on the Soviet avant-garde in general. Overall, the ostensible topic of Compton’s work is best served by its introduction and first two chapters, which deal in turn with a clarifying historico-cultural context, the working relationship between book authors and book designers, and finally a cursory examination of formal design techniques and the material construction of books.
In summary, Susan Compton’s Russian Avant-Garde Books 1917 –1934 is a well-researched historical investigation into the cultural, political, and personal currents that gave rise to a unique post-revolutionary artistic movement. I venture the book is not the most well suited supplement to an introductory typography class. The student will find the abundant color and black and white reproductions of Soviet design very useful as a visual archive, perhaps even inspiring. However, he or she will not find much in the way of sustained and critical examination of book cover design from a formalist perspective. Therefore a student hoping to ingest a set of guiding formal principles and practices might be left feeling a bit unsatiated.
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