Stenberg Brothers: Constructing a Revolution in Soviet Design

by Christopher Mount, Peter Kenez

The extraordinary film posters reproduced in this book, made in Russia by Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg from 1924 to 1933, exemplify a literal revolution in the graphic arts: the transformation of a primarily illustrative medium into one increasingly abstract, constructed, or collaged from a variety of sources. This book accompanies an exhibition of the posters opening at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in June 1977.

The Stenberg brothers, like their contemporaries Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, were artists of immensely varied interests and eclectic skills. They were sculptors, architects, and stage and costume designers, and were enamored of the film and montage theories developed in the suddenly burgeoning Soviet film industry. As seen in this book's super colorplates, they brought to film poster design an extraordinary compositional dynamism, originality, and contrast of scale, employing many of the artistic conventions of the Constructivist movement.

Genres: Art, Design

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Plenty of online stores carry prints of these posters, but they're all so good that I remain unable to decide on just one (or even two) for my walls. They will stay a book then.

[Oxalis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Stenbergs were new artists to me and I really enjoyed seeing some of their work and reading the accompanying analysis. Very well done collection.