Lot description
ARTIST: GUSTAV G. KLUTSIS (1895-1944) SIZE: 20 x 28 3/4 in./50.6 x 73 cm PRINTER: State Publishers, Moscow DESCRIPTION: The First Five-Year Plan of Russia was a list of economic goals decreed by Joseph Stalin to strengthen the USSR's economy between 1928 and 1932, making the nation both militarily and industrially self-sufficient. The fine photomontage locomotives used in this Klutsis design focus on the Development of Transport One of the Most Serious Tasks in Fulfilling the Five-Year Plan. Not only are the actual numbers of first-year achievements listed on the poster, but also projections for the following year in the areas of capital investment, basic funding and railroad freight turnover. One of the members of the Russian Constructivist movement, Latvia-born Klutsis joined the Soviet avant-garde in the early years of the Bolshevik regime. He continued to produce posters well into the Stalinist period, using photography and montage, and also maintaining many of the constructivist design principles. Sometimes . . . he took the photograph himself, using documentary photographs which he montaged, or photographs with an angled view . . . Klutsis usually succeeds in avoiding the potentially idealized, sentimental or utopian nature of this gaze as it tended to be used in the realism of the 30s, by introducing an element of confrontation . . . or shock, which depends essentially upon montage (Avant-Garde, p. 56). Like many of his colleagues, he was betrayed by the system, imprisoned in 1938 and eventually died in a forced-labor camp. Rare! (Russian Avant-Garde; Rail)