Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: International Center of Photography, New York

Through the course of the Bolshevik 1920s and Stalinist 1930s, the pioneering Soviet photomonteurs Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina produced some of the most terrible--in the old-fashioned sense of the word--examples of visual propaganda ever executed in the service of modern state power. Eventually supported almost exclusively by the administrative organs and centralized publishing houses of a one-party state, their often overlapping, but also sometimes diverging, design practices were directly dependent on the ever-shifting exigencies of their historical context. Unlike that of many of their contemporaries, however, the work of Klutsis and Kulagina has also managed to transcend the grim and gritty details of its historical formation--no doubt owing in part to its sheerly compelling nature qua modern design and to our alternatively lurid and utopian fascination with its construction of that major leitmotif of socialist modernity, Homo sovieticus, the New Soviet man or woman.

Organized for the International Center of Photography in New York by Margarita Tupitsyn, a Paris-based freelance curator of both Soviet and contemporary Russian art, "Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: Photography and Montage After Constructivism" is the first major exhibition devoted to a joint consideration of the two artists' use of photography in the graphic design of agitational posters and postcards, book and magazine covers and illustrations, exhibition installations, and, perhaps most staggeringly, monumental billboards of an unprecedented scale. Since perestroika, these two comrades in the art of montage--who married in 1921, three years after Klutsis's arrival in Moscow from Latvia--have become increasingly visible through their inclusion in many of the group exhibitions of the Soviet avant-garde that have traveled the world and, in Klutsis's case, also via a major 1991 retrospective of his work in Kassel and Madrid. Comprising approximately 130 objects, the present exhibition, however, is the largest showing of either artist in the United States to date. (Fifteen of its loans are from the State Museum of Art in Riga, which holds some four hundred objects donated in 1964 by Kulagina in memory of her husband, who was summarily executed in February 1938 by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.) While the exhibition's presentation of Klutsis outstrips that of Kulagina by a long shot, excerpts from the latter's previously unpublished diaries in the show's catalogue reveal that she often assisted with the production of his designs, a labor for which she seems never to have been publicly credited.

The task of accommodating on a single floor such a wide range of formats--from the tiny to the gigantic--poses numerous challenges that are well met by the exhibition's designers, Julie Ault and Martin Beck. Refraining from saturating the space in red--an overdetermined and unfortunately all too predictable color in shows dealing with revolutionary art and culture--they opt instead for a strong but restrained contrast of gray and white. This scheme sectionalizes the gallery's available wall space, reinforcing the curatorial division of the exhibition into six primarily thematic but also loosely chronological arenas of production: "The Formation of Photomontage," "Between the Public and the Private," "Socialist Joy," "Change the Leader," "Exhibition Designs and Street Agitation," and "The Socialist Body." The exhibition designers have also paired a book in a glass vitrine with a digital screen that turns its virtual pages, allowing visitors to experience the entirety of the book's design, if not its material palpability. And the massive enlargement of a number of tiny photographs (including some whimsical portraits of each artist) visually evokes Klutsis's own important theorization of monumental photography in an essay first published in 1932 on the occasion of his production of two "super-gigantic" montaged portraits of Lenin and Stalin.

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Unlike the 1991 retrospective, the ICP exhibition does not attempt to present the overall diversity of media in which Klutsis worked. Only passing reference is made--in the form of a single print from the pages of Lef magazine--to Klutsis's first major design innovation that concerned itself directly with the mediation of the public sphere, the very problem that would become the dominant concern of his mature work. This innovation consists of a series of semiportable, multipurpose media modules (comprising radio orators and all-in-one film screen, speaker tribune, and newspaper kiosks) that Klutsis designed in 1922 for installation on Moscow's boulevards. While these designs were much missed, at least by this reviewer, who kept fantasizing about how they might have been put to work in the current display, the exhibition's exclusive attention to the artists' photo-based practices is, of course, appropriate to the ICP's mission. More important, such tight focus affords Tupitsyn maximum space in which to dramatize the manifold shifts in Klutsis and Kulagina's exploration of their favored media over the course of the roughly two decades from 1918 to 1939.