Agit-plakat: The destalinization of Soviet posters (1956–1966)

During the first decade of destalinization, inaugurated in 1956 with Nikita Khrushchev\u27s denunciation of Joseph Stalin\u27s rule by terror, younger artists sought to reformulate the artistic language of Stalinist Socialist Realist political and social posters, characterized by narrative legibility and finessed realist form. The anti-realist changes that the artists pursued continued despite Leonid Brezhnev\u27s 1964 takeover, a leadership change linked to a retrograde reaction. By drawing on archival documents, contemporaneous responses, and interviews with the artists, this dissertation illuminates the discursive and visual strategies that artists at the smaller publishing houses, Agit-plakat and Soviet Artist, negotiated in order to subvert the academic-painting-based formula of Stalinist posters produced by the conservative Central Publishing House, Izogiz. Under the banner of poster-specificity, a daringly formalist but otherwise tactically open-ended term, progressive artists and critics advocated the decoupling of poster design from the influence of academic painting, the dominant genre whose careful modeling, mixed colors, and privileging of human figure defined the look of Izogiz posters since 1934. Agit-plakat, not incidentally founded in 1956, and Soviet Artist slightly lifted the ban on the forbidden modernist idioms. Their artists referenced the graphic austerity and whimsy of Rosta Window posters (1918-1922), disjunctive Constructivist photomontages from the mid-1920s through the early 1930s, and the modernized Socialist Realist style of Polish posters. As a result, Agit-plakat and Soviet Artist posters flaunted flattened fields, pure colors, formal de-skilling, and the previously suppressed anti-painterly materials and procedures, such as collage, photomontage, and photography, at times, translated into drawing. A metaphorical model of the political still life emerged to justify the intrusion of montage-inflected idiom. A recalibration of the thematic repertoire from grandiloquent Stalinist statements to mundane, internal topics, in conjunction with the deployment of caricature, legitimated further anti-realist tendencies in political poster design, e.g. the eruption of pinks in lieu of red, the displacement of exclamation points with question marks, an increase in compositional complexity, disfiguration of the human body, among others. Finally, the study throws into relief the post-Stalinist development of allegorical mentality that resisted the literariness of Socialist Realist posters, encouraging more active, agitated perception