The National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana opened on July 8 at 4:00pm an exhibit on Soviet art hailing from the 1920s and 30s, a period of time commonly penciled in as a transit point between avant-gardism and socialist realism, but also viewed as crucial for the many contemporary notions on design that whipped into shape as it combined the formal quest for the vanguards with the mass media demands.
Ruben del Valle Lantaron, president of Cuba’s National Council of Fine Arts, is the curator of this exhibit that was bankrolled with funds granted by Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno.
Vanguardias soviéticas en la colección del IVAM. De la formulación abstracta a la utopía humanística suggests a grand tour that kicks off with an example of artistic creation harking back to 1919 and comes to a close with a war poster from 1941. However, the core of the exposition is made up of pieces from the in-between decades, a time in which abstraction was shrugged off and photography, photo-mounting and elements of what we now know as graphic and editorial design eventually set in. The ten artists culled in this exhibit are Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956), El Litssitzky (1890-1941), Gustav Klucis (1895-1938), Valentina Kulagina (1902-1987), Varvara Stepanova (1894-1956), Liubov Popova (1889-1924), Nathan Isayevich Altman (1901-1970), Vladimir Roskin (1896-1984), Boris Ignátovich (1899-1976) and Solomon Telingater (1903-1969). All of them scoured photographic collages and mountings, posters and overall design.
In the history of design as both genre and structure of graphic representation, the contributions made by Russian artists from the so-called esthetic avant-gardism cannot be overlooked.
Source: Press release and forewords in the catalog sent to this news bureau
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