16 april - 23 may 2010

The Leningrad style of the 1960s-80s industrial art 

The Academy of Fine Arts and the Union of Artists of the USSR held the first all-Union exhibition of applied graphics in Moscow in 1964. This put the finishing touch to the formation of a new trade of a graphic designer though it went under different, Soviet-style, names of “artistic engineering”, “technical aesthetics”, “applied graphics”, “commercial art”, and “commercial art and packaging”.

It is also a well-known fact that industrial art was spurred into action by the revolution conducted from above by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union that passed the appropriate resolutions. In those times, the only “customers” in need of graphic design were state organizations indifferent to their product, obliged by the administrative command system to ‘write off’ certain budgetary funds for design frillings. As often as not it was done for the sake of appearances, rather than for promoting the product, since it could never occur to anyone to think about competitiveness in the deficit-generating planned economy. There was nobody to vie with, for that matter. 

Yet, another paradox of time stemming from the vast spaces of our huge homeland – and still giving us a great surprise – is that the country, indifferent to the work of graphic designers as it was, can now boast highly professional craftsmen.

The Soviet industrial art became an ideologically and economically unaffected niche where artists felt themselves relatively free. In the early 60s, industrial art clearly showed the continuity of major traditions and achievements of the most prominent and independent period of the 1920s-30s. This is especially noteworthy because young artists managed to overcome the indisputable decline in style that characterized the Stalin era.

It is also true that the industrial art of the 1920s-30s was a far cry from advertising, the latter being meant to regulate consumption of goods by exploiting human egotism; it had its own vision. It was aimed at propagating new social and aesthetic norms; it was a form of artistic agitation translated into the language of photo collage, typeface, national ornaments, new heraldry, etc.   

By the 1960s, industrial art had lost the propagandistic thrust of the 1920s, but it had reserved the right to many of its practices. With no market to compete for goods and no ideological pressure exerted on the living environment where the Soviet citizen led his simple life detached from all parties and governments, artists created a new artistic domain.  Shunning advertising methods to buy customers, not wishing to interest anyone and urge them to choose a product at the time of total deficit, they were free to express themselves in art. 

Masters were concerned with the matters of decoration, of beauty and stylishness of simple things – be it a match box or a packet of cigarettes. It is the Soviet living environment that gave rise to a new grand task industrial art had set for itself – to refine the taste of its fellow countrymen. 

Since all artistic ideas conjured up by the Leningrad school of industrial art stem from the city itself, they brim over with love of this city, which serves as a fountain of inspiration for most of the masters and also creates an image of the most beautiful and most European city in the whole country.

St Petersburg’s space with the earth melting into the sky seems to challenge the artists to draw a personal skyline; this enables them to create different images of the city that represent symbols of different epochs – from the monuments of the Petrine times to Aurora the revolutionary cruiser, to the Malaya Okhta housing development, to the urban seascapes of the Baltic. This is the way the strong and distinguished school of graphic design has been formed – anonymous for the country yet known worldwide. 

The paradoxes are twofold:

Although graphic designers – from the 1960s almost to the perestroika – totally rejected and condemned the masters of the analytical art of the 1920s-30s, they preserved the style created by constructivist artists in the 1920s, who were inspired by the ideas of production art indivisible from life. 

Curious facts from paradoxes of history: during the perestroika, many artists of the new wave denied en masse all the achievements of the Soviet art, expropriated the ideas of their predecessors and adopted them without so much as a nod of gratitude to the generation of the 1960s, who had had reverence for the traditions and their continuity.