Week Two: Academic Writing/Tate Modern Visit

Academic Writing: Tate Modern Visit

‘Poetry and Dreams’: Russian Revolutionary Posters

The propaganda posters of the Russian Revolution were displayed as part of the ‘Poetry and Dreams’ exhibition within the museum. It was an entire room dedicated to showing off the street posters that exhibited the ideals and illusions of the Russian Revolution. Its large quantity of posters spread out over one room, suggested and successfully managed to expose not only the rapid, mass production of propaganda images, newspapers and leaflets that developed through the era of the Revolution, but the dramatic change in graphic art and design alongside the changes of the Soviet Union. Additionally, the posters are successfully in showing off the impressive creation of a street art available to all.

From this particular section of the exhibition, I was mostly interested in the strong sense of individuality that each poster carried out. Having been created and printed by various different artists, though each poster suggested and delivered the same message, each was strikingly different due to the wide and differing approaches and or mediums that each artist took in order to create their particular poster. I personally found that although every poster carried a sense of individuality the striking colour of red that was explicit in every poster also managed to suggest an impression of uniformity, of not only the artists themselves, but in my opinion of the Revolution as a whole.

Images from: http://www.seventhstr1ng.com/article/russian-propaganda-art-at-tate-modern/

One poster I was intrigued by in particular titled ‘Death to Worlds’ Imperialism’ interested me due its differing style of graphic art. It seemed almost manga like, and carried a strong sense of Japanese art. This, in my view, suggested that there was a travelling of artists, either to outside countries or to Russia, where ultimately styles and ways of drawing could be passed over and shared to other artists - Ultimately creating an even wider and larger sense of scale to the artistic community behind the Russian Revolution.

Death to Worlds' Imperialism - Artist Unknown

Conclusively, I feel the exhibition was vastly successful overall in an aesthetic sense, but more prominently definitely showed a questioning to the definition of a typical poster. These revolutionary posters in particular I feel were exhibition not only because of their interesting and unique approaches to graphic art and design but because they captured a strong sense of the Revolution itself and were not just successfully as propaganda images, but as pieces of art.