Gustav Klutsis

Gustav Klutsis (Latvian:"Gustavs Klucis", Russian: Густав Густавович Клуцис) (b. January 4, 1895 near Rūjiena, Latvia – d. February 26 1938 in Moscow) was a pioneering photographer and major member of the Constructivist avant-garde in the early 20th century. He is known for the Soviet revolutionary and Stalinist propaganda he produced with his wife and collaborator Valentina Kulagina.

Biography

Klucis began his artistic training in Riga in 1912. In 1915 he was drafted into the Russian Army, serving in a Latvian riflemen detachment, then came to Moscow in 1918. In the next three years he began art studies under Malevich and Antoine Pevsner, joined the Communist Party, met and married his longtime collaborator Valentina Kulagina, and graduated from the state-run art school VKhUTEMAS. He would continue to be associated with VKhUTEMAS as a professor of color theory from 1924 until the school closed in 1930.

Klucis taught, wrote, and produced political art for the Soviet state for the rest of his life. As the political background degraded through the 1920s and 1930s, Klucis and Kulagina came under increasing pressure to limit their subject matter and techniques. Once joyful, revolutionary and utopian, by 1935 their art was devoted to furthering Stalin's cult of personality.

Despite his active and loyal service to the party, Klucis was arrested in Moscow on January 17, 1938, as he prepared to leave for the New York World's Fair. Kulagina agonized for months, then years, over his disappearance. In 1989 it was found that he had been executed by Stalin's order due to his Latvian origin three weeks after the arrest.

Work

Klucis worked in a variety of experimental media. He liked to use propaganda as a sign or revolutionary background image. His first project of note, in 1922, was a series of semi-portable multimedia agitprop kiosks to be installed on the streets of Moscow, integrating "radio-orators", film screens, and newsprint displays, all to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Revolution. Like other Constructivists he worked in sculpture, produced exhibition installations, illustrations and ephemera.

But Klucis and Kulagina are primarily known for their photo montages. The names of some of their best posters, like "Electrification of the whole country" (1920), "There can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory" (1927), and "Field shock workers into the fight for the socialist reconstruction" (1932), are as dated and stuffy as the images are fresh, powerful, and sometimes eerie. For economy they often posed for, and inserted themselves into, these images, disguised as shock workers or peasants. Their dynamic compositions, distortions of scale and space, angled viewpoints and colliding perspectives make them perpetually modern. In the later work the presence of Stalin, accepting the applause of a cut-and-paste cross-section of Soviet society, resonates with the falsity of Stalin's myth.

Klucis is one of four artists with a claim to having invented the sub-genre of political photo montage in 1918 (along with the German Dadaists Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, and the Russian El Lissitzky).