Valentina Nikiforovna Kulagina - Russian political poster artist

Валентина Никифоровна Кулагина

Valentina Nikiforovna Kulagina

Introduction

1929.

In June 2026 two Russian Constructivist political posters from 1929 and 1931 by Valentina Nikiforovna Kulagina (1902-1987) were offered for sale on Invaluable by the American firm Poster Auctions Inc., Chicago. The posters were spectacular examples of a combination of screen printing / graphic design featuring photomontage collage / Stalinist Soviet political propaganda and avant-garde artistic invention. They were produced by the young Valentina Kulagina, still in her 20s. As an artist she worked in paint, graphic design such as posters and book covers, and exhibition design. The following is a brief discussion of her major work in posters and of Kulagina's general oeuvre. A chronology is included to assist in providing historical context to her life and art. Reference should be made to sites listed in the References section below, such as blogger Visual Diplomacy for a listings of some of her works, plus brief biographical notes similar to those also found in her Wikipedia entry, and with Grokpedia providing a more fulsome account. Valentina is often written about in connection with her husband, the famous Latvian photographer Gustav Klutsis (1895-1938). He helped invent the genre of political photo montage around 1918, alongside German Dadaists such as Hanna Hoch and Raoul Hausmann, and the Russian El Lissitzky. Valentina also made use of collage in some of her most famous posters.

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Chronology

The following chronology includes biographical references plus information pertaining to artworks, exhibitions and related activities.

1902

* Birth of Valentina Nikiforovna Kulagina at Gari in the Klinskii District, Moscow region, Russia. Nothing much is known of her family background.

1919

* Valentina begins studies as a painter at the State Free Art Studios / Workshops (SVOMAS) in Moscow, with Antoine Pevsner and Vladimir Favorski.

1920

* At the urging of her teacher, Gustav Klutsis, Kulagina leaves the State Free Art Studios and enters the newly founded state-run Higher Art and Technical Studios (VKhUTEMAS). She takes a preliminary course with Liubov Popova and Aleksandr Vesnin, and studies graphic design with Aleksandr Rodchenko.

Valentina Kulagina, Student drawings.

1921

* 2 February - Kulagina and Klutsis marry and reside at the VKhUTEMAS headquarters. Also resident there were Alexsandr Rodchenko, Vera Stepanova, and Sergei Senkin. Valentina initially dropped put of Vkhutemas, but later returned.

1922

* Photomontage of Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina by Klutsis.

1923-1924

* Valentina drops out of the VKhUTEMAS, but is readmitted in 1925.

* Dynamic City, lithograph in black on paper, 7 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches, 1923. Collection: Art Institute, Chicago.

1925

* 26 September - Valentina graduates from VKhUTEMAS. Her graphic design thesis project is purchased by GIZ (State Publishing House). It is titled Stroim (We Are Building) and is published in 1929.

* Valentina's first exhibition of photomontage design.

* Transrational Language in Seifullinaia, book cover, circa 1925. Aleksei Kruchenykh, Заумный язык, Zaum language, Moscow, Soiuz poetov, 1925, 64 pages, Edition: 3,000. Cover and tail-pieces by Kulagina-Klutsis. References: ; Getty 1997, nr. 392; NYPL 1998, nr. 159; Hellyer 2006, nr. 260.

* Eleven Devices of Lenin's Speech, book cover, circa 1925.

Aleksei Kruchenykh, Леф агитки Маяковского, Асеева, Третьякова. Propaganda piece by the 'Lef' poets Mayakovskii, Aseev, Tretiakov. Moscow, Soiuz poetov\, 1925 64 pages, Edition: 3,000. Cover by Kulagina. References: LeClanche-Boulez 1984, p. 58; Munich 1991, nr. 27; Getty 1997, nr. 366; NYPL 1998, nr. 146; Hellyer 2006, nr. 230.

Aleksei Kruchenykh, Записная книга Велимира Хлебникова, Velimir Khlebnikov's notebook, Moscow, Soiuz poetov, 1925, 30 pages, Edition: 2,000. Cover by Kulagina. References: LeClanche-Boulez 1984, p. 64; Modena 1986, p. 79; Getty 1997, nr. 316; NYPL 1998, nr. 124; Hellyer 2006, nr. 196.

1928

* February: Kulagina joins the artists' group Oktiabr (October). Her husband was already a member.

* Valentina is a member of the 38 person team of Soviet artists who decorate the Soviet pavilion at the International Press Exhibition ("Pressa") in Cologne, Germany, under the leadership of El Lissitzky.

1929

* 29 September: Valentina graduates from the VKhUTEMAS. Her design thesis project is purchased by Gosizdat / GIZ (State Publishing House). It is titled Stroim and survives in marquette and postcard forms.

* 1905, The Road to Red October, poster, 1929.

Valentina Kulagina, 1905, The Road to Red October, 1929.

Dimensions: 38.5 h x 26 w in (98 x 66 cm). Description: This design revisits the tragic event of Bloody Sunday in January 1905, when peaceful demonstrators were gunned down outside the Winter Palace, an atrocity that helped precipitate broader unrest and ultimately forced Tsar Nicholas II to concede limited reforms later that year. Employing her characteristic photomontage approach, Kulagina juxtaposes the rigid, advancing mass of workers against symbols of imperial authority, visually compressing the violence of the old regime beneath the collective force of the people. The tsar's likeness, encircled by a fallen crown, becomes an emblem of a collapsing order, foreshadowing the revolutionary upheaval that would culminate in 1917. Although often associated with her husband and collaborator Gustav Klutsis, Kulagina demonstrates here her independent artistic voice, blending photographic fragments with emerging graphic elements to heighten both the dynamism and ideological clarity of the composition-an approach that set her apart at a moment when Soviet propaganda largely privileged pure photography. An example of this poster is held in the collection of the IzoGiz (State Publishing House), Moscow. Provenance: Collection of Albert Boni (1892-1981), American literary publisher | Thence by descent | Thence by descent to the present owner. Literature: V&A E.1274-1989; Klutsis & Kulagina 133; Power of images p. 142. Condition Report: Cond B: with some replaced paper, creasing and repaired tears. Overpainting to margins.

* Krasnia Niva - 45, book cover, circa 1929. Maquette known for this cover, titled Stroim (We Are Building).

Preliminary maquette.

Book cover.

1930

* Valentina exhibits in the Oktiabr (October) group show in Moscow.

* Design for the poster "May First, Forward to the New Victories!" circa 1930, silver print on card.

Copy known bearing a dated stamp (1933) and editorial notations in ink on verso. Description: Large-format photographs are exceedingly rare during this period of the Russian avant-garde. The text reads: "With the corrections indicated on the second version, it goes into production." The stamp is accompanied by an editor's signature, signing off on the photomontage in a large format. This exceptionally rare and large piece illustrates an example of Soviet avant-garde photographers and photomontage artists worked for state publishing houses such as IZOGIZ. Dimensions: The image 20 5/8 x 16 3/8 in. (52.4 x 41.6 cm.), the sheet 23 1/2 x 17 1/2 in. (59.7 x 44.5 cm.).

* International Women Workers’ Day, poster, 1930.

* The May Day, poster, 1930.

* Under the banner of Lenin for socialist, poster, 1930.

* To the Defence of Russia, poster, 1930.

1931

* 25 April - 31 May: Valentina is one of 14 Soviet artists included in the Fhotomontage retrospective at the Staatliche Museen, Staatliche Kunstbibliothek, Berlin.

* Valentina leaves Oktiabr and joins RAPKh (Russian Association of Proletarian Artists).

* International Women Workers’ Day — A Battle for the Proletariat, poster, 1931. Formerly Merrill C. Berman Collection; now The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

* Let's Give 8 Million Tons of Pig Iron for Socialism in Construction in 1931!, poster, 1931.

Dimensions: 28 h x 20 w in (71 x 51 cm). Description: This poster by Valentina Kulagina reflects her influential role in Soviet Constructivist graphic design, where she developed a highly dynamic visual language for mass political communication. Created during the rapid industrialization drive of the First Five-Year Plan, the work mobilizes bold typography and photomontage to rally steel mill workers toward ambitious production goals, in this case the call for eight million tons of pig iron as part of socialist construction. An example of this poster is held in the collection of the IzoGiz (State Publishing House), Moscow and Leningrad. Provenance: Collection of Albert Boni (1892-1981), American literary publisher | Thence by descent | Thence by descent to the present owner. Literature: Klutsis/Kulagina p. 170. Condition Report: Cond B/B+: with one small loss to upper right, toned and one small piece of paper adhered to lower edge.

* Women Shockworkers, Fortify Your Shockworker Brigades, Master Technology, Increase the Cadres of Proletariat Specialists, poster, circa 1931, 71 x 98cm

Josef Salvador, commentary on this poster, from Love .... exhibition:

Valentina Kulagina (Moscow, 1902-1987) In the two decades following the historical events of the Soviet Revolution, between the formal experimentation of the first abstraction and the controlled artistic production of socialist realism, photography and photomontage were essential to the development of avant-garde movements that gave birth to an unprecedented visual language. Valentina Kulagina took an active part in the debates and implementation of these new communication techniques, cultivating the expressive possibilities arising from the combination of photography and other resources of the press, together with graphic design, in order to create large-format posters to be displayed in public spaces, them being the genuine precursors of the innovative possibilities of mass media. Kulagina had an extensive experience in designing posters and publications, and she displayed her work in various exhibitions in Russia and Europe. In 1919, she joined the studios of Antoine Pevsner and Vladimir Favorsky in the SVOMAS (free state art studios) in Moscow, where she met her future husband, the artist Gustav Klucis. During 1920-1921, they studied together in the VkhUTEMAS (higher state artistic and technical studios). Her first photomontages and constructivist typography were exhibited in 1925, standing out for the strength and power of the images. In 1928, she engaged in the organisation of the Soviet section of the Pressa exhibition in Cologne, devoted to current affairs in journalism, and that year she became a member of the art group October, thereby exhibiting her work in the 1930 group exhibition in Moscow. In the late 1920s, she designed and created posters for the Izogiz (the State Publishing House of Fine Art). She exhibited her work in 1931 Berlin’s Photomontage and 1932 The Poster in the Service of the Five-Year Plan exhibitions. She continued to display her work in exhibitions in Russia and throughout Europe until her husband was arrested during Stalinist purges. Kulagina’s engagement in this period of profound social and cultural changes made her a key figure in the evolution of photomontage and graphic design, and its ability to analyse reality, coupled with its relevance to the visual culture involved in the transformation of political and social structures. This aesthetic of productivist design relied upon the consolidation and diversification of the range of expressive resources in the era of mechanical reproduction, which fostered the exchange of ideas in a clear defence of the revealing power of compositional montage techniques. In all Kulagina’s covers and posters, but also in her designs for exhibitions and fairs, these methods of mobilisation and mass awareness plotted a path towards the defence of contemporary themes such as gender equality and the active demand for women’s access to the new means of production, as illustrated by this poster from the IVAM collection, which contains a representative selection of works by this artist acquired in 1995.

* Let's name the zeppelin squadron after Lenin, poster, circa 1931.

* [Unknown], poster, circa 1931.

1932

* * Valentina exhibits in the Posters in the Service of the Five-Year Plan exhibition in Moscow.

* 1932 Kulagina saw her works frequently rejected by the Communist Party's Central Committee. (VD)

* J. Huijts, Het Tweede 5_Jaarsplan, Den Haag, 1932, 68p. Book cover.

1933

* Comrades Coal Miners! Let's Make the Coal Industry a Bolsheviks' Victory! Let's Get Rid of Bureaucratic Methods in Management of Coal Industry! Let's Establish Permanent Engineering and Technical Manpower in the Mines!, poster, 1933. A maquette for this poster is also known.

1935

* 22 August: Valentina gives birth to Edvard (Edik) Gustavovich Kulagin.

1937

* Valentina is responsible for the photomontage devoted to Serbia in the Soviet pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition, 1937.

1938

* On 17 January 1938, Klutsis was arrested as he prepared to leave for the New York World's Fair. He was killed on the order of Stalin shortly after his arrest. Valentina largely stopped working as an artist thereafter, concentrating on raising their child, though occasionally doing art to secure funds to survive.

c.1939

* Valentina is commissioned to do decoration murals for the pavilions at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, Moscow.

post 1945

* Valentina works as an independent designer on occasional projects.

1956

* Valentina is given a false death certificate of Gustav saying he died from heart failure in 1944.

2004

* Margarita Tupitsyn, Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: Photography and Montage After Constructivism, Steidl / International Centre of Photography, 2 April 2004, 256p.

2010

* Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina, A Revolutionary Portrait, exhibition, 23 January - 9 March 2010, Kunstforum, Wien.

2015

* Modern Experiment, Cabinet Exhibition, 5 September - 28 November 2015, Kunstforum, Wien.

2016

* Love in Times of Revolution: Artist Couples in the Russian avant-garde, Kunstforum, Wien.

1987

* Death in Moscow, Russia.

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Biopgraphical excerpts

* Visual Diplomacy, Artist of the Day - Valentina Kulagina, Visual Diplomacy, 22 October 2022. Text largely taken from the Wikipedia entry:

Valentina Kulagina, (full name Valentina Nikiforovna Kulagina-Klutsis) (1902–1987) was a Russian painter and book, poster, and exhibition designer. She was a central figure in Constructivist avant-garde in the early 20th century alongside El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko other and her husband Gustav Klutsis. She is known for the Soviet revolutionary and Stalinist propaganda she produced in collaboration with Klutsis. Kulagina left State Free Art Studios and entered the state-run art school Vkhutemas in 1920 at the urging of teacher Gustav Klutsis, whom she had recently met. On 2 February 1921, the couple wed and lived together at the school's headquarters. In 1928, Kulagina joined the artists' group October, of which her husband was already a member. In 1930 she designed a poster for International Working Women's Day, employing avant-garde techniques combined with typography, lithography, and photomontage. Starting in 1932 Kulagina saw her works frequently rejected by the Communist Party's Central Committee. Her work as a designer began before she graduated the school, with the Soviet Pavilion at the Pressa exhibition in Cologne including areas which she designed. Later, she worked for IZOGIZ (the State Art Publishing Agency) and VOKS (the All-Union Society of Cultural Relations with Abroad) and VSKhV (The All-Union Agricultural Exhibition).

Klutsis' and Kulagina's work was complementary, and their style of photomontage combined with graphic work saw them implemented as official revolutionary poster producers for the Communist Party under Stalin. In the late 1930s, The Great Purge began to occur and many civilians were accused of having anti-communist ideals or encouraging the success of the revolution; both Kulagina’s father and husband were accused. On 17 January 1938, Klutsis was arrested as he prepared to leave for the New York World's Fair. Kulagina was never told the truth as to what happened to her husband, believing for the remainder of her life that he had died of a heart attack while imprisoned. In 1989, two years after her death in Moscow, it was discovered that he had been executed by order of Stalin, very soon after his arrest. Within the early formation of Soviet Union, politics was a potent influence on the artistic community, and the art and design produced during this early period is known for its revolutionary zeal and joyous utopianism. With this subject matter, Kulagina's work combined drawing and graphic symbolism with photomontage techniques. It was a combination that distinctively separated her work from Klutsis'. Klutsis and Kulagina never worked on projects together, their work was collaborative nevertheless, and was strengthened by one being around the other. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, political unrest grew and the past revolutionary spirit seen in Russian art turned into propagandist work. By the beginning of the 1930s, poster production was strictly reserved for commissioned artists as well as the images, text, and symbols used. Posters made by amateur artists were destroyed and confiscated. In a diary entry by Kulgalina dated 1935, she documented the frustration and difficulty in making posters for Stalin and the government, only for them to be chosen under strict guidelines promoting censorship in her work. Most posters of this time were rejected or sent back for major revision.

Though Klutsis and Kulagina are known for these official pieces for the government, they also ran a personal art and photography practice, utilising styles such as superimposition and photomontage, often portraits of each other. Following the radical change happening, in 1931 Kulgalina made the piece "International Women Workers Day–A Battle for the Proletariat", a propagandist poster which commends women in the workforce. She used figurative painting and photomontage on this poster to portray female soldiers, peasants, farmers, and a group of women in the streets fighting with police. As the political environment in Russia began to dissolve in the 1930s, Klutsis and Kulagina came under increasing pressure to limit the subject matter and humour that they had employed for official posters and graphic work, and their posters came to represent Stalinist visual rhetoric and propaganda rather than its original revolutionary hope. By 1933, propagandist posters had become such a common artform with little room for original pieces. Kulagina states in her diary that, ‘But there is no inventiveness, no creativity. Or formalism is what destroys someone like me? But it seems to me that one always has to look for something pointed — and at Izogiz, they like posters that are barely distinguishable from one another.’ Kulagina, along with other photomontage artists, experienced a major cutback on poster commissions because of paper and ink shortages. As a result, her work of this time was limited to two colors because each additional color increased the production time.

* Margarita Tupitsyn, Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: Photography and Montage After Constructivism, Steidl / International Centre of Photography, 2 April 2004, 256p. Book which accompanied an exhibition.

Abstract: Between the Public and the Private is the first English-language publication to address the work of the pioneering Constructivist artist, designer, photographer and photomontagist Gustav Klutsis. Unlike the work of fellow members of the Soviet avant garde, such as Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitsky, Klutsis's extensive and innovative output has remained relatively unexplored. This catalogue also presents the ground-breaking but largely unknown work of Valentina Kulagina, Klutsis's wife and colleague, and explores the creative partnership that existed between the two artists. In addition to a scholarly text by curator Margarita Tupitsyn, a leading scholar of Russian art and photography who has had access to the artists' family archives, Between the Public and the Private presents, for the first time in any language, translated excerpts from Klutsis's letters and Kulagina's diaries, offering new insight on the artists and the political and cultural climate in which they were working.

* Maria Gough, Artforum, 2004: Through the course of the Bolshevik 1920s and Stalinist 1930s, the pioneering Soviet photomonteurs Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina produced some of the most terrible—in the old-fashioned sense of the word—examples of visual propaganda ever executed in the service of modern state power. Eventually supported almost exclusively by the administrative organs and centralized publishing houses of a one-party state, their often overlapping, but also sometimes diverging, design practices were directly dependent on the ever-shifting exigencies of their historical context. Unlike that of many of their contemporaries, however, the work of Klutsis and Kulagina has also managed to transcend the grim and gritty details of its historical formation—no doubt owing in part to its sheerly compelling nature qua modern design and to our alternatively lurid and utopian fascination with its construction of that major leitmotif of socialist modernity, Homo sovieticus, the New Soviet man or woman. Organized for the International Center of Photography in New York by Margarita Tupitsyn, a Paris-based freelance curator of both Soviet and contemporary Russian art, “Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: Photography and Montage After Constructivism” is the first major exhibition devoted to a joint consideration of the two artists’ use of photography in the graphic design of agitational posters and postcards, book and magazine covers and illustrations, exhibition installations, and, perhaps most staggeringly, monumental billboards of an unprecedented scale. Since perestroika, these two comrades in the art of montage—who married in 1921, three years after Klutsis’s arrival in Moscow from Latvia—have become increasingly visible through their inclusion in many of the group exhibitions of the Soviet avant-garde that have traveled the world and, in Klutsis’s case, also via a major 1991 retrospective of his work in Kassel and Madrid. Comprising approximately 130 objects, the present exhibition, however, is the largest showing of either artist in the United States to date. (Fifteen of its loans are from the State Museum of Art in Riga, which holds some four hundred objects donated in 1964 by Kulagina in memory of her husband, who was summarily executed in February 1938 by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.) While the exhibition’s presentation of Klutsis outstrips that of Kulagina by a long shot, excerpts from the latter’s previously unpublished diaries in the show’s catalogue reveal that she often assisted with the production of his designs, a labor for which she seems never to have been publicly credited. The task of accommodating on a single floor such a wide range of formats—from the tiny to the gigantic—poses numerous challenges that are well met by the exhibition’s designers, Julie Ault and Martin Beck. Refraining from saturating the space in red—an overdetermined and unfortunately all too predictable color in shows dealing with revolutionary art and culture—they opt instead for a strong but restrained contrast of gray and white. This scheme sectionalizes the gallery’s available wall space, reinforcing the curatorial division of the exhibition into six primarily thematic but also loosely chronological arenas of production: “The Formation of Photomontage,” “Between the Public and the Private,” “Socialist Joy,” “Change the Leader,” “Exhibition Designs and Street Agitation,” and “The Socialist Body.” The exhibition designers have also paired a book in a glass vitrine with a digital screen that turns its virtual pages, allowing visitors to experience the entirety of the book’s design, if not its material palpability. And the massive enlargement of a number of tiny photographs (including some whimsical portraits of each artist) visually evokes Klutsis’s own important theorization of monumental photography in an essay first published in 1932 on the occasion of his production of two “super-gigantic” montaged portraits of Lenin and Stalin.

Unlike the 1991 retrospective, the ICP exhibition does not attempt to present the overall diversity of media in which Klutsis worked. Only passing reference is made—in the form of a single print from the pages of Lef magazine—to Klutsis’s first major design innovation that concerned itself directly with the mediation of the public sphere, the very problem that would become the dominant concern of his mature work. This innovation consists of a series of semiportable, multipurpose media modules (comprising radio orators and all-in-one film screen, speaker tribune, and newspaper kiosks) that Klutsis designed in 1922 for installation on Moscow’s boulevards. While these designs were much missed, at least by this reviewer, who kept fantasizing about how they might have been put to work in the current display, the exhibition’s exclusive attention to the artists’ photo-based practices is, of course, appropriate to the ICP’s mission. More important, such tight focus affords Tupitsyn maximum space in which to dramatize the manifold shifts in Klutsis and Kulagina’s exploration of their favored media over the course of the roughly two decades from 1918 to 1939.

During this period, the artists oscillated between cut-and-paste methods of montage and the darkroom manipulation of negatives, and between found and staged source material. Some shifts, however, appear to have been unidirectional, particularly those having to do with the gradual abandonment of a montage practice dedicated at least in part to impeding vision (Viktor Shklovsky’s principle of zatrudnenie, or difficulty) in favor of one of effortless legibility. Hence, the disjunctions in scale within single works, such as Klutsis’s 1930 poster featuring a massive hand and forearm juxtaposed with the much smaller head of a worker, give way to the more normative scale relations of his mawkish designs for the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. Similarly, the presence of multiple and contradictory spatial systems, especially the combination of axonometric projection with photographic elements in plan, elevation, or one-point perspective, yields in the late ’30s to the perspectival reorganization of space around a dominant horizon line, as seen in Kulagina’s 1938–39 photo panels for the Siberian pavilion at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. In these late works Kulagina abandoned the signature conjunction of drawn and photographic elements that is characteristic of her most accomplished agitational posters of 1930–31. The exhibition’s presentation of these multiple shifts raises fundamental questions: Does Klutsis and Kulagina’s eventual transformation of photomontage into a mode of socialist realist practice after 1934 correspond to concurrent changes within the sociopolitical sphere? If so, does their transformation of the medium represent a capitulation to an increasingly oppressive political situation or a bid to secure the material and social privileges that often seemed to come with such stylistic realignment? Or is it a manifestation of genuine conviction?

Although the agitational posters in which Klutsis and Kulagina most efficaciously rendered their service to the Soviet state have often been shown, if not in such quantity, the ICP exhibition brings to our attention for the first time a little-known aspect of the artists’ work: a sizable corpus of photographs and montages having to do with their domestic life together. This sphere was often known in the Soviet period as the “kitchen” realm of communication, as opposed to the one under official control and scrutiny. Tupitsyn scored a major coup in arranging the loans for these objects, the majority of which seem to have come from a privately owned archive in Moscow. Some, like Klutsis’s beautiful double portrait of Kulagina and himself superimposed on a close-up of her face, 1921–29, or his double printing of her brother Boris’s face on a single sheet, ca. 1929, are darkroom pleasures made explicitly for private consumption, looping the artist’s montage practice into a circuit of pan-European photographic experiments.

But perhaps the most surprising aspect of this additional corpus is that the majority of its objects ultimately intersect with Klutsis’s production for the public realm. As such, these newly available objects lend the already well-known public designs new texture and thereby facilitate more nuanced readings of them than has hitherto been possible. These private/public photographs and montages fall into roughly three sorts. The first comprises straightforward snapshots of family members that sooner or later find their way into Klutsis’s public designs: His mother-in-law, Maria Efimovna Kulagina, for example, appears as the “happy peasant” on the cover of a 1929 survey of regional agricultural practices and as Stalin’s right-hand peasant, as it were, in a design for a 1932 poster celebrating the success of the first Five-Year Plan. Another close-up of Boris Kulagin covers comrade Galin’s 1927 manifesto for the scientific organization of Communist leisure, while Kulagina herself features prominently in one of the unpublished 1925 illustrations for the poet Vladimir Mayakovski’s elegy Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In each case, private acts of communication are put into the service of public ones. The second group of mixed-sphere photographs documents the artists and their friends performing costumed roles: as peasants for insertion within a front-page image for the daily newspaper Pravda, ca. 1933, for example, and as coal miners for the 1932 poster The Struggle for Heat and Metal. Not only do these theatrical stagings involve something more than the simple generation of stock photographs, but they also raise the issue of Klutsis and Kulagina’s contrary postion with respect to the rejection of the “played” in favor of the so-called “non-played” by many of their fellow practitioners of montage, such as Aleksandr Rodchenko and Dziga Vertov. But their dressing up in various proletarian guises goes beyond the kinds of fictionalization practiced by, say, Sergei Eisenstein, whose hiring of a Lenin look-alike to play the role of the Bolshevik leader in his 1927 film October was condemned by the factographic documentarians as “disgracefully false.” For in these stagings, Klutsis and Kulagina instrumentalize not only their artistic dexterity but also their own bodies in the fictionalization of historical truth.

The third and final instance of the mutability of the public and the private consists in a small suite of montages made by Klutsis around 1929 and featuring Lenin. The most formally compelling involves the diagonal crossing in the darkroom of two spectacular photographs—a full-length figure of Lenin, on the one hand, and an illuminated nightscape on the other—a redux, thematically speaking, of the artist’s famous early photocollage for the poster Electrification of the Entire Country, 1920. But the later montage, produced five years after the leader’s death and at the very moment of Stalin’s accession to power, was not intended for the public sphere and, as far as is known, was never circulated beyond the studio. In this work, then, one of the most public figures of the Bolshevik period is drafted into a very private moment. And thus it makes us look afresh at Klutsis’s most famous poster from the Plan years, Building Socialism Under the Banner of Lenin, 1930—first at the brilliant illumination of Lenin’s face and then at the deep shadow that ominously crosses that of his successor.

“Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: Photography and Montage After Constructivism” is on view through May 30.Maria Gough is associate professor of art history at Stanford University.

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References

Artsy.net, Valentina Kulagina – Arts & Prints for sale, www.artsy.net, accessed 14 June 2026.

Gough, Maria, Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina, International Centre of Photography, Artforum, New York, 2004.

Grokipedia, Valentina Kulagina, Grokipedia, accessed 15 June 2026.

Great Offensive, 1933, 368p. Illustrated on the cover of two Valentina Kulagina poster designs.

Kulagina, Valentina, International Women Worker's Day A Battle Day for the Proletariat (Mezhdunarodnyi den' rabotnits—boevoi den' proletariata) (Poster for International Women Workers' Day). 1931 | MoMA, Museum of Modern Art. Article accessed 23 April 2021.

Pisch, Anita, The Rise of Stalin Personality Cult, ANU Press, 2016, 87-190.

Poggi, Christine, Mass, Pack, and Mob: Art in the Age of the Crowd, Crowds, Stanford University Press, 2006, 178–180.

Elkin, Vasily, Valentina Kulagina and Solomon Telingater, Russian and Soviet Collages, 1920s - 1990s, The State Russian Museum, Palace Editions, St. Petersburg, 2005, 264p.

Love in Times of Revolution: Artist Couples of the Russian avant-garde - Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina, Kunstforum, Wien, 14 October 2015 - 31 January 2016.

Tupitsyn, Margarita, Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: Photography and Montage After Constructivism, Steidl / International Centre of Photography, 2 April 2004, 256p.

Stedelijk Museum, Vellikia utopia: Russkii i sovetskii avangard 1915-1932 [Exhibition catalogue], Benteli Verlag, Bern, Switzerland, 1993.

Valentina Kulagina, Museum of Modern Art, New York, accessed 14 June 2026.

Valentina Kulagina, an example of a revolutionary woman, Revolucion Obrera, 5 March 2023.

Visual Diplomacy, Artist of the Day - Valentina Kulagina, Visual Diplomacy, 22 October 2022.

Wikipedia, Gustav Klutsis, Wikipedia, accessed 15 June 2026.

-----, Valentina Kulagina, Wikipedia, accessed 14 June 2026.

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Last updated: 15 June 2026.

Michael Organ, Australia