Russian Avant-Garde Film Poster, Featuring Conrad Veidt

c. 1920's, USSR
The film is Lucrezia Borgia (Germany, 1922), starring Conrad Veidt
Colored lithograph, backed on Japon paper
28 x 42 inches (71.1 x 106.6 cm)
Framed

Conrad Veidt (1893 – 1943) was a German silent film actor best remembered for his role as as the murderous somnambulist Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). In the German silent film Lucrezia Borgia, detailing the life of the Borgia family in 16th Century Italy, Veidt plays Cesare Borgia.

Literature: Susan Pack, Film Posters of the Russian Avant-Garde, Taschen 1995. For similar examples.

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The 1920s and early 1930s were a revolutionary period for the graphic arts throughout Europe. The concept of the designer as "constructor" marked a paradigmatic shift within the field, from an essentially illustrative approach to one of assemblage and nonlinear narrativity. This new idea of assembling preexisting images, primarily photographs, into something new freed design from its previous dependence on realism. The subsequent use of collage became a defining element of modern graphic design.

In Russia, these new artist-engineers were attracted to the functional arts by political ideology. The avant-gardists' rejection of the fine arts, deemed useless in a new Communist society, in favor of "art for use" in the service of the state, was key in the evolution of the poster. Advertising was now a morally superior occupation with ramifications for the new society; as such, it began to attract those outside the usual illustrative or painterly backgrounds - sculptors, architects, photographers - who brought new ideas and techniques to the field.