Gustavs Klucis

Gustavs Klucis (1915)

Gustav Klutsis ( Russian Густав Густавович Клуцис , transcription Gustaw Gustawowitsch Kluzis, born January 4, ^jul. / 16th January  1895 ^greg. Near Rūjiena , Latvia ; † 26. February 1938 in Moscow ) was a pioneer photographer and prominent member of the constructivist avant-garde in early 20th century , known for its Soviet revolutionary propaganda and later Stalinist propagandawhich he created with his colleague and wife Walentina Kulagina (1902–1987).

Life

Gustavs Klucis began his artistic training in Rīga in 1912 . In 1915 he was drafted into the Russian army, he served in a division of Latvian riflemen before coming to Moscow in 1918 . Over the next three years he began to study art under Kazimir Malevich and Anton Pewsner , joined the Communist Party , met his long-time colleague Valentina Kulagina, married her and graduated from the state art school WChUTEMAS . He stayed at the art school as a professor of color theory from 1924 until it closed in 1930.

Klucis engaged in political art for the Soviet state for the rest of his life , creating, teaching and writing about it. As a result of the enforcement of Stalinism in the second half of the 1920s and 1930s, including the "purges" , artistic freedom was increasingly curtailed. Klucis and Kulagina came under increasing pressure to limit their subjects and techniques. Originally happy, revolutionary and utopian, her art had become a supporting instrument of Stalin's personality cult in 1935 .

Despite his active and loyal service to the party, Klucis was arrested on January 17, 1938 in Moscow during the Latvian operation of the NKVD . At that time he was preparing to visit the New York World's Fair. His wife tortured herself for months and years because of his disappearance. In 1989 it was found that three weeks after his arrest he had been executed on the Butowo Poligon and buried in a mass grave.

Create

Construction (1921), now in the Latvian National Art Museum

Propaganda poster (1930)

Klucis worked experimentally by various means. His first notable project in 1922 was a series of partially portable multimedia agitprop kiosks that were installed on the streets of Moscow and linked radio announcements, screens and newspaper notices to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution . Like other Constructivists , Klucis created sculptures, exhibits, illustrations, and smaller works. However, Klucis and Kulagina are mainly known for their photo montages . For reasons of cost, they often served themselves as models for these pictures, as push workers or peasants. Her best-known posters include “The electrification of the whole country” (1920 or 1921), “There can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory” (1927) and “Agricultural push workers in the struggle for socialist reconstruction” (1932). Klucis uses a special composition of images, distortions of scales and spaces, as well as changing and colliding perspectives as a creative means. In later works, the representation of Stalin receiving the cheers of a selected section of Soviet society is preferred as a means of cultivating his personality .

Klucis is one of four artists who are credited with inventing political photo montage in 1918 (alongside the German Dadaists Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann and the Russian El Lissitzky ).

literature

• Alain Weill: Encyclopédie de l'affiche . Editions Hazan, Paris 2011, ISBN 978-2-7541-0582-8 , pp. 360–361 (with illustrations).

Web links

Commons : Gustav Klutsis  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Biography ( Memento from April 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia (Latvian)
• Works by Gustav Klucis in the Costakis Collection , State Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki) (Greek, English, Russian)
• for the exhibition Gustavs Klucis. Anatomy of an Experiment , Latvian National Art Museum (English, riga2014.org, June 25, 2014)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Gustavs Klucis and Valentina Kulagina 'A revolutionary Portrait' . artnet.com, accessed October 8, 2018