Propaganda In The 1920s

In the height of the Russian Civil War, artists were faced with several questions about their role in a new society. A debate ensued during the 1920s about which artistic style would be appropriate for the post-revolutionary masses. Propaganda had a new part in the unification of Russia. There was a question of: how do artists represent this newfound unity while agitating the public into Socialist roles? On one hand, there were the Realist who believed in legibility of realism, with its basis in tradition. Figuration was an important strategy for propaganda and to encourage the ideology. This can be seen through Boris Kustodiev’s The Bolshevik of 1920 where a traditionally folk larger-than-life man marches over the crowd carrying a large

As Benjamin Buchloch writes about in, “From Faktura to Factography,” there was suddenly a need to construct iconic and monumental images that could only be done through representation. (FOOTNOTE) By including a recognizable image or figure, the mass begins to understand visual cues in propaganda that makes it more legible and effective. A triangle penetrating a circle was not enough. In Klucis’ “Photomontage as a New Form of Agitation in Art,” he writes, “Agitation art required realistic representation created with maximum perfection of technique, possessing graphic clarity and intensity of effect.” (FOOTNOTE) He continues by stating, “By distributing and emphasizing photos of different scales, and highlighting the concreteness of color correlations, one can express the required theme, force the photo, the slogan and the colors to serve the purpose of the class struggle, force the photo to tell the story, to agitate, to explain...Photomontage, which simultaneously organizes a number of formal elements-photo, color, slogan, lines, surface-has a single purpose: to achieve maximum power of expression.” (FOOTNOTE) For him, photomontage was the ultimate way to agitate and engage a viewer. The reality of the photographs combined with the expressivity of graphics allowed for the work to be legible and impactful. Those two elements are at the core of agitprop: one must be able to understand it, and once one understands it, one must be moved enough to act upon