Footnotes

Born in Latvia and later in life drafted into the Russian Army, Klutsis took part in the 1917 overthrow of the Tsar and in 1919 resumed his art education in Kazimir Malevich's Moscow studio. A photographer and major member of the constructivist avantgarde in the Soviet Union, the artist became a professor in colour theory at the VKhUTEMAS (Higher State Artistic and Technical Institute) in 1924. He is known as a pioneer of photomontage: he covered new ground in design, colour theory and typography. This revolution in style increased the circulation and distribution of such posters because of the mechanical means of reproduction, such as photographic printing and lithography. Printed in the tens of thousands, the posters facilitated the transformation of the Soviet visual landscape of the Stalinist era.

Klutsis was a great contributor to the visual rhetoric of Stalinism, however he was arrested and executed in 1938 under the order of Stalin. The artist contributed greatly to the cult of Stalin and posters such as the present lot strengthened Stalin's legitimacy and united Soviet citizens into a singular core collective. The present poster is in Yakutian, a Turkish language spoken in Sakha, which is a federal republic in Russia and was the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. On the poster are the Turkmenistan, Estonian, Ukrainian, Russia, Belorussian, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan Republic people as represented by their republic flags. It contains the rhetoric of peace, loyalty, unity, and the power of the collective. When the collective is unified it amplifies their Soviet state. Stalin, depicted as the father of all the people, is at the forefront as the bringer of this peace.