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Gustav Klutsis Latvian Constructist Gouache

Currency:USD Category:Antiques Start Price:300.00 USD Estimated At:4,000.00 - 6,000.00 USD
Gustav Klutsis Latvian Constructist Gouache
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Gouache on paper, framed. Featuring a suprematist expressionist composition. Signed Klustis in Cyrillic on the lower right corner, Attributed to Gustav Klutsis (1895-1944, Latvian). 34 x 24 cm (13.4 x 9.5 inches). Frame size: 50 x 40 cm (19.7 x 15.8 inches). Gustav Klutsis was a pioneering Latvian photographer and major member of the Constructivist avant-garde in the early 20th century. He is known for the Soviet revolutionary and Stalinist propaganda he produced with his wife and collaborator Valentina Kulagina. Klutsis worked in a variety of experimental media. He liked to use propaganda as a sign or revolutionary background image. His first project of note, in 1922, was a series of semi-portable multimedia agitprop kiosks to be installed on the streets of Moscow, integrating "radio-orators", film screens, and newsprint displays, all to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Revolution. Like other Constructivists he worked in sculpture, produced exhibition installations, illustrations and ephemera. But Klutsis and Kulagina are primarily known for their photo montages. The names of some of their best posters, such as "Electrification of the whole country" (1920), "There can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory" (1927), and "Field shock workers into the fight for the socialist reconstruction" (1932), belied the fresh, powerful, and sometimes eerie images. For economy they often posed for, and inserted themselves into, these images, disguised as shock workers or peasants. Their dynamic compositions, distortions of scale and space, angled viewpoints and colliding perspectives make them perpetually modern. Klutsis is one of four artists with a claim to having invented the subgenre of political photo montage in 1918 (along with the German Dadaists Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, and the Russian El Lissitzky).[citation needed] He worked alongside Lissitzky on the Pressa International exhibition in Cologne. PROVENANCE: Southern Ontario estate