Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945

Abstract

When, in the mid-1990s, the Art Institute of Chicago began a series of long-awaited renovations, staffers discovered a secret ‘trough-like space’ in a little-used storage closet; inside, reeking of solvents and decaying paper, was a forgotten hoard of 157 vibrantly coloured, outsized posters utterly unknown to curators and staff alike. The re-discovery of the Institute’s hidden trove of Second World War Soviet era TASS Windows posters reads like a fairy-tale; once found and identified, the posters were presented to the public in a show and documented in this lavish catalogue. In some ways, this magical story overshadows the real achievement here; this scholarly, well-researched tome forces us to assess not just the posters themselves, but also their changing significance over time. Drawing on the talents of established figures like painter Mikhail Cheremnykh and editor Osip Brik, TASS (the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Opinion) established a poster-making studio in 1941; the group rapidly mobilized, making large-scale posters for the studio’s centrally located windows in central Moscow and constantly updating them. But their true function and meaning was multifaceted; behind their nationalist ardour lay an almost mystical belief in the power of the poster that recalls an earlier generation of Russian artists. As the workshop issued their one thousandth poster in June 1944, they titled it ‘Our One Thousandth Blow’ [1], echoing a 1925 poem by the revolutionary poet and designer Vladimir Maiakovskii and announcing ‘I want the pen to be on a par with the bayonet.’