POSTED BY Katie R., ON July 26, 2011, Comments Off

If this was Extreme Makeover, the pictures below—taken just a few short weeks ago—would definitely be the “before” pictures. They were taken in Regenstein Hall shortly after Kings, Queens, and Courtiers: Art in Early Renaissance France was de-installed and as curators worked with exhibition designers, carpenters, painters, and electricians, among many others to completely transform the space. These images start to articulate the amount of work that goes into construction, painting, moving walls, creating vitrines, etc. Basically, all the things that happen behind the scenes to make the exhibition look effortless to you.

Stay tuned tomorrow for some of the “after” images…

POSTED BY Katie R., ON July 25, 2011, Comments Off

Here at blog HQ, we’re very excited about the opening of Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941–1945. So excited, in fact, that we’ll be posting details of the installation every day this week.

In an effort to flesh out the creation process of the TASS posters, the curators worked with a contemporary artist to recreate one of the posters using techniques similar to the ones that would have been used in the 1940s by the artists who worked at the TASS news agency. The poster they chose is called The Moralistic Wolf and shows a complex caricature of Hitler as a wolf surrounded by bombs. Above, you can see a miniature model (created months ago by curator Peter Zegers) of the wall in the exhibition where these stencils and posters would ultimately hang. And below—from just last week—is a-still-in-progress installation shot of the stencils created for the exhibition and the original posters (two versions hang to the left of the stencils). For more details on the process, we invite you to the exhibition, opening this Sunday!

Images courtesy of Exhibition Assistant Molly Zimmerman-Feeley.

POSTED BY Guest Blogger, ON June 29, 2011, Comments Off

If you read my previous post you’ll remember that I said “Big Lenin,” at nearly ten and a half feet tall, was our SECOND largest poster that is going to be exhibited in this summer’s Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad 1941-45. I bet you’re wondering what could top that. Our largest poster, in fact, is very different from “Big Lenin,” both in composition and assemblage, and thus presents its own unique challenges. TASS 100, Defenders of Moscow, was released on July 28, 1941. And as a matter of fact, our first member preview day for Windows on the War will occur on July 28, 2011, this poster’s seventieth birthday! But instead of one monumental image, Defenders of Moscow displays seven distinct image vignettes which each address different forms of the city’s military and civilian defense, from how to employ local artillery and spotlights to shoot enemy planes out of the air to how to put out incendiary bombs on the ground. As it turns out, Defenders of Moscow was a prescient composition, since the city would be surrounded by the invading Nazi forces in October of that same year.

With seven images and multiple text panels, Defenders of Moscow is comprised of seventeen sheets of paper assembled in narrative form—much like a contemporary comic strip—which, when pieced together, stretch to nearly eleven feet in height. The poster had been sent abroad by the Soviet agency VOKS to an American former military man, Phil W. McMahon, who admired the design of political posters and sought to make these unusual Soviet TASS agency works part of his collection. In 1946 he bequeathed the lot of them to the Joslyn Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, and there they peacefully rested until we came knocking on their door. As this work had never been exhibited, it had never been fully assembled; its seventeen pieces were loose like a puzzle. This made it slightly easier to handle than “Big Lenin,” who was delivered to us in one piece, at least for preliminary conservation and for photography. However, Defenders of Moscow still needs to be framed. Our preparators are thinking of framing it in three separate pieces—you know, so it doesn’t take a half-dozen football players to carry it to Regenstein Hall for installation. What will they decide? You’ll just have to come to the show to see.

Be on the watch for Defenders of Moscow when you visit Windows on the War this summer. And if you attend the member previews, be sure to wish it a happy birthday!

—Jill B., Research Associate, Department of Prints and Drawings

POSTED BY Guest Blogger, ON June 22, 2011, Comments Off

Today is June 22. Seventy years ago European hostilities mounting since Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 erupted into the cataclysm now known as World War II. June 22, 1941 is the day the Nazi forces initiated Operation Barbarossa, the full-scale invasion of the former Soviet Union. This action broke the spurious Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact signed by representatives of both nations and brought two totalitarian titans into a head-to-head battle that would escalate to global warfare, endure for four desperate years, and claim nearly sixty million lives.

A somber anniversary indeed. Yet behind the terror and devastation of the front lines, a studio of artists in Moscow was fervently producing an array of unusual, vivid and large-scale stenciled posters to reassure and rouse the Soviet citizenry and document the progress of war on the Eastern front. In the midst of 1,418 days of war, the TASS studio produced some 1,240 designs treating subjects that reflected the progress of the war from the Soviet perspective and incorporating an extraordinary range of literary and visual styles. The resulting body of work is—in its size, scope, and variety—unique in the annals of Soviet visual propaganda, constituting a singular chapter in the broader history of graphic art and poster design. It is a chapter all the more intriguing because it has been hitherto absent from the histories of these subjects in the West.

These rare and historically significant posters will be the subject of the exhibition Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941–45 opening to the public on July 31.

—Jill B., Research Associate, Department of Prints and Drawings

Citizens of Moscow, including two young brothers, listening to the address of foreign affairs minister Viacheslav Molotov’s announcement of war over a public loudspeaker, June 1941.

POSTED BY Guest Blogger, ON June 17, 2011, Comments Off

The most challenging aspect of preparing for this summer’s exhibition Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad 1941-45 has been dealing with the size of the artworks. These wartime posters were meant to catch public attention though incredible color, biting imagery and, of course, traffic-stopping scale. We’re lucky that the ceilings in the museum’s Regenstein Hall are fifteen feet high—because our largest posters are nearly eleven feet tall!

Our second largest poster dates from late 1943, and in a typically Socialist Realist style, depicts the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin inspiring the wartime citizens of Leningrad. . . we’ve nicknamed him “Big Lenin.” “Big Lenin” was a particular challenge to our staff in the Department of Prints & Drawings. He is composed of sixteen sheets of paper, individually stenciled and pieced together to form one monumental composition. When he first arrived on loan from the Ne boltai! Collection, no table surface in the department was large enough to unroll him—then to later conserve him, press him flat, and prepare him for framing—except for the tables in our Study Room (and even that was a close call). He’s so grand that he took up four TASS numbers: 880-883. With Lenin, we’ve joked that, come July, we won’t need banners for the facade of the museum – we’ll just hang him up out front! It even took five staff members to wrestle him into a photograph for our catalogue. Our photographer said that we set a record for the largest work on paper photographed in-house that he can remember.

At long last, Lenin has finally been laid to rest in the plexiglass frame that he will be exhibited in come July – but carrying that frame into our department required four strong movers. The next hurdle will be moving him—and the others that are nearly his size—from the Department of Prints & Drawings into the exhibition space in Regenstein Hall for the opening in July. And that will no doubt take a lot of patience, strength, coordination, and skill. The heroes of labor for this show are not the Soviet Leningrad citizens of the 1940s, but our very own P&D conservation and preparation staff!

To learn about the overall biggest poster in our summer exhibition, stay tuned for my next post!

—Jill B., Research Associate, Department of Prints and Drawings