‘Comrades there’s no debate! Soviet Citizens will get in great shape. What is ours is in our power. Where’s our power? In this cocoa powder.’ Such were the lyrical themes stretching the talents of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky by the mid 1920s. He had gone enthusiastically into business as an advertising agent, producing posters with the artist Aleksandr Rodchenko. Their company, Reklam-Konstruktor (advertising constructor), would last only two years, and Lenin’s New Economic Policy, the mixed economy that allowed such enterprises, wouldn’t last much longer after Stalin came to power. Such can be the brief life of good ideas.
John Heartfield s The Hand Has Five Fingers (1928), a campaign poster for German Communist Party The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Merrill C. Berman Collection
In moments of turmoil, what does it mean to be an artist? A quiet show of small works on ageing paper might not, at first glance, be the resounding answer that this kind of big question seemingly calls for. Then again, in a year that cannot stop shouting, the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) capsule show,
Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: the Artist Reinvented, might well be the small, still voice to heed.
The New York exhibition opening this weekend heralds the addition to MoMA’s drawings and prints holdings of a core set of works from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, considered one of the greatest to focus on political art. From John Heartfield’s communist poster designs to Kurt Schwitters’s lesser-known page layouts and Liubov Popova’s splendid linocuts and collages, the show highl