Hasta La Ideas

As an extension to its exhibition of Soviet TASS news agency posters from World War II, the Art Institute of Chicago has launched a Tumblr that will update daily with examples of these handmade propaganda efforts…

Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945 is on show at the Chicago gallery which has just launched tass-posters.tumblr.com – an exhibition-specific Tumblr highlighting the range of posters that chronicled the Soviet Union’s endeavors during World War II.

The Telegrafnoye agentstvo Sovetskovo Soyuza (Telegraph Agency), abbreviated to TASS, was the Soviet Union’s internal and external news agency during World War II. It enlisted hundreds of artists to aid the nation’s war effort, producing daily editions of posters that were then displayed in windows and shopfronts.

“They produced, assembly-line style, editions of between one hundred and one thousand striking and sizable posters entirely by hand with a labour-intensive technical virtuosity previously unheard of in poster production,” explain the curators on the exhibition website.

“Some of the most intricate and chromatically brilliant designs demanded 60 to 70 different stencils and colour divisions,” they continue. “In collaboration with the Ne boltai! Collection of 20th-century propaganda, Windows on the War marks the first time the handmade posters have been displayed in the United States since World War II, bringing to the fore many Soviet artists little known in this country.”

Vladimir Vasilevich Lebedev, Russian, 1891-1967. A Belorussian Landscape, July 31, 1944

Kukryniksy, Russian. Thunderous Blow, June 17, 1942

Kukryniksy (Mikhail V. Kupriyanov, Porfiry N. Krylov, and Nikolai A. Sokolov), Russian. Meeting Over Berlin, 1941. (Ne boltai! Collection)

Posters will be added daily to tass-posters.tumblr.com until the end of the exhibition on October 23.