Soviet Posters: The Sergo Grigorian Collection

by Maria Lafont (2007)

“This massive book of Soviet propaganda posters, many rare and never before published, is at once a revealing historical document and a sublime example of graphic art at its best.

Dating from 1917 to the beginning of the Cold War, the posters in this book feature the work of such major Russian ground-breaking avant-garde designers as El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko as well as extraordinary works by anonymous artists. Presented in full color, the 250 posters gathered here range in themes from warnings about the dangers of alcohol abuse and the creeping Nazi menace to illustrations of utopian harmony and the Soviet industrial machine. A brief illustrated introduction offers a chronological overview of the period that produced such eloquent art, which has long been a major source of inspiration to artists and designers.”

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Raymond Myerscough-Walker (b.1908; d.1984)

Myerscough-Walker was among the best architectural draughtsman of the 1930s ‘with his distinct contemporary style: employing fantastic trees, powerfully contrasting and dense colours using bodycolour rather than wash to create emphasis, dynamic weather and light effects’. Much influenced by Surrealism, Myerscough-Walker lived in Chelsea and knew English painters such as Sutherland. In 1936 he designed an Art Deco entrance to the Zoological Gardens at Dudley Zoo, with a strong use of perspective, and a strong contrast between the ‘streamlined sweep of the entrance roof’ and the ‘vertical line of trees that frame the entrance’. Wrote Stage and Film Décor in 1940, ‘an historical overview of décor from the symbolic simplicity of the Greeks to modern times’.

Information collated from: Royoung Booksellers, ‘Stage and Film Décor, by Myerscough-Walker, R.’, http://www.royoung.com/cgi-bin/ryb455/2193.html, accessed October 3 2003.