Amer­i­cans swim in pro­pa­gan­da all the time, even those of us who think the word refers to some exot­ic form of for­eign author­i­tar­i­an­ism rather than our own good ol’ home-cooked vari­ety. But the sad fact—admittedly very far down the list of rather trag­ic facts—is that U.S. pro­pa­gan­da is par­tic­u­lar­ly crude, obnox­ious, and unap­peal­ing. Con­trast, for exam­ple, the sym­bol of the pantsuit, or the casu­al racism, misog­y­ny, and homi­ci­dal fan­tasies on truck­er hats, t‑shirts, and beach tow­els with the alarm­ing pageantry of Maoist Chi­na, Stal­in­ist Rus­sia, or name-your-showy-total­i­tar­i­an-regime.

In the ear­ly days of the Sovi­et Union, state pro­pa­gan­da received a spe­cial boost from a cadre of eager and will­ing avant-garde artists, includ­ing poet, actor, direc­tor, etc. Vladimir Mayakovsky, who wrote Sovi­et children’s books, and a num­ber of Russ­ian Futur­ists who seized the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pro­mote the new order with total­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble poet­ry and art.

In no way reg­i­ment­ed or stan­dard­ized, as were lat­er Social­ist Real­ists, ear­ly Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­dists used pol­i­tics as anoth­er mate­r­i­al in their work, rather than its pri­ma­ry rai­son d’être.

These pio­neers were joined by exper­i­men­tal com­posers, film­mak­ers, and even tex­tile design­ers, who had a brief moment under the shin­ing Sovi­et star between 1927 and 1933, when, as one pub­li­ca­tion from a wealthy col­lec­tor notes, “a fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ment in tex­tile mak­ing took place in the Sovi­et Union. As the new nation emerged and the Com­mu­nist par­ty strug­gled to trans­form an agrar­i­an coun­try into an indus­tri­al­ized state, a group of young design­ers began to cre­ate the­mat­ic tex­tile designs.”

Their designs—adorning table­cloths, sheets, cur­tains, and scarves and oth­er items of every­day, off-the-rack wear—showcase bold, strik­ing pat­terns, many, writes Dan­ger­ous Minds, “the­mat­ic of clas­si­cal Russ­ian art: you see lush col­or, dense scapes and even the odd Ori­en­tal­ist trope.” They are also filled with “delight­ful­ly pro­pa­gan­dist imagery,” notes Mari­na Galpe­ri­na at Fla­vor­wire, “of revving trac­tors, smoke-pump­ing fac­tor pipes, and babush­ka-clad women tak­ing a sick­le to wheat… woven in between opu­lent flo­rals and pret­ty, con­struc­tivist squig­gles.”

Fac­to­ry gears, war machines, ath­letes, and scenes of indus­try were pop­u­lar, as were the expect­ed state sym­bols and iconography—as in the Lenin linen at the top, framed at the top by Marx and Engels; Trot­sky at the bot­tom left has been purged from the tex­tile record. See many more exam­ples of ear­ly Sovi­et tex­tiles at io9, Flash­bak, and Messy Nessy.

via Eng­lish Rus­sia and @Ted­Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every­thing You Need to Know About Mod­ern Russ­ian Art in 25 Min­utes: A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Futur­ism, Social­ist Real­ism & More

A Dig­i­tal Archive of Sovi­et Children’s Books Goes Online: Browse the Artis­tic, Ide­o­log­i­cal Col­lec­tion (1917–1953)

Watch the Sur­re­al­ist Glass Har­mon­i­ca, the Only Ani­mat­ed Film Ever Banned by Sovi­et Cen­sors (1968)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Images via PLOS

If you want to see where art began, go to a cave. Not just any cave, but not just one cave either. You’ll find the best-known cave paint­ings at Las­caux, an area of south­west­ern France with a cave com­plex whose walls fea­ture over 600 images of ani­mals, humans, and sym­bols, all of them more than 17,000 years old, but oth­er caves else­where in the world reveal oth­er chap­ters of art’s ear­ly his­to­ry. Some of those chap­ters have only just come into leg­i­bil­i­ty, as in the case of the cave near the Ethiopi­an city of Dire Dawa recent­ly deter­mined to be the world’s old­est “art stu­dio.”

“The Porc-Epic cave was dis­cov­ered by Pierre Teil­hard de Chardin and Hen­ry de Mon­freid in 1929 and thought to date to about 43,000 to 42,000 years ago, dur­ing the Mid­dle Stone Age,” writes Sarah Cas­cone at Art­net.

There, archae­ol­o­gists have found “a stash of 4213 pieces, or near­ly 90 pounds, of ochre, the largest such col­lec­tion ever dis­cov­ered at a pre­his­toric site in East Africa.” The “ancient vis­i­tors to the site processed the iron-rich ochre stones there by flak­ing and grind­ing the raw mate­ri­als to pro­duce a fine-grained and bright red pow­der,” a sub­stance use­ful for “sym­bol­ic activ­i­ties, such as body paint­ing, the pro­duc­tion of pat­terns on dif­fer­ent media, or for sig­nalling.”

In oth­er words, those who used this ochre-rich cave over its 4,500 years of ser­vice used it to pro­duce their tools, which func­tioned like pro­to-stamps and crayons. You can read about these find­ings in much more detail in the paper “Pat­terns of change and con­ti­nu­ity in ochre use dur­ing the late Mid­dle Stone Age (MSA) of the Horn of Africa: The Porc-Epic Cave record” by Daniela Euge­nia Rosso of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Barcelona and Francesco d’Errico and Alain Quef­f­elec of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bor­deaux. In it, the authors “iden­ti­fy pat­terns of con­ti­nu­ity in ochre acqui­si­tion, treat­ment and use reflect­ing both per­sis­tent use of the same geo­log­i­cal resources and sim­i­lar uses of iron-rich rocks by late MSA Porc-Epic inhab­i­tants.”

The Ethiopi­an site con­tains so much ochre, in fact, that “this con­ti­nu­ity can be inter­pret­ed as the expres­sion of a cohe­sive cul­tur­al adap­ta­tion, large­ly shared by all com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers and con­sis­tent­ly trans­mit­ted through time.” The more evi­dence sites like the Porc-Epic cave pro­vide, the greater the lev­el of detail in which we’ll be able to piece togeth­er the sto­ry of not just art, but cul­ture itself. Cul­ture, as Bri­an Eno so neat­ly defined it, is every­thing you don’t have to do, and though draw­ing in ochre might well have proven use­ful for the pre­his­toric inhab­i­tants of mod­ern-day Ethiopia, one of them had to give it a try before it had any acknowl­edged pur­pose. Lit­tle could they have imag­ined what that action would lead to over the next few tens of thou­sands of years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

We Were Wan­der­ers on a Pre­his­toric Earth: A Short Film Inspired by Joseph Con­rad

Hear the World’s Old­est Instru­ment, the “Nean­derthal Flute,” Dat­ing Back Over 43,000 Years

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Europe at the end of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and begin­ning of the twen­ti­eth: what a time and place to be alive. Or rather, what a time and place to be alive for peo­ple in the right coun­tries and, more impor­tant­ly, of the right class­es, those who saw a new world tak­ing shape around them and par­took of it with all pos­si­ble hearti­ness. The peri­od between the end of the Fran­co-Pruss­ian War in 1871 and the out­break of World War I in 1914, best known by its French name La Belle Époque, saw not just peace in Europe and empires at their zenith, but all man­ner of tech­no­log­i­cal, social, and cul­tur­al inno­va­tions at home as well.

We here in the 21st cen­tu­ry have few ways of tast­ing the life of that time as rich as its posters, more than 200 of which you can view in high res­o­lu­tion and down­load from “Art of the Poster 1880–1918,” a Flickr col­lec­tion assem­bled by the Min­neapo­lis Col­lege of Art and Design.

“In the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, lith­o­g­ra­phers began to use mass-pro­duced zinc plates rather than stones in their print­ing process,” says the accom­pa­ny­ing text. “This inno­va­tion allowed them to pre­pare mul­ti­ple plates, each with a dif­fer­ent col­or ink, and to print these with close reg­is­tra­tion on the same sheet of paper. Posters in a range of col­ors and vari­ety of sizes could now be pro­duced quick­ly, at mod­est cost.”

Like oth­er of the most fruit­ful tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments of the era, this leap for­ward in poster-print­ing drew the atten­tion, and soon the efforts, of artists: well-regard­ed illus­tra­tors and graph­ic design­ers like Alphonse Mucha, Jules Chéret, Eugène Gras­set, and Hen­ri de Toulouse-Lautrec took to the new method, and “The ‘Gold­en Age of the Poster’ was the spec­tac­u­lar result.” While many of the best-remem­bered posters of that Gold­en Age come from France, it touched the streets of every major city in west­ern Europe as well as those of Eng­land and Amer­i­ca, all places whose well-heeled pop­u­la­tions found them­selves new­ly and avid­ly inter­est­ed in art, pho­tog­ra­phy, motion pic­tures, mag­a­zines, bicy­cles, auto­mo­biles, absinthe, cof­fee, cig­a­rettes, and world trav­el.

The com­pa­nies behind all those excit­ing things had, of course, to adver­tise, but unlike in ear­li­er times, they could­n’t set­tle for get­ting the word out; they had to use images, and the most vivid ones pos­si­ble at that. They had to use them in such a way as to asso­ciate what they had to offer with the abun­dant spir­it of the time, whether they called that time La Belle Époque, the Wil­helmine peri­od, the late Vic­to­ri­an and Edwar­dian era, or the Gild­ed Age. All those names, of course, were applied only in ret­ro­spect, after it became clear how bad times could get in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. But then, none of us ever real­ize we’re liv­ing through a gold­en age before it comes to its inevitable end; until that time, best just to enjoy it. You can enter the poster archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 2,000 Mag­nif­i­cent Turn-of-the-Cen­tu­ry Art Posters, Cour­tesy of the New York Pub­lic Library

René Magritte’s Ear­ly Art Deco Adver­tis­ing Posters, 1924–1927

A Gallery of Visu­al­ly Arrest­ing Posters from the May 1968 Paris Upris­ing

Glo­ri­ous Ear­ly 20th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

40,000 Film Posters in a Won­der­ful­ly Eclec­tic Archive: Ital­ian Tarkovsky Posters, Japan­ese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

The Strange and Won­der­ful Movie Posters from Ghana: The Matrix, Alien & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.