Stylogeny combining Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster × Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

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Style combination · Contrasts

Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster × Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

The naturalistic, modelled painting that displaced the idiom after 1936; set them side by side to choose between a schematic, playful picture of people and a heroic, illusionistic one.

From the research on Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

Mix them and make something Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

NEWSocialist Realist × Leningrad Avant-Garde
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster, their arrangement from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book, the finish from Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

01

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

Type from Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster
Colour from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book
Form from Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster

Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book avoids naturalistic depiction: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.

Composition from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book
Surface from Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster

02

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster

New

Big Shoulders, standing in for Hand-drawn Cyrillic poster capitals in condensed grotesque and slab forms

Text · Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

Thin, large picture books made in Petrograd/Leningrad from 1922 to the mid-1930s for Raduga and the Gosizdat children's department led by Samuil Marshak, with Vladimir Lebedev as art editor. People, animals and machines are cut into flat, mostly unoutlined planes of a few bright lithographic inks and float on bare paper. Hand-drawn grotesque capitals frame the picture, and 'production books' show how things are made. Pravda's 1936 attack on 'artist-daubers' (khudozhniki-pachkuny) forced it towards naturalism, and in 1937 the Leningrad children's publishing house was broken up with arrests.

Inter; Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book used Heavy drawn Cyrillic block capitals and Grotesque capitals, one word diagonal

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book, with a counter-accent from Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

  • #efe4c8 ground · 36%
  • #1c1a18 ink · 14%
  • #d23a24 accent · 18%
  • #f2c230 accent · 14%
  • #5b7bb5 accent · 10%
  • #8a9a68 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #efe4c8;
  --ink: #1c1a18;
  --accent-1: #d23a24;
  --accent-2: #f2c230;
  --accent-3: #5b7bb5;
  --accent-4: #8a9a68;
  --font-display: "Big Shoulders", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book: These books' makers were later persecuted: Vera Ermolaeva was arrested in 1934 and shot in a Karaganda camp in 1937, the Leningrad editorial office of the children's publishing house was broken up in 1937 with arrests, the poet Nikolai Oleinikov was shot that year, and Daniil Kharms died in a prison psychiatric ward in besieged Leningrad in 1942. Do not treat the idiom as cheerful Soviet nostalgia or propaganda pastiche. Its schematic types include racialised figures, such as Tsirk's Black violinist drawn as a solid black silhouette: simplify every figure with the same economy, and never use skin colour, hair or dress as an ethnic marker or joke. Lebedev (d. 1967) and Marshak (d. 1964) are still in copyright in Russia and the EU (life plus 70 years): draw your own figures and verses instead of reproducing their pages.

04

The two styles

A painted propaganda-style poster shows a worker raising a red flag, a woman holding golden grain, a soldier carrying a rifle with a bayonet, and a bespectacled man holding rolled plans. The words “BRIGHTER TOMORROW” appear above them, with a sunrise, mountains, a city, an elevated train and a dam in the background. 1932–1989 · Eastern Europe, Central Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster The official art doctrine of the Soviet Union from 1932, later exported across the socialist world, which replaced avant-garde experiment with legible, heroic realism 'national in form, socialist in content'. Its posters show idealised workers, soldiers and leaders on rising diagonals and low horizons, bathed in red, with bold slogans promising a radiant future; in China they merged with New Year print and calendar-poster conventions. A stylised yellow dog with black patches, a blue collar and a red tongue bounds toward the right on a cream background. Huge red Cyrillic lettering reading “БЕГИ!” rises diagonally above it, with speckled print texture throughout. 1922–1936 · Eastern Europe Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book Thin, large picture books made in Petrograd/Leningrad from 1922 to the mid-1930s for Raduga and the Gosizdat children's department led by Samuil Marshak, with Vladimir Lebedev as art editor. People, animals and machines are cut into flat, mostly unoutlined planes of a few bright lithographic inks and float on bare paper. Hand-drawn grotesque capitals frame the picture, and 'production books' show how things are made. Pravda's 1936 attack on 'artist-daubers' (khudozhniki-pachkuny) forced it towards naturalism, and in 1937 the Leningrad children's publishing house was broken up with arrests.

05

More combinations

With Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster

All 32 combinations with Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster

With Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

All 10 combinations with Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

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