Stylogenyin the style of Lubok Popular Print

Traditions & vernacular · 1650–1920 · Eastern Europe

Lubok Popular Print

Also known as Lubki, Russian popular print, Russian folk picture, Agitlubok (wartime descendant)

Cheap single-sheet Russian popular prints sold at fairs and by pedlars from the later 17th century: woodcut, later engraved and lithographed pictures of saints, fables, heroes, battles and satire in which text and image share one sheet. Thick-contoured, flattened figures fill the field, captions and rhymed verses crowd the gaps, episodes split into panels, and loud tempera washes brushed on by hand spill over the lines.

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An ornate folk-art cover titled “THE WOLF BRIDE” shows a large snarling black wolf behind a braided woman in floral traditional dress carrying a glowing lantern. Flowers and leafy borders surround small scenes with villages, castles, riders, hooded skeletons, a wizard, a black cat, birds, and a skeleton, beneath a sun and crescent moon.
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

01

How it works

  • Cut picture and text in the same block, squeezing captions, dialogue and verses into the gaps around the figures.
  • Flatten figures with thick black contours and mix perspectives freely; clarity of story beats illusion.
  • Brush a few loud washes (red, yellow, green, crimson) on by hand after printing and let them spill over the contours.
  • Split the sheet into numbered episodes or rows when a story needs time, reading like an early comic strip.
  • Use carnivalesque humour and inversion, such as mice burying a cat, to entertain, moralise or mock authority.

Moscow and the Russian provinces; woodcut workshops from the later 17th century, industrialised by Ivan Sytin's Moscow presses in the late 19th century

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Generous white space, Non-representational, Straight photography, Gradients, Illusion of depth, Ornament-free, Grotesque & neo-grotesque

Palette

  • #efe3c8
  • #1a1612
  • #c62d2a
  • #e8b923
  • #3f7f3a
  • #a3245a

Typefaces

  • Hand-cut Cyrillic lettering in the block, from Church Slavonic-style semi-uncial (poluustav) to civil script

  • Rubber-stamped and stencilled lettering imitating lubok woodcut letters in Russian Futurist books

Known for

  • The Mice Are Burying the Cat

    woodcut, 18th century

  • Vasily Koren, woodcut picture Bible

    1692–1696

  • Ivan Sytin's Moscow publishing house, mass-produced lithographed lubki

    late 19th–early 20th century

  • Mikhail Larionov's exhibition of icons and lubki, Moscow

    1913

  • Segodnyashny Lubok (Today's Lubok) war posters, Kazimir Malevich with verses by Vladimir Mayakovsky

    1914

03

Make something in this style

Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Lubok Popular Print’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.

Rule out a choice, read the prompt, or blend in another style: take this brief to Mix styles.

04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

Nothing earlier is recorded: in the atlas it is a starting point.

This styleLubok Popular Print1650–1920 · Eastern Europe

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Real works

Artefacts in museums, libraries and archives that show the style, linked at their source.

  • Coats of Skins (Kozhany rizy), sheet 14 of the Koren picture BibleVasily Koren · 1696 · Wikimedia Commons (scan from O. D. Baldina, Russkie narodnye kartinki, 1972; holding institution not named)
  • The Mice Are Burying the Cat (Myshi kota pogrebayut)Anonymous Moscow woodcut workshop · design late 17th–early 18th century; image is a hand-coloured facsimile plate, apparently from D. A. Rovinsky's atlas (1881) · Wikimedia Commons (via zeno.org; apparently plate 167 of D. A. Rovinsky, Russkie narodnye kartinki, atlas, 1881)
  • The Brave Bogatyr Bova KorolevichAnonymous folk artist · early 1700s · Wikimedia Commons (scan from O. D. Baldina, Russkie narodnye kartinki, 1972; holding institution not named)
  • Farnos the Red NoseAnonymous folk artist · 18th century (per Commons, unsourced) · Wikimedia Commons (from a Rollins College course page; holding institution not recorded)
  • The Tale of Ersh Ershovich, Son of ShchetinnikovAnonymous (Rovinsky collection) · 19th century or earlier (per Commons); image is a facsimile plate, apparently from D. A. Rovinsky's atlas (1881) · Wikimedia Commons (from D. A. Rovinsky's Russian folk pictures; plate numbered 173)

06

Sources

  1. University of Washington Libraries, 'The Russian Lubok and the Illustrated Children's Book': https://content.lib.washington.edu/exhibits/russian-childrens-lit/6-lubok.html
  2. Wikipedia: Lubok
  3. MoMA: Kazimir Malevich, patriotic propaganda postcards with verse by Vladimir Mayakovsky (publisher Segodniashnii lubok, Moscow, 1914): https://www.moma.org/collection/works/16995

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