Stenberg Brothers

The extraordinary film posters reproduced in this book, made in Russia by Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg from 1924 to 1933, exemplify a literal revolution in the graphic arts: the transformation of a primarily illustrative medium into one increasingly abstract, constructed, or collaged from a variety of sources. This book accompanies an exhibition of the posters opening at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in June 1977.

The Stenberg brothers, like their contemporaries Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, were artists of immensely varied interests and eclectic skills. They were sculptors, architects, and stage and costume designers, and were enamored of the film and montage theories developed in the suddenly burgeoning Soviet film industry. As seen in this book's super colorplates, they brought to film poster design an extraordinary compositional dynamism, originality, and contrast of scale, employing many of the artistic conventions of the Constructivist movement.