242 pages Edited by Vladimir Tolstoy, Irina Bibikova & Catherine Cooke 27,2 x 25,2 cm Language: English Hardback Publisher: The Vendome Press 1990
The title promises one thing and delivers something stranger and better: not graffiti, but the state-commissioned decoration of Soviet cities during the first fifteen years after the Revolution. Squares, façades, trams and boats wrapped in painted panels for May Day and the October anniversary — Mayakovsky's line about making the squares our palettes and the streets our brushes, taken literally and funded. Tatlin, Rodchenko, Stepanova, Rozanova, Vesnin and the Vesnin brothers' circle all worked festival commissions, alongside painters, sculptors, stage designers and architects whose ephemeral work survives nowhere else.
The book gathers what remains: surviving designs, contemporary photographs, Lenin's first decree on monumental propaganda, Lunacharsky's diaries, artists' personal archives, press reports and the minutes of the festival committees, much of it published here for the first time. The English edition was overseen by Catherine Cooke, the architectural historian who did more than anyone in Britain to make Soviet constructivism legible, which is why the apparatus holds up as scholarship and not just as picture book. Still the standard reference on agitational art in public space.
