Conventional Soviet Commercial Designs Florida Gu
Stylistic analysis: Choose any work of art we have not viewed in class and you have not used for previous assignments from a museum website (so from a “.org” website) for which you can find good citation information…include the image and the citation. As usual the citation should be in the following format:
Artist, title, medium, size, date, museum collection
(you should at least have 4 of those bits of information…maximum of 2 “unknown”s.)
Web address (copy and paste the full address, not just the museum shell address)
Write a minimum 3 paragraph stylistic analysis. Do not read about the work other than for translation purposes. (I can tell when an analysis has come from another author.) You can use what you have learned in class and what you might alreadyknow about the history of the time and place of the work. Use the Elements and Principles to describe the work and back up your assertions. It is not necessary to list sources, however…the analysis must be your own and in your own words. While this is a short essay, this assignment has the highest available appoints of any assignment or test in the class.
Highest grades will be awarded to write-ups that include notes about how the medium, context, and style are interrelated.
1.5 pages maximum. Don’t make the image half of page one! Just a small image will suffice.
Example write-up here and on the and here: Stylistic Analysis.pdf
This is a good example of the structure of a stylistic analysis. It could use more in the way of description of the elements and principles but it does a great job of analyzing style and even integrating a bit of history.
This is one of my favorite examples of commercial/advertising design. The work was created in 1923 by Alexander Rodchenko for a company (most likely a government industry) that made pacifiers for babies. The text on the poster roughly translates to, “There is not, and have never been better pacifiers. Demand that they be sold here!” This is typical of the sort of propagandistic advertising of early Soviet designs. The work is abstract because the figure is obviously not life-like, but the work is representational. Alternatively, the work could also be considered very highly stylized. It utilizes the art movement of Constructivism, wherein the image is built up out of basic shapes and colors, resulting in a blocky and solid looking design.
These conventional Soviet commercial designs used striking color relationships and/or dramatic compositions to reinforce their messages of strength and Socialist identity. This work utilizes primarily the color relationship to create visual interest …the strong contrast set up by the complimentary red and green creates a very bold image. This is especially notable because the image is also very symmetrical (aside from the coloration), which would generally not create this level of dynamism.
The work supports the government/industrial system in place at that time because it encourages customers to both purchase this product, and ask that their retailer sell that particular product. To me, the work is also somewhat comical…the heavily stylized design creates a cartoonish character, which seems almost contradictory to the strong wording and styling of the lettering. An alternate translation reads “There are no better dummies than old suckers”.
Alexander Rodchenko, 1923, poster for rubber pacifiers from the Rezinotrest company