Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: 
A Revolutionary Portrait


Galerie Priska Pasquer is pleased to exhibit photographs and photomontages by the artist couple Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina. Gustav Klutsis was a pioneering Russian constructivist artist, designer, photographer, and photo-montagist. Alongside the works of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, and Sergei Senkin, Klutsis’s work stands one of the strongest examples of the post-abstract Soviet avant-garde. His wife and colleague Valentina Kulagina was an innovative poster, book, and exhibition designer. The exhibition explores the creative partnership between the two artists.

Throughout their life together, Klutsis and Kulagina saw the camera as a tool that permitted experimentation and creative exchange. By the mid-1920s, their public projects entirely relied on photography. However, being a tool of contextual precision, the camera was also a channel through which Klutsis was able to escape from time to time the immediacy of the Soviet context. Klutsis’ cropping  of the environment in which he repeatedly photographed Kulagina, situate her portraits in the lineage of international modernist production. In contrast, Kulagina photographed Klutsis at the moments that most highlighted the Soviet context. For example, she depicted him in a military uniform during his attendance of the Moscow military-political courses in 1930. Large ambitions that Klutsis invested in his camera had to do with his new commitment to take documentary photographs, specifically for use in photomontages. His accumulation of an archive comprised of photographs that documented public and private activities begins around 1924, and establishes the simultaneity in Klutsis’ predilection toward public and private photography. The practice of making rather than borrowing photographs for public photomontages positioned Klutsis apart from other Soviet photomontage practitioners. Like Aleksandr Rodchenko, Klutsis took portraits of friends and family in the early 1920s. But Rodchenko was not eager to utilize his examples in political imagery, instead finding a place for them in his commercial advertisement. Klutsis on the other hand, dared to place shots of his friends and relatives on a worktable alongside his street photography and mix family and leaders portraits in his montages. Klutsis began to experiment with the modernist techniques of double exposure and the photogram around 1929 primarily for avoiding awkward superimpositions that resulted from the cut and paste technique of montage. He created a „private“ double-eyed portrait of Kulagina’s brother Boris that resembles Man Ray’s 1922 portrait of the Marquise Casati, and made several „public“ posters with a double-exposure technique . These kinds of photographic experiments, although common in advanced European photography of the 1920s, were quite rare in the circles of Soviet photographers. Under the influential leadership of Rodchenko, most Soviet avant-garde photographers favored oblique angles and unconventional vantage points. The exhibition includes collages that record the Dadaistic performances enacted in Klutsis and Kulagina apartment on Miasnitskaia Street, in the famous building of VKhUTEMAS, and provide a body of rare images that are associated with the avant-garde circle of artists, poets, and graphic designers.
 
Gustav Klutsis
Following two years of art school in his native Latvia, Gustav Klutsis (1895 – 1938) was drafted into the Russian Army, and pariticipated in the 1917 oftherthrow of the tsar. In 1919, Klutsis resumed his art schooling in Moscow in the studios of Konstantin Korovin and Kazimir Malevich. Acclaimed for his spatial constructions, as well for his designs of practical structures like kiosks, tribunes, and radio-orators, Klutsis became a professor of color theory at the construcitivist school VKhUTEMAS (Higher State Artistic-Technical Workshops) in 1924. In addition to being an accomplished constructivist, by the early 1920s, Klutsis had become a pioneering developer of photomontage. Klutsis applied photomontage to innovative designs for posters, magazines, and books throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and the technique was swiftly adopted by other members of the Soviet avant-garde. In addition to being one of  leading practitioners of photomontage, he also participated in debates on the subject, published essays on his theories, and contributed to major exhibitions, including the Internationale Presse-Ausstellung (Pressa) 1928, and Film and Foto, 1929. Alongside the works of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, and Sergei Senkin, Klutsis’s work stands one of the strongest examples of the post-abstract Soviet avant-garde. Although a devoted member of the Communist Party, Klutsis was arrested and detained in 1938, shortly after returning from the Paris World’s Fair, where he designed numerous exhibitions and installed a photomontage frieze that he created for the Soviet pavilion. He was executed three weeks after his arrest.

Valentina Kulagina
In 1920, VKhUTEMAS student Valentina Kulagina (1902-1987) met Klutsis, and the two artists married on February 2, 1921. Throughout the 1920s, she and Klutsis lived in the school’s headquarters, which also housed Rodchenko, Stepanova, and Aleksei Kruchenykh. In 1928, she joined October, an artist’s group whose members included Klutsis (who was in charge of the photomontage section), Rodchenko, Boris Ignatovich, and Lissitzky. That same year, she designed parts of the Soviet pavilion of the landmark Pressa exhibition in Cologne. After graduating from VKhUTEMAS, she worked for Izogiz (State Art Publishing House of Art) and VOKS (All-Union Society of Cultural Relations Abroad), receiving domestic and international commissions for poster, exhibition, and book designs. After Klutsis’s arrest and execution in 1938, and until the beginning of World War II in 1941, she was employed as a designer of photomontages for the VSKhV (All-Union Agricultural Exhibition). After the war, she was employed as an official painter and designer. She died in Moscow in 1987.
[Source: Margarita Tupitsyn: Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina. Photography and Montage after Constructivism. International Center of Photography, New York 2004]


An independent curator, critic, and scholar, Dr. Margarita Tupitsyn is the author of numerous essays and books on twentieth-century and contemporary Russian and Western art and photography. 
Selected exhibitions and publications:
Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present. Milan 1989
Glaube, Hoffnung, Anpassung. Soviet Art 1928-1945. Museum Folkwang, Essen 1995
The Soviet Photograph, 1924-1937. Yale 1996
Aleksandr Rodchenko: the New Moscow. Munich 1998
El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet: Photography, Design, Collaboration. Yale 1999
Bauhaus: Dessau, Chicago, New York. Museum Folkwang, Essen 2000
Malevich and Film. Yale, 2002
Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina. Photography and Montage after Constructivism. International Center of Photography, New York 2004
Verbal Photography: Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov and the Moscow Archive of New Art, Museum Serralves, Porto 2004 (co-authored) 
Gegen Kandinsky / Against Kandinsky. Museum Villa Stuck, Munich 2007
Rodchenko & Popova. Defining Constructivism. Tate Modern, London 2009

Gustav Klucis and Valentina Kulagina: 
A Revolutionary Portrait

Kurator: Margarita Tupitsyn