Stenberg Brothers: Constructing a Revolution in Soviet Design

The catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art's 1997 exhibition of Vladimir (1899-1982) and Georgii (1900-1933) Stenberg, the first critical survey of the brothers whose film posters carried Constructivist montage onto the Soviet street.

Organised by Christopher Mount of MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design, the show drew on the Ruki Matsumoto collection in Tokyo and brought together around 100 works, including 65 film and political posters. The book reproduces the posters at full page in colour: the Stenbergs' designs for Battleship Potemkin, The Man with the Movie Camera, Symphony of a Big City and dozens of imported Hollywood and German features, in which faces are cut, tilted and enlarged, lettering runs on diagonals and photographic fragments are redrawn by hand to simulate the effects of montage. Mount's essay sets the posters against the brothers' earlier work as sculptors of spatial constructions in the Obmokhu group and as stage designers for Tairov's Kamerny Theatre; Peter Kenez contributes an essay on the film culture of the early Soviet years. A chronology closes the volume.

The exhibition ran at MoMA from 10 June to 2 September 1997. The catalogue is out of print and remains the principal English-language reference on the Stenbergs.