HARSÁNY — Today’s Russian Design
In the summer of 2019, a large-scale poster, book and motion design exhibition titled “HARSÁNY — Today’s Russian Design” was organised by curator Serge Serov and Lajos Major, in MODEM, Debrecen, Hungary.
We produced five short films with the exhibitors: Peter Bankov, Igor Gurovich, Eric Belousov, Yuri Gulitov, Anna Kulachek — led by Andras Fekete in Moscow. A short study by Serge Serov was published and can be read in full here.
The Russian School of Graphic Design
Russia is a cold country. It is the coldest country in the world. The average annual temperature is -5.5 °C. The expenditures of energetic — without which survival is unimaginable — are three times higher in Russia than in Western Europe. Russia has the coldest pole in the world. Depending on methodology, 65–85 percent of the country is covered by permafrost areas with permanently frozen soil. But most importantly, there is another eternal freeze, which has a direct connection with graphic design.
Being a designer is not an easy cross to bear. It is not like in Western Europe. In simplified terms, it may be said that Russia does not like living well but badly. She likes not to live but to die well. To sacrifice herself and perform acts. The love for God is encoded in our genes. Is it impossible to love God and dislike your neighbour? In Russia, every impossible thing becomes possible. The Russian soul moves as a pendulum between the divine and demonic realms, ignoring the human things.
In Russia, graphic designers are more than just graphic designers. In the West, they can lean on culture and tradition. In our country, they not only have to solve a certain task, but also have to dissolve the uncivilised frostiness surrounding them during each and every project, which is indifferent to any beauty or everyday comfort, since it is unsuitable for it.
Russia is a huge country that you never get used to. The more you travel, the better you see how small the world is and how large Russia is. The world is getting smaller, but Russia is getting larger. She begins at the Black Sea and the warm Russian steppes; she runs wild through forests and mountains to the Northeast, then she flies into the open space upon the teaser of the Northwestern direction. Another diagonal of hers connects the Pacific shores with the White Sea and the Arctic Sea.
Otherwise, the diagonal is related to geometry. Russia is not America, where the states are connected along straight borderlines. She is not Europe with well-organised rooms of nations. No matter how the borders are, the outer frames will remain the same with exact unbroken lines, which are destined to protect the personal freedom as well as the linguistic, cultural, and the comfortable national identity.
There is no such a thing in Russia. There is no comfort. There is no geometry. This is the reason why they call any small and heat interior design “eurorenovation”. There are no exact lines. There are no roads. As the Russian proverb says, Russia’s biggest problems are “fools and bad roads”. There are no personal rights and there are no national borders. There is no such concept as border: for Russians only the space exists.
But design has connection even with borders, corners, lines, and geometry. It arranges the space and categorise s the modular network of forms, meanings, images, and lines accurately, considering the proportions and their importance carefully. The boundless, formless, continuous, and all-embracing space of the Russian cosmos is resistant to design. She definitely stands in its way with her centuries-old history and incredible geography. Since, she offers resistance stubbornly and morosely in her indestructibility.
Anna Kulachek — a young and fragile girl, who can be regarded as our follower with Yuri Gulitov and Peter Bankov — fights firmly in this field, structuring it angrily with descriptive geometry she created. She produces her posters from one end to the other with harmonious lines, energetic, shining figures, and precise paragraphs.
Yuri Gulitov and Peter Bankov have already understood it for a long time that it is impossible to defeat the wild energy of the Russian space. They decided not to break in but chart and integrate it into their own professional language and visual mentality. This energy permeates their rough letters, inclined typography, strange illustrations, and “hand-made” calligraphy, which is weird to call calligraphy at all, because calligraphy means nice graphics, elegance, and precision. Their calligraphy is not about that.
So, what are this calligraphy, whole Russian graphic design, and Russian school about? Might it not even know? Does it exist at all?
If we want to talk about the Russian graphic design school, it will be a kind of recollection of the future. It will happen in a utopian Russia. It definitely existed in the long past. There was an Old Russian icon painting, which was the culmination of the Russian soul that contributed to the development of the visual culture of the world. There were the brutal Russian lubok and the protodesign of the strict country life. Finally, the Russian avant-garde came into being in the 1920s, when the Russian graphic design became a global and universal phenomenon, but it still remained Russian. We can call it a national school.
A prominent Dutch graphic designer, Gert Dumbar said in an interview that the modern graphic design had three homelands: Russia, Germany, and The Netherlands. He put Russia in the first place. In his world-famous book called New Typography, Jan Tchichold wrote that the new typography was based on the Dutch neoplasticism, the Russian suprematism, and mainly the Russian constructivism.
When I got acquainted with Josef Müller-Brockmann, the patriarch of the Swiss graphic design school, I told him that he was the master and role model for the Russian graphic designers of the 1960s such as Maxim Zhukov, Mihail Aniksta, or Arkady Troyanker. They launched a kind of book design revolution in the Soviet publishing of books. He asked me if I knew who had the greatest influence on his professional development. He said that he regarded Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky as his greatest mentors.
The circle has closed. In my country, the road-roller of the Stalinist regime ground the Russian avant-garde down, which became suffocated and wiped out from the memories of several generations. In the 1960s, during the post-Stalinist” warming, we started to discover the graphic design again. We studied from the Western graphic designers, who had studied from our forgotten predecessors. The avant-garde returned home via German and English translations. The mentors of the Russian graphic designers were Swiss, German, and American masters, whose books were managed to get over the Iron Curtain by some miracle. The Iron Curtain protected the Russian people much more from their own history than from the West; thus, the Russian graphic designers could not say that they were disciples or followers of Alexander Rodchenko or El Lissitzky.
Nor can the members of the present generation say it about themselves. I think there are few Russian graphic designers, who represent the country internationally such as Vladimir Tchaika, Andrey Logvin, Yuri Surkov, the Faldinis, Andrey Shelutto, Erken Kagarov, Dmitry Kavko, and many others, who think so. The history of that profession has already been available for everyone, but until now no one is rushing to identify themselves with the Russian avant-garde. They do not reckon themselves as the heirs of the Russian avant-grade, in spite of the desire of the global profession.
Typographer Gayana Baghdasaryan said in an interview: “Many foreigners identify the Russian graphic design with the Russian avant-garde. It seems that the Russian avant-garde became a stereotype like the >>vodka-matryoshka-balalaika<<, in fact, we think much more complexly and do not want to get stuck only at the >>Russian brand<<”.
Igor Gurovich once told my students that they chose their own artistic path with Eric Belousov during a “brainstorming” at the beginning of the poster art. They concluded that they would combine the Polish and Dutch poster schools in their own works.
But here is a paradox. Recently, at the AGI conference (Alliance Graphique Internationale), Igor Gurovich showed a pile of posters in his presentation, which were made by him and Eric Belousov as well as the members of the Ostengruppe they founded. After the performance, Lars Müller, the president of the AGI of that time came to me to congratulate. “Here is the Russian school, here is the heritage of the Russian avant-garde”, he said enthusiastically.
In brief, no matter how much you intend to resemble someone else instead of yourself and how much you try to disguise yourself even with a mask, you will be recognised. On what basis? Who knows?
I asked foreign graphic designers about it. What is valuable and interesting in the Russian avant-garde today? Several answers were surprising. They listed the values below: “idealistic soul”, “possibility of breaking any rules”, “courage”, “creative freedom”, “passion for your own work”, “romance of the style”, “letters and numbers as elements of the free composition”, “integration with the modern media”, “artistic approach in the creation of letters”, “unrepeatable combination of photography, typography, and graphic elements”, “bold experimentation”, “the magic of typography”, “fourth dimension”, “boundlessness between design and art”.
Perhaps, these are the qualities that we have not understood about ourselves, but maybe the Russian design school will revive again from them in a better Russia. A real school; not just few heroes in a country, where is no design but there are designers.
Russia is a huge country. But she is held back by her space. But the call of these few heroes, who turn their heads to the sky, is hardly audible. The works of some of them are on display at the exhibition.
Russia is a cold country, but graphic design is the source of heat, light, colour, harmony, happiness, and beauty. May the design help defrost Russia, changing the state of mind, the style, and the landscape of our lives?
Sergei Serov, AGI
