“Seven Things About…” propaganda in the Collection of Posters and Graphic Design
Prepared by Viera Kleinová, curator of the Collections of Applied Art, Design and Architecture
White, grey, black, horizontal, vertical, total, hybrid — today we “experience” the broad and supple world of propaganda in the algorithms of the worldwide web as hoaxes, disinformation campaigns, trolling. As far back as the 17th century the Papal Commission for the Propagation of the Faith had the word propaganda in its title, but the true “conjuncture” of manipulative and suggestive narrative, aimed at mass-scale opinion-forming, came only in the 20th century. The postcard as pictorial and textual information diffused on a mass scale became, due to its enormous visibility, a favourite resource for ideological experiments. According to the German semiotician and philosopher Max Bens, postcards are nets in which people’s desires are caught. In particular, the constructors of attempts at new world orders have become well-established and highly agile clients of graphic design. Taking a look at the gallery collections of graphic design and poster art, one recalls the communist propaganda that made its exaggerated claims in our own hills and dales during the second half of the 20th century. Here, via works presented in a select and lapidary visual language, we give an airing to the artists of socialist realism and normalisation.
1/ Protohoaxes of the Cold War
Communist catalclysmic strategies in “top form” — a menacing, aggressive and perfidious accusation of the Western enemy, rendered by the Czech graphic artist, caricaturist and painter Lev Haas (1901–1983). The criminals in this case are the USA, which according to pro-Soviet propaganda in the early 1950s had committed an exceptionally vicious attack with biological weapons. It was alleged that American planes had scattered insects contaminated with the most virulent infectious diseases over North Korea and China. The hullabaloo this hoax created (principally) in the eastern bloc generated agitation on various levels — from media campaigns to the incitement of mass indignation, resulting for example in commitments by the working people, who expressed “their outrage at the criminal use of biological weapons by the American imperialists” by making a commitment of honour, unpaid and outside of normal working time, to produce injection needles, syringes and other health materials for their Chinese and North Korean friends. The story of Lev Haas fits precisely, like a diamond in a jewel box, into these “paranormal” Stalinist times. During the Second World War, as a Jew he made the frightful journey from the Terezin ghetto (there, incidentally, they accused him of spreading horror propaganda for sketches he had made from real life), through Auschwitz, where he was a sketch artist for Dr. Mengele, to “engagement” in command of a forgery unit in Sachsenhausen. Despite all this, or precisely because of it (?), he quickly became a believer in communism, and his impressive sketches, caricatures and illustrations became an effective hammer of propaganda in the early exploitation of monopoly power. But the hoary old truth that revolution devours its children soon caught up with Haas. Antisemitic passions inspired by the trial of Rudolf Slanský in 1952 made his position as one of the regime’s prominent artists dangerously unstable. In 1955 he definitively left Czechoslovakia.
2/ The Chinese Footprint of Anton Hollý
One cannot say that we’ve heard little of China in recent times. Quite the contrary, China is served up to us with obsessive regularity and persistence, with an opulent supplement of miseries, with a saturating and stifling scent of manipulation. Today you simply cannot avoid “Chinese cooking”, though you may still choose the ingredients and recipe for yourself. Communist China gave a good deal of importance to the image, made according to its taste, even in the “founding” times of Maoism, and it did not hesitate to produce alternative images, nondeferential and highly skilled, to those of the leader of red globalisation, the Soviet Union. Chinese-Czechoslovak friendship, actively fostered from the early 1950s, including via a lively cultural exchange, was achieved among other things through visits by delegations of precisely selected (meaning regime-affiliated) artists. Hence in 1956 one visitor to China was Anton Hollý (1915–1989), graphic artist, caricaturist, draughtsman, painter, and cadre member of the nomenklatura of the current visual artists’ professional organisation. The journey evidently was not as representative as in 1953, when prominent names had met there: for example Adolf Hoffmeister, Vojtech Mihálik, Vladimír Mináč, Mária Medvecká, Andrej Bagar and Vladimír Novotný, director of the Prague National Gallery, but the goal was the same. Anton Hollý registered “the building of socialism on the pylons of tradition stretching deep into Chinese cultural antiquity” by means of travel sketches, which he also presented at a special exhibition. As a delegate of “the cultural front”, he was required to convey to ordinary mortals, for whom China was as inaccessible and incomprehensible as in Marco Polo’s time, a feeling of solidarity (in the rhetoric of the comrade ideologists) between the friendly Czechoslovak and Chinese peoples. And since he was at the same time a collector, as a memento of the communist Orient he brought over 30 contemporary local posters. During the 1970s he sold them as part of his extensive poster collection, to the National Gallery.
3/ How (Chinese) Steel Was Tempered
Some years ago, in a study of Czechoslovak-Chinese relationships in the 1950s, the sinologist Martin Slobodník took a look at Anton Holly’s collection of Chinese propaganda posters. And although this was not part of his research task, he translated the poster texts and gave us information about the authors of some of them. We have therefore been able to identify one of the most famous Chinese poster artists of the second half of the 20th century — Cai Zhenhuaa (1912–2006). In our featured poster, this excellent comics sketch-maker and politically committed designer of important state commissions offers an ecstatic emotion of building socialism, derived from the early period of the Maoist republic (1949–1965). As regards the Czechoslovak-Chinese cooperation promoted here, its life was ephemeral. At the turn of the 1960s relations between Beijing and Moscow became notably embittered, and that meant the end of friendship for pro-Soviet satellites. It was in vain that Ján Kostra wrote: “… we know how People’s China was born in pain / how the steel was tempered in the fire / of party truth, which posted / a quarter of humanity / to the defence of peace…” The course had been reset, and the poem was deleted from a prepared anthology of Kostra’s works by the censors of the Print Administration.
4/ No Hoarding
“This is something appalling…” One of the many anti-social actions that a citizen of People’s Democratic Czechoslovakia must not commit was hoarding. To lay up one’s own supplies was forbidden in an egalitarian society. The premise of the victorious party Equal Shares to All was transformed in the years 1949–1952 to a “special” communist protection payment, in the crude form of obligatory deliveries to the state, the so-called “contingent”. In practice this meant that if you grew a crop or raised livestock, you did not have the right to feed your children first: the state belly had first claim on your pig. And it was no accident that it was mainly members of the suppressed minority (kulaks and other “former people”) who were inclined to commit “acts of sabotage of public supply”. Such people wished to “dissolve” the state that held workers, peasants and working intelligentsia in a happy embrace, all of them convinced that besides their work there was nothing they needed, as mammon did not interest them at all. The caricature agitational piece by Štefan Bednár (1909–1976), the Nestor of Slovak propaganda, illustrates this phenomenon of the new age as an intolerable crime, with the assistance of a tracking and punishing hand.
5/ Traps of the Aurora
A poster by Rudolf Altrichter (1916–1978) shows us an exceptional work of typography expressing extreme homage to a political festival implanted by the Soviet comrades: the Bolshevik putsch known as the Great October Socialist Revolution. The combination of extreme servility and progressive design was on the one hand a response to the weariness and emptiness of state rhetoric — in the same year (1967) as the poster was produced, the Department and Commission of the Political Poster in the Union of Visual Artists ceased to function, and the exhibiting activity specialising in the propagandist poster ceased also (for a while). Concurrently, the revolts of the 1960s produced a confident, powerfully artistic and activist type of art poster with a worldwide scope. These processes were occurring on both sides of the Iron Curtain, though with a different dynamics and power. In Slovakia one who notably caught this alternative wind in his sails was Rudolf Altrichter. He promoted the autonomy of the poster as creative artistic space with universal socio-political themes, such as for example the threats of war, which are only pro forma associated with the “style” of real socialism. One must add, however, in the same breath that he was also an exceptionally adept exponent of Communist Party propaganda.
6/ Treacherous Tears
The bloody tear identified with the date 21. 8. 1968 was the central motif of a poster by the Czech graphic designer Václav Ševčík (*1932), who was making an immediate comment on the act of Soviet occupation. Ševčík, a member of the Czech creative group Placard, was one of the few graphic artists who dared to comment openly on official state policy. That held true only for a moment, however: in the routine of normalisation the artist’s freedom and integrity were no longer cherished. Even in such a bastion of conservatism as the propagandist poster, however, change was not excluded. If we move onwards in time a few years, to 1971, we see that the peculiarly archaic rhetoric and empty figures of ideological massage were quietly beginning to recede. The poster by Ondrej Zimka (*1937), working with an almost identical motif of a weeping face, moves in the secure territory of ideologically suitable themes, without any discrediting flavour of anti-Sovietism. And yet this is a well-considered and high-quality execution of an artistic purpose, with a discreet trace of text, rendered with civility and empathy. The design won a large politically-informed competition, prepared as an introduction to the normalisation period and dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The works from this exhibition were never seen pasted up on streets; as in other fields of design, they were more like comprehensively refined camouflages, serving to preserve the regime’s legitimacy.
7/ Poster on the Gallery’s “battlefield”
In the SNG’s collection of graphic design and posters, the largest amount of space is taken by the cultural poster in a time range from the late 19th century to the present. Of these the propagandist posters form an extremely striking group, with more than 500 items. In part these have come to the collection via transfers from the Pravda publishing house (which used to issue propagandist materials for the whole of Slovakia); a further group of posters were given to the gallery as the foundation for a collection of “utilitarian graphic art” in 1962 by the Museum of Applied Arts in Prague; and a substantial part of the works was added via acquisitions in the 1970s and 80s. The collection was built with the artist’s distinctive opinion in mind and especially in the design register, and hence numerous works from officially favoured reviews of committed art found a place in it. These were the representative, non-routine and handsome face of political commissioning. By the late 1970s there was a phase of popularity of the political and agitational poster, reflecting a sense that the public was indifferent and even resistant to the ideals of socialism and hence that there was an acute need to mobilise them in a more personally-addressed and complex way. The first Permanent Exhibition of the Slovak Political Poster, unique of its kind, thereby came into being. It was installed in Zvolen Castle and showed work by “almost all representatives of this artistic genre…”, and evidently it fulfilled the ambitions of the politico-cultural apparatchiks. We do not know what ordinary people said about the exhibition, but the heading of the daily newspaper Pravda summed it up quite succinctly: “The Political Poster Tells Its Story”.
Literature and Sources:
Váross, Marian (author of introduction): Anton Hollý: Kresby z Číny (Sketches from China). Výstavná miestnosť Slovenského vydavateľstva krásnej literatúry, Bratislava, 1957
Slobodník, Martin — Lelkesová, Viera: „Ako rybky v akváriu“ — nepublikovaný strojopis Milana Ferka o ceste do Číny v decembri 1964 (“Like Fish in an Aquarium”: an unpublished typescript by Milan Ferko of a trip to China in December 1964). Studia Orientalia Slovaca 13/2, 2014, 209–272
AVU SNG, documentation of an exhibition and displays in SNG, 1978, with component Permanent Exhibition of Political Posters, Zvolen Castle
