Decoration by Vladimir Stenberg
Stenberg, Vladimir Avgustovich (March 23, 1899 —May 1, 1982), a Soviet graphic artist, Constructivist, scenographer and outstanding cinema poster designer, who worked together with his brother, Georgy, signing their joint works “2-Stenberg-2”.
The two brothers were born into the family of the Swedish artist A. Stenberg, who came to Russia in 1898 to work as a designer at the Nizhni Novgorod Fair. They attended the Stroganov School of Industrial Design (1912-1917) and the State Free Artistic Studios (1917-1920) and were members of the Society of Young Artists (OBMOKHU, 1919-1920), InKhuK (Institute of Artistic Culture, 1921-1924) and the Oktyabr association (from 1928 on).
They joined the Constructivists when at school and produced abstract ‘color structures’ and industrial models. Taking an active part in revolutionary propaganda, they decorated mass festivities and made an outstanding contribution to avant-garde scenography while working for A.Y. Tairov’s Chamber Theater. However, they went down in history primarily as the founders of cinema poster design. They started working for the Sovkino agency in 1923 and made 300 or so posters for motion pictures by S.M. Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, Charlie Chaplin and so on. Film-making found its first adequate expression in pictorial art through their flashy compositions that symbolically conveyed the gist of the film.
After his brother died in a car crash in 1933, Vladimir Stenberg was the chief artist of the All-Russia Agricultural Exhibition (from 1935 on) and of the Mayakovsky Museum (from 1941 on). He found his niche in public and military parade design, sticking to the strict Socialist Realism canons (which allowed for no extravaganza), and from 1932 to 1962 served as the chief designer of the Red and Soviet squares in Moscow. He also worked extensively in exhibition design, abandoning abstract compositions in favor of picturesque dioramas and panels (done for the Mikhail Frunze Museum in Shuya, 1949, etc.). Between 1968 and 1980 he reproduced his early abstract structures and stage sets.