Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg were graphic designers from Moscow who produced a range of amazing constructivist film posters during the 1920s.
Let's look at some of their work...
Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg were born in Moscow in 1899 and 1900 respectively. Their father was a Swedish artist who encouraged their interest in both painting and graphic design.
The Stenberg brothers were students at the Stroganov School of Applied Art when they first started to design posters. They founded the Society of Young Artists in 1919 and held their own constructivist art exhibition in 1922.
Visual arts were strongly supported in the early Soviet Union. Russia had a 60% illiteracy rate in the 1920s, so films and posters were widely used for mass communication.
The Stenberg bothers produced over 300 movie posters from 1923 until Georgii's death in 1933. They covered both Russian cinema and Hollywood imports.
Constructivism tries to make the audience an active viewer of the artwork; the Stenberg brothers used a playful mix of forced perspective, implied movement, expressive typography and bold colour to achieve this.
However their work wasn't pure constructivism; many avant garde influences - along with an expert knowledge of how film worked - helped create a unique approach to poster design.
As well as cinema posters the Stenberg brothers worked on magazine posters, set design and sculpture.
Much of what we take for granted in graphic design today was either pioneered by Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg or was shaped into effective and striking poster work.
It's both amazing and instructive to see the way the Stenberg brothers reinterpreted the Hollywood films for a Soviet audience: Buster Keaton and Mary Pickford were both given the constructivist treatment.
The Stenberg brothers understood the fundamental truth of poster design: no matter how clever or complex you may want to be, you only have a fleeting second to get across the emotion and the action of what you want to say.
Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg's work is as striking and captivating today as it was in the 1920s: bold, witty and direct. You can read more about them here: moma.org/interactives/e…
More posters another time...
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“Space is big. Really big,” as Douglas Adams observed. So why haven’t we seen any alien life yet?
Odds are a big universe must have some – or are the odds wrong? This is the Fermi Paradox, and today in pulp I’m looking at some of the novels that have explored it.
Don’t panic…
In 1950 Physicists Enrico Fermi and Michael Hart were chatting in the Los Alamos canteen when the topic turned to UFOs. Where were they? After a few calculations Fermi felt the probability of alien life was high enough; we just didn’t have any evidence ‘they’ were out there.
Frank Drake built on this in 1961. The Drake equation looked at the probabilities for how many stars and planets over what period could host life that could become intelligent and travel in space. Life on Earth meant the probability must be more than zero, but how much more?
Today in pulp... let me introduce you to Mark Hardin: The Penetrator!
Mark Hardin is a one-man strike force against corruption. Orphaned at the age of four he was brought up mean and hungry. He learned his fighting skills in Vietnam before returning to an America gone bad.
Actually The Penetrator is one of a long list of vigilante pulp heroes thrown up in the 1970s counter-counterculture backlash, along with The Destroyer, The Executioner The Iceman and The Marksman to name but a few.
Today in pulp I look back at an amazing but slightly forgotten British publisher: a company that made a virtue of necessity and an art form out of amazement...
Badger Books!
John Spencer and Co was founded in London in 1946 by Samuel Assael and specialised in publishing original fiction, normally written to order by freelance writers using house aliases. Like many pulp publishers they paid a flat rate for copy – up to ten shillings per 1,000 words.
Initially Spencer focussed on story magazines in digest and pocketbook form: Tales of Tomorrow, Out Of This World and Supernatural Stories focussed on fantasy and sci-fi short stories. But the digest market was beginning to decline as the post-war paperback market began to boom.
The Wimpy chain originally began in 1934 in Chicago. The name was inspired by the character of J. Wellington Wimpy from the Popeye cartoons created by E. C. Segar.
And in 1954 the company sold a license to J. Lyons & Co - owners of the Lyons Corner House - to use the Wimpy name in the United Kingdom.