“Poisoned” with the West: Popular Music Posters from Soviet Ukraine Vasyl Kosiv

Despite some censorship and the party committees’ involvement, Ukrainian music posters were given leeway, which would have been unacceptable for other genres. “Antagonistic” Western styles were combined with Ukrainian content.

“These are not our clouds, these are foreign clouds!” — one of the members (M) of the artistic council (the censorship committee) said to Ashot Arutunian (A), an artist from Kyiv, when the latter submitted his surrealist design to be the official poster for a film festival in 1986. “Foreign clouds? What are you talking about?” — the artist was quite surprised. “Are you a Party member?” was the next question. A: “Yes. So what?” M: “So why did you paint such clouds?” A: “What has Party membership got to do with clouds? Haven’t you seen clouds? These are stormy clouds.” M: “Why stormy clouds? Explain why there are stormy clouds above Kyiv?” The proposal was rejected, but many other “foreign style” posters made it through and were printed by state publishing houses in large volumes. It was one of the late Soviet Union’s paradoxes: in the 1970s and 1980s, it was still impossible for Western modernism and popular visual culture to be exhibited in public galleries. Nevertheless, surrealism, op art, pop art, and even psychedelic graphics were legally present in urban spaces. How was it possible and what kind of posters were these?

The explanation goes back to the summer of 1957 and the World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow, which was a breakthrough event opening the door to Western popular culture. Thousands of guests, including those from the “capitalist” countries, inspired a trend for jeans, English language slangs and rock-n-roll. With Khrushchev’s thaw, such fashion spread all over the Soviet Union, including Soviet Ukraine. Black markets for music albums became places where Soviet youth could satisfy their hunger for the latest hits. Those who lived along the western border of the country listened to Radio Luxembourg and Polish Radio. Starting from the mid-1960s, student music bands emerged in all the big cities of Ukraine, and some turned professional receiving the official title of being a “Vocal and Instrumental Ensemble”. It seemed more appropriate for the KGB and Komsomol officials to tolerate (or even organize) local creativity than to have students singing British and American hits.

For the music bands of the 1970s and 1980s, the main artistic approach was to combine popular Western trends with local Ukrainian culture. This was a common practice not just in music, but stage costume designs merged fashionable silhouettes with folk pattern decorations. A powerful example of such an approach was observable with the band Kobza. They combined the electric guitar with the Ukrainian bandura to create an electric bandura. Poster designers also followed suit, incoporating popular visual vocabulary from the West to illustrate Ukrainian content. Where did they pick up this vocabulary? Two major sources have to be mentioned. First, there were art and design magazines from other socialist countries. Polish, Hungarian, Bulgarian and East German publications reported about the latest trends in the West and reproduced major artworks. These magazines could be subscribed to in the USSR and became alternative educational material for students and professionals. Despite censorship (certain pages of the magazines turned blank on the way to their subscribers) this channel of communication functioned rather well. The other source of inspiration was Poland and its International Poster Biennale in Warsaw (since its inception in 1966). All major Ukrainian poster designers confess that they either travelled to attend the Biennale or were familiar with its catalogues. Polish poster designs were at their peak in the 1970s, but for Ukrainian designers, it was also a chance to see the latest graphic trends from all over the world exhibited in the neighboring socialist country. Vitaliy Shostia, a Kyiv-based poster designer who regularly visited the Warsaw Biennale, called Poland “a place in the curtain where you could smuggle one suitcase”.

Surrealism as an artistic method has been quite popular in graphic design since the 1930s. This style has been probably the most used (and abused) in the advertising industry. Ukrainian designers were no doubt familiar with commercial rehashings of Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali through foreign magazines. There were a number of famous Czech and Polish artists who created theater and film posters in this style. As a result, posters for Ukrainian music bands Mriya, Kobza, Stozhary, and Taras Petrynenko were transformed into surrealist puzzles.

Valery Viter, a professional artist and Kobza band singer, experimented with collages and foreground placement. Ashot Arutunian, a Kyiv cinema poster artist, would paint in a photorealistic style to create mystical scenes and mimic European and American film titles. Some of the posters from the late 1970s to early 1980s were conceptually close to the “psychic automatism in its pure state” of Andre Breton, where one cannot explain the logic of an image but the overall effect is fascinating. Ashot Arutunian, when asked to explain the idea of his 1988 Petrynenko poster, admitted that for him it was not necessary to have a particular idea. “It could have been something else, a water drop with his portrait. Anyway, what you see is just a fantasy.” Another type of surrealism in late Soviet poster design in Ukraine looked “marvellous”, sometimes “uncanny”, and continued formal experiments from the 1920s. However, in terms of communication, its method was quite different. There was a logic and a particular message behind each image. Following their Polish colleagues, Ukrainian artists would use metaphors. Every element had its symbolic meaning, while together as a whole, they presented a clear message.

Optic Art made its way into Ukrainian design through a single major international design project. It was neither the 1965 New York MOMA exhibition nor the wide publicity that followed in the West, but Lance Wyman’s logo for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City which made op art popular worldwide. Multiplied outlines, linear vibrations and patterns with illusionary movement appeared in Ukrainian posters starting in 1969. Yavir, Mriya, Veselka, Krayany and other music bands presented themselves with posters where singers’ pictures were combined with abstract “optic” backgrounds. Some of the designers tried to move one step further looking for particular graphics and color rhythms in Ukrainian folk art. They would transform embroidery or ornamental weaving into abstract geometric patterns. It proved to be an interesting point of reference for official art and design education and ideology which stressed the importance of the roots of folk art. As a result, these music posters from the 1970s can be recognized as both abstract optic art pieces and statements about the musicians’ national identity. Because of its formal neutrality, op art was a relatively safe style to use. Thus, there are a couple of examples of political posters applying optic effects to promote collective farming or represent communist symbols.

Pop Art, as a movement that borrows from popular (commercial) culture, relies on contextual change. When something familiar from everyday life is enlarged, given a title, and moved to a gallery space, new meanings begin to appear. In this sense, pop art is described as postmodern. For the Soviet poster artists as well as for their audience, visual elements of pop art were rather new and modern. Raster enlargement, bold outlines, posterisation of portraits and airbrushed photorealistic rendering all refreshed their technical vocabulary. These “fashionable” Western means of producing graphics was also a major contextual change in Ukraine. Hardly could one find more “non-Soviet” representations of the Soviet cultural scene. In the local Ukrainianl context, this “capitalist” and “bourgeois" style would often merge with national elements. Bands with very Ukranian-sounding names (e.g. Olesia, Chervona Ruta, Vodohray), would have a visual presence through posters which appeared as non(anti)-Soviet. Viewers might have been unaware of the particular origins of these graphics, but most certainly they could read the connotations attached to Ukrainian identity.

Psychedelia was one of the shortest but also one of the brightest moments in 20th century art and design. Most of its visual lexicon developed between 1967 and 1970 in London, New York, and San Francisco, influencing other cities and countries in subsequent years. The style is very much associate with the rock music scene: most graphic art was produced for concerts, parties, and album covers. Both musicians and designers would experiment with narcotics, transferring their hallucinations into art. Psychedelic graphics employed radical color contrasts, distortions of images, borrowings from pop art, optic art as well as Art Nouveau and Vienna Secession. It is rather difficult to find a direct relationship between British or American artistis and Soviet Ukrainian counterparts. Once again, Poland must be mentioned. Not only was it a country where the latest European design trends could be learned from magazines, but also a place where these trends were creatively transformed into a design language which became well-known. In any case, as Ukrainian poster artists recall, they considered psychedelic graphics a Polish invention. One more confession comes from Ukrainian artists — unlike their colleagues in the West, they never used narcotics to create psychedelic images. Alcohol could be involved, but neither poster designers nor musicians, for whom they produced the artwork, experienced psychedelic drugs. Of course, they knew about hippies, but did not really embrace such a way of life. Thus, Soviet Ukrainian psychedelic design is yet another example of appropriating a style and employing it in the context of Brezhnev's Soviet Union. Another paradox is the difference in printing technologies. While San Francisco or London’s posters came out rather small and cheap, Soviet posters were printed on high quality A1 paper with the best technology that state publishing houses had on offer.

It was common for all the mentioned stylistic devices in Ukrainian posters to be semiotically flexible. In in the West, where they originated, these styles were connected to particular cultural, social or political contexts as well as with a time and place. They were visual embodiments of manifestos or reactions to certain artistic movements.

The Ukrainian imitations did not follow such links. Surrealist “psychic automatism” turned out to be thought-out, logical constructions. Optic art was no longer abstract and looked for symbolic expressions Pop art moved away from its critical vulgarization of advertisement and re-embraced its commercial function. Psychedelic graphics lost its revolutionary spirit and was used in messages coming from the establishment. Hence, graphic styles in Ukrainian posters rarely had the same significance as in the Western “originals”. In most cases, it had no meaning at all, being “cleansed” of the original contexts and semantic relationships. As a mere “graphic shell” it could be used for any content in visual communication.

Despite some censorship (Union of Artists, publishing houses) and the party committees’ involvement, Ukrainian music posters were given leeway, which would have been unacceptable for other genres. “Antagonistic” Western styles were combined with Ukrainian content. Too dangerous and noxious to be exhibited in Soviet museums, such graphics were legally sponsored by the state and distributed in thousands of copies. One explanation for this paradox was the censors’ poor knowledge of Western art. For many, the new visual language was rather ideologically neutral and presented pure formal experiments. Another explanation is that the people generally regarded music posters as something less serious. It was not a representation of a Soviet reality, but an artistic fiction that had nothing to do with people’s everyday lives. Yet another weakness of the censors was their concentration on the poster’s verbal content and iconography. All the while, they could hardly read the political connotations inherent in style. In the late 1970s and 80s, this was also true for political posters. As one artist admits, censors underestimated the power of graphic style: “With graphic style alone we were able to undermine the system .” And indeed, as some examples show, when a Communist Subotnik poster appeared as a surrealist puzzle, when the Red Star was transformed into optic vibrations, or when all the typography in a May Day poster was distorted like in hallucinations, it was the beginning of the end.

Vasyl Kosiv – has been teaching visual communication since 1998. He graduated from Lviv Academy of Arts and received his PhD from Kharkiv Academy of Design and Arts in Ukraine. In the 2003–2004 academic year he lectured at Kansas State University and worked as a visiting scholar at Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. He served as a Deputy-Mayor of the City of Lviv from 2006 to 2013. He spent 2015-2016 academic year in the USA as a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University in New York. Currently he is working on his habilitation monograph about Soviet Ukrainian and Ukrainian Diaspora graphic design.