Gustav Klutsis

Biography

In January 1938 Klutsis was preparing to travel to New York for the World’s Fair. Instead he was arrested: on 16 or 17 January; the accounts differ. Five weeks later he was shot.

He was born on 16 January 1895 (4 January, Old Style) in the Ķoņi parish of Volmar county, near Rūjiena, into a Latvian family. From 1911 to 1915 he studied in Valmiera and at the Municipal Art School in Riga, where his teachers were Janis Rozentāls, Vilhelms Purvītis and Janis Roberts Tillbergs. The sources disagree on dates: some give 1912 or 1913 as the start of his Riga studies, others 1911. In 1915, in the middle of the war, he found himself in Petrograd, where he studied at the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. In 1917 Klutsis served in Latvian rifle units. He later wrote that he took part, rifle in hand, in the overthrow of the autocracy and of the Provisional Government, and that in the first days of October he volunteered for the 9th Latvian Rifle Regiment, in the machine-gun team, and guarded the Smolny. In July 1918 he took part in the suppression of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary uprising. In the autumn of 1918 an exhibition of works by Red Latvian riflemen opened in the Kremlin, and its most gifted participants, Klutsis among them, were advised to continue their art education. In 1919 he joined the Communist Party and, as part of a machine-gun team, guarded the Council of People’s Commissars and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in the Kremlin.

He studied at the State Free Art Studios under Konstantin Korovin, Antoine Pevsner and Kazimir Malevich, and in 1920–1921 at Vkhutemas, the state art and technical school in Moscow. His early works include “Red Man” (1918), “Dynamic City” (1919) and “Axonometric Painting” (1920). From 1918 he turned to photomontage. He is named as one of four artists who claim to have invented political photomontage, along with Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann and El Lissitzky.

He worked with Inkhuk (the Institute of Artistic Culture), with the Left Front of the Arts (LEF) and with the group Unovis (Affirmers of the New Art). In 1921 he married the artist Valentina Kulagina, with whom he often worked afterwards: to save money they posed for the posters themselves and inserted their own figures into images of shock workers and peasants. In 1922 Klutsis devised a series of portable agitation kiosks for the streets of Moscow, combining a “radio-orator”, a screen and newspaper stands. From 1924 until the school closed in 1930 he taught at Vkhutemas. Together with like-minded colleagues he proposed a “Workshop of the Revolution” there; its programme, printed in the journal LEF in 1924, promised to train young artist-organisers for the struggle “by means of visual influence”.

In 1922–1928 he designed Constructivist clothing and designed exhibitions. In 1927 he made stained-glass windows for the pavilion of the All-Union Printing Exhibition; in 1928 he took part in designing the Soviet section at the International Press Exhibition (Pressa) in Cologne and made display equipment for an exhibition of Soviet art in Brussels. In the same year he was one of the founders of the group October. Among the posters of these years are “Let Us Fulfil the Plan of the Great Works” (1930) and “The USSR Is the Shock Brigade of the World Proletariat” (1931); in 1931 he published the article “Photomontage as a New Kind of Agitation Art”. In 1937 he designed the Soviet pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris.

To my mind, the fate of his posters is best seen in the dates: in the early 1920s they were built on Constructivist methods, and by the mid-1930s they mostly served the cult of Stalin.

He was arrested on a charge of taking part in a “fascist conspiracy of Latvian nationalists”, and was said to have belonged to an armed terrorist organisation. The sentence was passed by an NKVD commission and the USSR Prosecutor on 11 February 1938, and he was shot on 26 February at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. In 1956 he was rehabilitated. Kulagina preserved her husband’s legacy. Klutsis’s works are in the Tretyakov Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and museums in Latvia: the Latvian National Museum of Art has devoted a “Gustav Klutsis Cabinet” to him. In 2017 a new street in Riga was named after him.