Futurist art - After the carnage of the First World War, many artists were filled with revolutionary spirit. It was a short-lived moment, finds Richard Cork
The end of the First World War was a time of exhaustion and economic uncertainty in Europe. But it was also a time of revolutionary optimism in Germany and Russia. Young artists seized on the boldness of pre-war experimental work and tried to spread its spirit throughout society. Hence the spectacular impact of the show of avant-garde graphics at the Estorick Collection in north London.
With works loaned from the outstand-ing collection of the American Merrill C Berman, the exhibition concentrates above all on the potency of the poster. Whether promoting politics, architecture, film or home furnishings, artists approa-ched the task with zeal. It was as if all their visual energy, pent up during the years of carnage, was unleashed at last.
Russia led the way, encouraging all too briefly an artistic radicalism. Gustav Klucis, deploying the new concept of photomontage, celebrated nothing less than the "electrification of the entire country" in one poster. A cloth-capped colossus, bearing an inevitable resemblance to Lenin, advances towards purged geometric forms. Shafts of electric energy radiate out, sending their power across the newly liberated nation.
Klucis continued to explore diagonal dynamism in his subsequent posters. In Towards a World October, Lenin's left arm points decisively over skyscrapers filled with purposeful workers. Stalin, standing beside him, seems to listen with passive obedience. But by the time Klucis designed another poster, The Reality of our Programme is Active Men and Women - You and I, Stalin had become leaden, marching centre-stage with ranks of smiling proletarians. The year was 1931, Lenin was dead, and the prime period of revolutionary innovation had been brutally terminated.
As late as 1929, El Lissitzky made an arresting poster for a Russian exhibition in Zurich. Here, a minimal building is dominated by a strange, Siamese twin- like beaming couple, their conjoined foreheads printed with "USSR" in fluorescent orange capitals. Yet all hope of cultural vitality had evaporated by 1930, when Alexei Gan designed a poster for Vladimir Mayakovsky's "Twenty Years of Work" show. The pioneering poet stands defiantly in a poster that integrates typography with photography and photomontage. Within a few months, however, Mayakovsky had committed suicide, worn down by Stalinist opposition.
Innovation and social change were becoming equally embattled in Germany. In 1923, Herbert Bayer and Karl Peter Rohl had both designed spare, dramatic posters for Bauhaus and constructiv- ist exhibitions. As the 1920s proceeded, Bayer's use of geometrical form grew more free: one poster shows a solitary man striding into a cosmic world where titanic discs are suspended in space. Lines shoot across the paper like voltage from an unseen power station.
Yet more unruly, protesting elements soon began to assert themselves. In 1927, Willi Baumeister deployed a new, graffito-like urgency and attack in his poster for an exhibition devoted to the home. A monochrome photograph of a faded and cluttered 19th-century interior has been cancelled out by a vigorous, roughly applied cross. Its angry and rebellious redness recurs in many of the political German posters.
John Heartfield used the same emotive colour in the headline of an image showing a haggard child desperately eating "the last piece of bread". He also put crimson bars across a German coin hovering above gun barrels at the ready. The words shout: "No Man, No Penny for Capitalist War Arms". But Heartfield knew that the build-up of armaments would not be stopped easily. In 1927, he produced an ominous photomontage of a bespectacled magnate sporting a bow tie, clutching an intricate model of a battlecruiser.
An even greater sense of menace dis- tinguishes Ladislav Sutnar's 1932 cover for the book Motorist and the Law. The familiar red returns, seeming to ensnare the black-and-white photograph of high-speed cars roaring around a circuit. Their drivers are caught in the sinuous and inescapable embrace of legal regulations. The versatile Sutnar was also adept at generating a mood of tranquillity. An outstanding Czech designer, he produced a deeply satisfying poster titled Exhibition of the Harmonious Home (1930). A pale and simplified jug with an elegantly curved handle seems to float, along with a glass tumbler, in a book-lined interior where striped patterns evoke curtains and the windows they flank.
In Holland, by contrast, Kurt Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg were busy creating the maximum amount of bourgeois outrage. In order to publicise their notorious 1923 tour of Holland, they produced a wildly anarchic poster called Little Dada Soiree. Spattered with the movement's name, the poster mounts a delirious assault. "Eric Satie's Rag-Time-Dada" is extolled, while nearby some angry black letters spell out the word "Banalitaten". Elsewhere on this scatter-gun sheet, the artists insist: "Dada est contre le futur, Dada est mort, Dada est idiot, vive."
The whole concoction issued an appropriate warning to anyone rash enough to attend the opening soiree in The Hague. Here, after van Doesburg announced that the Dadaists "would do something unexpected", Schwitters rose from the middle of the audience and barked out loud. Some people fainted and were carried out. The evening provoked such a furore that the two artists got sell-out engagements in Haarlem and Amsterdam.
We can only guess at the full, combustible force of these Dada onslaughts. But their poster retains its own inflam-matory impact today, exploding in the middle of this irresistible exhibition.
"Avant-Garde Graphics 1918-1934", a national touring exhibition from the Hayward Gallery, is at the Estorick Collection, London N1 (020 7704 9522) until 5 June
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