Featuring El Lissitzky

The inter-war period was a time of extraordinary change in Europe and a moment of radical inventiveness in the history of art and culture. The advance of the machine age brought with it mass production and a new sense of internationalism. This ‘heroic’ period of modernity found a particularly forceful expression in graphic design and photomontage, with new techniques enabling a fusion of typography, painting and photography for artistic, commercial and political ends.

After founding Futurism in 1909, F.T. Marinetti’s ambition was to establish an international movement that would develop his own group’s activities, achievements and interests. Futurist ideas quickly became familiar to Russian artists through translations of manifestos and newspaper articles, yet Marinetti’s visit to the country in 1914 provoked mixed responses. While many artists admired his revolutionary zeal others resented what they perceived to be Marinetti’s cultural imperialism.

The manipulation of photographic imagery is as old as photography itself, but the modernist conception of photomontage was a radical extension of techniques and creative attitudes that first emerged in Cubist, Futurist and Dadaist collage, in which cut-out photographs and fragments of newsprint from illustrated journals were pasted into drawings and paintings.