A Mirrorof the
Big Idea

In 1929 — two months after Black Thursday — Stalin turns fifty and the Soviet Union turns to a problem no five-year plan can solve by decree: it needs hard currency. The answer is a travel agency. Intourist, a fusion of inostrannyj and turist, is founded by the Commissariats for Railways and Commerce to sell the first socialist state to capitalist travellers — the all-inclusive model in the communist model country.

The advertising had to speak a language Western audiences already loved. While Soviet domestic propaganda outlawed Western influence, Intourist was licensed to borrow from it: the geometry of Cassandre — born Adolphe Mouron in Kharkov, of all places — the viaduct trains and streamlined liners of European Art Deco. Under the artistic direction of painter Aleksey Kravchenko at the Chamber of Commerce, competitions brought forward a young generation — Nikolay Zhukov, Sergey Sakharov, Maria Nesterova-Berzina, Sergey Igumnov — who fused ideologically faithful realism with export-grade Deco dazzle into a style that belongs to neither world entirely.

The posters showed a model state of 189 peoples and a tourist paradise, not a country of labourers: fashionable women in open train windows, big-game hunts, Black Sea resorts, the Red Arrow gliding quietly instead of blazing. The contrast with reality could be brutal — while brochures praised sunflowers on whitewashed Ukrainian walls, the Holodomor starved millions. By the Second World War a million foreign guests had come to the fantasy empire. The images stayed behind as some of the most seductive commercial art the USSR ever produced — and virtually unknown inside the country itself.

The Tradition ContinuesEin eigener EntwurfСобственный эскиз

Patriki, 2022

The collection's only motif that looks forward: an original contemporary design by Paul Grabowski and Oliver Kempkens.

Ninety years after the first Intourist competitions, the idiom is turned on the present: the café society of Moscow's Patriarshiye Prudy quarter — Patriki — rendered with the flat planes, theatrical light and lettering of the 1930s sheets, the ИНТУРИСТ globe signing off at the bottom edge as it always did. Where the historical posters sold an illusion to the West, this sheet records a real place at a real moment — advertising nothing, remembering everything.

Paul Grabowski & Oliver Kempkens, Moscow 2022 — original design, part of the collection.