Stenberg Brothers: Constructing a Revolution in Soviet Design

The Stenberg brothers, like their contemporaries Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, were artists of immensely varied interests and eclectic skills. They were sculptors, architects, and stage and costume designers, and were enamored of the film and montage theories developed in the suddenly burgeoning Soviet film industry. As seen in this book's superb colorplates, they brought to film poster design an extraordinary compositional dynamism, originality, and contrast of scale, employing many of the artistic conventions of the Constructivist movement to great effect.

Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg were born, respectively, in 1899 and 1900 in Moscow. As teenagers, the brothers studied theater design and decorative painting at the Stroganov School of Applied Art. Their professional collaboration began in 1917, when they worked together on the restoration of the stage at the Moscow Club of Railway Workers. They helped establish the First Working Group of Constructivists, were regularly commissioned to decorate the streets of Moscow for mass holidays, designed sets and costumes for the Moscow Music Hall and Bolshoi Theater, and created film posters for the government film agency Goskino. Georgii died young in a motorcycle accident in 1933; Vladimir remained a creative worker until his death in 1982.