Vision and Communism

Coming of age at the close of the relative artistic freedom and dynamic avant-garde experiments that defined the Soviet 1920s, Viktor Koretsky (1909-1998) belongs to the generation of Soviet artists who negotiated the fraught landscape of state-mandated Socialist Realism and Stalinist political repression. After being educated in Moscow’s art schools, Koretsky embarked on a professional career as a poster artist in 1931. Even during these early years, he did not adhere to the narrow orthodoxy of the official Socialist Realist method. Instead, he sought out the most innovative work in graphic design, both in the USSR and abroad-including familiarizing himself with the photomontages of artists such as Gustav Klutsis, Valentina Kulagina, and John Heartfield. Soon Koretsky began experimenting with a variety of new visual techniques indebted to photography and film, even as he contributed graphic work to various publishing houses and theater companies.

During World War II, known in the USSR as the Great Patriotic War, Koretsky became famous for the powerful, emotion-charged images he produced on behalf of the war effort. His design for the anti-Nazi poster Save Us!, which depicts a Soviet woman and child being threatened by a Wehrmacht bayonet, is arguably the best-known work of Soviet propaganda from the entire era. In the postwar years Koretsky diversified his art by taking on new subjects, many of them dealing with themes of international cooperation, such as Soviet-led campaigns for human rights and nuclear disarmament. In 1964, Koretsky received one of the most prestigious awards for a Soviet artist, the title of Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Koretsky’s art continued to grow in international stature, as younger generations of Eastern European poster artists adopted his aggressive, confrontational visual style.

Koretsky’s posters have long been in the collections of Moscow’s Russian State Library, the Central Museum of Russian Armed Forces, the Office of the Moscow Mayor, and St. Petersburg’s State Public Library. More recently his works have entered private collections and museums worldwide.