Windows on the War
Adam Jolles, Associate Professor and Chair of FSU’s Department of Art History, is co-curator of the exhibition Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 19411945 on display at the Art Institute of Chicago later this summer. The Art Institute calls the exhibition “not only a fascinating glimpse into one of the most significant government-sponsored cultural efforts of the 20th century, but also a major scholarly undertaking that brings these posters into the public eye for the first time in six decades.”
The project with the Art Institute is related to research Dr. Jolles has been conducting recently on Soviet arts policy under Stalin. He is planning a book on the Soviet Museum Reform movement of 192837, which “saw the reorganization of all public museums toward a strictly didactic model, one in which viewers were carefully instructed on the correct political interpretation of objects and images, both Soviet and otherwise. The close correlation of word and image in these prewar installations mirrors the polemical nature of the TASS posters issued the following decade.”
The exhibition’s 400-page catalogue features hundreds of images and essays by Dr. Jolles and a team of noted scholars from around the globe. “Windows on the War is a groundbreaking publication, the first in English to focus on posters, designed by the Soviet Union’s TASS News Agency to bolster support for the Soviet war effort. TASS posters were created by a large collection of Soviet writers, printers, and artists, including such notables as Mikhail Cheremnykh, Nikolai Denisovskii, the Kukryniksy, and Pavel Sokolov-Skalia,” Yale University Press.
The exhibition runs July 31-October 23, 2011 at Regenstein Hall. Adam Jolles will lecture at the museum on July 29 at 2 pm.