Hope or Menace? Communism in Germany Between the World Wars

Anonymous... Attention! The Red Soviet Pilots are Coming (1928, Lithograph in two colors on beige wove paper, Broadsheet for an air show, The Merrill C. Berman Collection). From the exhibition Hope or Menace? Communism in Germany Between the World Wars, March 25 - June 13, 2008 at Galerie St. Etienne in New York. "...The early Weimar era was the only period in the history of modern art in which most leading members of the avant-garde sought to engage directly with the broader community. They documented contemporary society in furtherance of a pointed political agenda, believing that the act of bearing witness would inspire constructive change. To this end, they sought to circumvent the conventional means of making and distributing art. Painting was far too bourgeois, too precious, too viscerally marked by the artist's ego. Printmaking, photography and photomechanical reproduction all offered the possibility of reaching a large and ostensibly proletarian audience with inexpensive multiples. The newer techniques, such as photo-montage, also had the advantage of minimizing any traces of the artist's personal touch."