?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,000
KUKRYNIKSY [FOR THE SOVIET COUNTRY BEAT THE GERMAN BEASTS.] TASS WINDOW NO. 534. 1942. 83x44 inches, 210 3/4x111 3/4 cm. Condition B- / C+: tears, losses, creases and abrasions along sharp vertical and horizontal folds and in margins and image; tape in top margin; time-staining in text banner affixed to bottom; text banner affixed to top. Seven-sheets attached. Paper. "In the immediate aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, a group of artists and writers in Moscow joined forces under the auspices of the TASS News Agency, to produce large-scale posters [Tass Windows, so called as they were intended to hang in storefront or office building windows for all passers-by to view] - designed to reassure and rouse the Soviet citizenry while manipulating the information it received in the service of envisioning a new world order. Over the 1,418 days of World War II on the Eastern Front . . . the Tass studio produced some 1,240 designs" (Windows on the War p. 13). Devising almost a new image every day, they were each labor-intensive, multi-panel stencils, combining imagery with text. Kukryniksy was actually three artists, Mikhail Kupriyanov, Porfiri Krylov and Nikolai Sokolov, who combined letters from their names to come up with their collective working name. The trio designed over 70 Tass Windows between 1941 and 1945. For this poster, the text was written by A. Prokof'ev.
![KUKRYNIKSY. [FOR THE SOVIET COUNTRY BEAT THE GERMAN BEASTS.] TASS WINDOW NO. 534. 1942. 83x44 inches, 210x111 cm.](https://catalogue.swanngalleries.com/full//636\688636.jpg)
