?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,500
P. MERINOV (DATES UNKNOWN)
THE TRANSSIBERIAN EXPRESS / INTOURIST, MOSCOW. 1930.
39 1/4x27 3/4 inches, 99 1/2x70 1/2 cm. People's Commissariat of Trade of the USSR & RSFSR, Moscow. Condition A-: minor repaired tears at edges; small replaced loss in upper right corner.
Rather ironically, the "State Joint Stock Company for Foreign Tourists," (Intourist, the Soviet State Travel agency) was formed in April 1929, just six months prior to the stock market crash that plunged the Western world into the Great Depression. "As Socialist Realism was gradually taking over and the era of the avant-garde was coming to an end, there were no official guidelines on the Intourist style, and in the first two or three years it was still up to the artists and the Committee to decide how to address the discriminating Western audience" (Intourist p. 17). "The impulse of the avant-garde . . . is still evident in the early publications of Intourist artists, who struggled to identify a vivid and contemporary visual language appropriate for export without being too inappropriate for the country it was imported from. The influence of Rodchenko and Constructivist stylistic devices is evident [in some early Intourist posters], while Lissitsky appears again in the image of the 'Trans-Siberian Express' . . . [these] early posters created an adventurous and attractive reality, overall charged with energy and enthusiasm" (Intourist p. 18). The Trans-Siberian railway cut the travel time between Europe and the Far East by more than half. A trip that would take as long as 36 days by steamship could be accomplished in 12 days by rail. Rare. Intourist pl. 2.
