Daria Kostina

Reflections and Interpretations of Photography and Poster Design in Grigory Musatov’s Paintings in the late 1920s and early 1930s

Grigory Musatov (1889–1941) was the Russian émigré artist who left the country in 1920 and spent the rest of his days in Czechoslovakia, mostly in Prague, where he was an active painter and graphic artist. During the last two decades of his life, Musatov’s artistic vision changed several times but relations between his works and different photographic phenomena can be determined at every stage. The article is devoted to the shortest period of Grigory Musatov’s work that lasted approximately from 1928 until 1932. In these years artist got attracted by such relevant to the age themes as the industrial boom, technological advances, and sport. Musatov’s comprehension of these issues popular not only in painting and graphic art but also in photography and poster design was conjugated with the rethinking of the visual features of these mediums. The paper offers an analysis of Grigory Musatov’s paintings as a case of the specific interpretation of the typical narratives and visual characteristics of pictorial photography, modernist photography, pressphoto and poster design by one modern artist.

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