Das schwarze Kuvert / The Black Cover

A Soviet film poster of 1922 designed jointly by Grigory Borisov and Nikolai Prusakov, one of the defining partnerships of Constructivist film advertising. Borisov and Prusakov were among the small group of Moscow designers who decided, in the early twenties, that a film poster should be engineered rather than illustrated. Their joint sheets are foundational documents of the style that would define Soviet graphic design for a decade. The sheet is horizontal, and the composition works through diagonal thrust and abrupt shifts of scale instead of a settled central figure. This is the Constructivist alternative to a portrait. A secret, assembled out of straight lines.

Maker

Grigory Borisov and Nikolai Prusakov

Date

1922

Medium of the original

One-sheet poster

Original held by

Wikimedia Commons

Credit

Wikimedia Commons · via Wikimedia Commons

Rights

Cleared for print

Catalogue number

PA-00757