Stenberg brothers

Vladimir Stenberg (April 4 1899 [O. S. March 23 1899] – May 1, 1982) and Georgii Stenberg (October 7 1900 [O. S. October 20 1900] – October 15, 1933) were Russian avant garde Soviet artists and designers, best known for designing film posters for Sergei Eisenstein's movies, Dziga Vertov's documentaries and numerous imported films. The pair worked in a constructivist and, later, productivist styles, in a range of media, initially sculpture, subsequently theater design, architecture, and drafting. Their design work spanned clothing, shoes, and rail carriages, but they are most notable for their frequent use of film stills and their innovative approach to composition, which replaced traditional styles with non narrative collage or assemblage. "Ours are eye catching posters," Vladimir explained, "designed to shock. We deal with the material in a free manner . disregarding actual proportions . turning figures upside down; in short, we employ everything that can make a busy passerby stop in their tracks. The inventive results included a distortion of perspective, elements from Dada photomontage, creative cropping, an exaggerated scale, a sense of movement, and a dynamic use of color and typography, all of which "created a revolutionary new art form: the film poster."

The brothers were at their prime during the revolutionary period of politics and artistic experimentation in Moscow when there was a shift from the illustrator as creator to the constructor as creator or nonlinear narrator as creator. They first studied engineering, then attended the Stroganov School of Applied Art in Moscow, 1912–1917, and subsequently the Moscow Svomas (free studios), where they and other students designed decorations and posters for the first May Day celebration in 1918. In the 1920s–1930s, they were well established as members of the avant garde in Moscow and of Moscow's INKhUK (INstitut KHUdozhestvennoy Kultury, or institute of artistic culture). Other INKhUK members included Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Lyubov Popova, Medunetskii, other artists, architects, theoreticians, and art historians. INKhUK was active only 1921–1924.

On May 3, 2010 Swann Galleries sold the Stenberg Brothers' poster for a run of performances by the Theatre Karmeny de Moscou in Paris in 1923 for an auction record price of $9,600. The poster is the only one by the Stenbergs ever produced for use outside of the Soviet Union.