Red lines: David King’s stockpile of Soviet design agitates again at Tate Modern
As art editor of The Sunday Times Magazine between 1965 and 1975, David King helped revolutionise magazine design in the UK and beyond. Working with art director Michael Rand, King brought a new visual punch to the country’s first Sunday supplement, just three years old when he arrived, using bold sans serif type and tightly cropped photography, and putting together photo stories with cinematic sweep.
On the side, King also designed the covers for The Who Sell Out and Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland and photographed Muhammad Ali training for the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ bout with George Foreman (King took up editorial photography, using a Nikon F2, after four hours of instruction from Don McCullin). He also came up with a logo for the Anti-Nazi League, designed the covers for City Limits, a leftist rival to London’s Time Out guide, long departed, and later worked with Bruce Chatwin on Photographs and Notebooks.
King was also a historian and a serious Russophile, putting together one of the largest collections of Soviet posters, flyers, magazines and photography anywhere and publishing a series of revelatory books on Soviet history and visual culture, and the use and abuse of photography, including The Commissar Vanishes and Red Star Over Russia.
King passed away last year, aged 73, and his collection was bought by Tate. This month, to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Tate Modern is opening ‘Red Star Over Russia: A Revolution in Visual Culture 1905-55’, drawing on just some of King’s 250,000-piece strong Soviet stockpile.
King first visited the Soviet Union in 1970, hunting background material for an article about the centenary of Lenin’s birth. He was already an admirer of Soviet Constructivist design, this before the cult of Aleksandr Rodchenko. (King was in many ways central to the development of that cult. He worked with David Elliott at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford on a groundbreaking Rodchenko show in the late 1970s. The curator of the Tate exhibition, Matthew Gale, says King tired of the associations, though the influence on his work was clear. ‘He went a bit off the boil with Rodchenko,’ Gale says. ‘He thought that Gustav Klutsis was doing things that were even more exciting. But you can see how magazines like The Face came out in the wake of the interest in that period, filtered through things like The Sunday Times Magazine. That is another spiral of history on top of all the others in the exhibition.’) King was also a Trotsky obsessive. He began collecting as much Trotsky-related material as he could then spread out, making contacts in Russia, eastern Europe but also in the US and Mexico and developing a kind of mythology around his detective work. ‘He could spin a good story,’ says Gale, ‘and you think about story and history sometimes.’
Gale first collaborated with King 15 years ago. He says the importance of the collection is not just its depth and breadth but King’s particular way in. ‘There is something about that single-mindedness and his visual take that make it a particular thing,’ he says. ‘At the beginning, there was a fascination with the rich design culture of the 1920s and 1930s, not just in Russia but also Germany. And that clearly influenced the way he designed things. But he also had that collector’s bug. He needed to get everything. Up until he died, he was still trying to complete collections of obscure Russian magazines.’
The exhibition pulls in art and design from Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Klutsis and Nina Vatolina. It also covers the Bolshevik ‘agitprop’ trains, mural-splashed travelling PR machines aimed at explaining the goals and means of the new government. And more broadly at how much public art, from propaganda posters to monumental sculptures to street performance, was a feature of Soviet life in its first optimistic flush. But it also looks at its souring and the terrors of Stalinisation. There are stark mug shots of those dragged to the Moscow show trials and off to the Gulags or the gallows.
As Gale says, in some ways the exhibition is also about the particular power of paper, print and effective design; of posters, pamphlets, magazines and flyers to, as the saying went, ‘educate, agitate, organise’. It is a power hard to imagine now. And these are traces easily lost, forgotten or denied. ‘It is vulnerable material – because people just throw it out or because others actively want to suppress it. This is exactly what King was hoarding. He has some flyers that were thrown out of the back of the lorries at the moment of the revolution. These are not things that readily survive.’ The show is also about photography, its unique charge and abuse in a repressive state. And again there are resonances to pick up on. ‘Some of King’s work was about people being photoshopped out of history and that is so easily done now. Does that mean we are able to wipe people from history?’
Gale admits that there are losses and gains in moving King’s collection from a domestic to an institutional setting. ‘His house was an extraordinary place. And if you went to visit him and he thought of something he wanted to show you, he could just pull it out and tell you what page it was on. Part of the impact of his death, apart from the personal one, was this sudden vacuum of knowledge. The collection has morphed into this thing that has an institutional apparatus, going from warm to cold I suppose. But we have this amazing public resource now, something we can keep revisiting.’
As originally featured in the November 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*224)
INFORMATION
‘Red Star Over Russia: a Revolution in Visual Culture 1905-55’ is on view until 18 February 2018. For more information, visit the Tate Modern website
ADDRESS
Wallpaper* Newsletter
Receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories from around the world direct to your inbox.
Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
-
Postcard from Paris Design Week 2024
Surrealism, restraint and a beautiful show of Blunk marked the new season of design events in the French capital
By Dan Thawley Published
-
Hermès cuts a dash with its first sports watch for women
The Hermès Cut epitomises the clean design codes of the house
By Hannah Silver Published
-
First look: ‘Ash Rise’ – 20 Scottish designers explore the versatility of the blighted native hardwood
A new Edinburgh exhibition addresses the issue of ash dieback with an inventive and optimistic response from Scotland’s design community
By Alyn Griffiths Published
-
FKA Twigs at Sotheby’s: healing, rawness and Eusexua
FKA Twigs debuts durational artwork at Sotheby’s, London, to coincide with new album launch, Eusexua. Wallpaper’s Hannah Silver was there
By Hannah Silver Published
-
Peggy Guggenheim: ‘My motto was “Buy a picture a day” and I lived up to it’
Five years spent at her Sussex country retreat inspired Peggy Guggenheim to reframe her future, kickstarting one of the most thrilling modern-art collections in history
By Caragh McKay Published
-
Artist Jonathan Baldock plays hide and seek with the windows of Hermès' London flagship
A series of fantastical, brightly coloured hedges, dotted with peepholes, transform Hermès' New Bond Street store, offering an interactive experience for the passerby
By Anne Soward Published
-
Penny Slinger’s 1970s erotic Photo Romance asks: ‘Is this where my story begins?’
Artist Penny Slinger’s seminal ‘An Exorcism’, gets an immersive outing
By Caragh McKay Published
-
Please do touch the art: enter R.I.P. Germain’s underground world in Liverpool
R.I.P. Germain’s ‘After GOD, Dudus Comes Next!’ is an immersive installation at FACT Liverpool
By Will Jennings Published
-
‘Happy birthday Louise Parker II’: enter the world of Roe Ethridge
Roe Ethridge speaks of his concurrent Gagosian exhibitions, in Gstaad and London, touching on his fugue approach to photography, fridge doors, and his longstanding collaborator Louise Parker
By Zoe Whitfield Published
-
‘A gentleness in the hard truths’: behind the scenes at Slave Play
Slave Play, London is on at the Noël Coward theatre – Amah-Rose Abrams reports on a ‘hilarious, tender, confronting’ performance and its masterful mirrored set
By Amah-Rose Abrams Published
-
‘Regeneration and repair is a really important part of how I work’: Bharti Kher at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Bharti Kher unveils the largest UK museum exhibition of her career at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
By Will Jennings Published