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Brutal Bloc post cards

Title: Brutal Bloc post cards / designed and edited by Murray & Sorrell FUEL.
Publication: London : FUEL Design & Publishing, 2018.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request Scan Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schwarzman Building to submit a request in person.	Text	Use in library	JQD 18-493	Schwarzman Building - Art and Architecture Room 300

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Additional Authors

Description

191 pages : chiefly color illustrations; 17 x 21 cm

Summary

Brutal concrete hotels, futurist TV towers, heroic statues of workers--this collection of Soviet-era postcards documents the uncompromising landscape of the Eastern Bloc through its buildings and monuments. These are interspersed with quotes from prominent figures of the time, which both support and confound the ideologies presented in the images. In contrast to the photographs of a ruined and abandoned Soviet empire we are accustomed to seeing today, the scenes depicted here publicize the bright future of communism: social housing blocks, palaces of culture and monuments to comradeship. Dating from the 1960s to the 1980s, they offer a nostalgic yet revealing insight into social and architectural values of the time, acting as a window through which we can examine cars, people and, of course, buildings. These postcards, sanctioned by the authorities, were intended to show the world what living in communism looked like. Instead, this postcard propaganda inadvertently communicates other messages: outside the House of Political Enlightenment in Yerevan, the flowerbed reads "Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union"; in Novopolotsk, art-school pupils paint plein air, their subject a housing estate; at the Irkutsk Polytechnic Institute students stroll past a 16-foot-tall concrete hammer and sickle. These postcards are at once sinister, funny, poignant and surreal.

Alternative Title

Soviet era postcards from the Eastern Bloc

Subject

Genre/Form

History.
Pictorial works.

Call Number

JQD 18-493

ISBN

9780995745520
0995745528

OCLC

1039948200

Title

Brutal Bloc post cards / designed and edited by Murray & Sorrell FUEL.

Publisher

London : FUEL Design & Publishing, 2018.

Type of Content

text

still image

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Chronological Term

1900-1999

Added Author

Murray, Damon, editor.

Sorrell, Stephen, editor.

Added Title Page Title

Soviet era postcards from the Eastern Bloc

Research Call Number

JQD 18-493

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