Moscow Theater Festival

Victor Shestakov designed this poster around 1935 for a theater festival hosted by the Vsevolod Meyerhold Theater in Moscow, where he served as the principal set designer. Shestakov was active in the First Working Group of Constructivists, an association of artists and designers established in 1921 that promoted avant-garde design principles in visual art as well as decorative and applied arts. The group was composed of different branches: furniture and equipment intended for everyday life, children's books, clothing, and typographic production. Like many constructivists, Shestakov typically employed solid fields of color and bold lettering, lacking any identifiable imagery. The poster’s typography is stark and practically devoid of decorative elements. The productions presented during the festival ranged from Alexander Ostrovsky's “The Forest” and Nikolai Gogol's “The Inspector General” to Alexandre Dumas's “The Lady with Camelias.”