Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge

Abstract

The author follows the historical path and transformations of one of the best known twentieth-century political posters, El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge The article surveys avant-garde art that moves from representing to changing the world and points out instances of such art in Italian futurism and Russian constructivism. Lissitzky’s poster is then described, and some of its transformations and appropriations in the history of the past century are detailed, showing how the poster has acquired a historic position among images of the Soviet Union that brought about remakes and applications in the USSR/Russia of the seventies and eighties. At that time it was also transformed into the logo of the “modernist” Chinese “Stars” group, which raises the question of how a Bolshevik political image could have served as an emblem for a non-politicized group of Chinese painters after the end of the Great Cultural Revolution. In the article the poster’s ideological and aesthetic connotations and denotations are also described.