The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 108

Klucis made this maquette, or model, as a design for a "radio-announcer"—a street-based loudspeaker—to be placed at city intersections, where it was to broadcast a speech by Lenin on the fifth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. An architecture of struts and cables supports geometric panels and gaily painted loudspeakers. The work clearly announces its purpose: the name "Lenin" appears in large red letters on an arrangement of vanes; black letters running across the leader's name spell the Russian word for "speech"; and in smaller letters above appear the words for "radio-announcer." Like other Constructivist artists, Klucis chose simple forms, declarative colors, and bold typography—the aim was to be easily understood. Intricately calculated and visually involving, the structure of crossbars and wire rigging is also completely open to view, and every part is self-explanatory in function.

Klucis had studied abstract painting and had worked in the Suprematist style, but after the Revolution he joined the many Russian artists who threw their energies behind the developing Communist state. Artists throughout Europe were trying to find aesthetic languages that would have a place in a world shaped by new industries, new technologies, and new social forms, a world of mass publics and mass media of communication. Radio-Announcer puts this concern into a Russian context: the attempt to build a utopian society.