Curator, Ellen Lupton: I'm Ellen Lupton. I'm a curator at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and I study the history and practice of graphic design.
Valentina Kulagina was a Russian artist and designer working in the 1920s in the new Soviet Union. She cut and pasted and painted and drew the elements of this original photomontage. Artists and designers in the ‘20s often clipped photos out of books and magazines to create new work. It was also common for them to paint or draw images by hand on top of these photographs. They would also add lettering and typography to their montages.
The image of the worker, who she has welding on top of a building, becomes a heroic symbol of the growing Soviet Union. Behind the worker, you see a photograph of a skyscraper, actually a photograph of Detroit, but she's overlapped that with her own more abstract gridded drawings of new buildings rising up. So, it's as if this worker is making possible this growing Soviet modernity.