Artist. A leader of the early Soviet avant-garde, associated with the Constructivist movement. He is best known for his political posters, which made pioneering use of photo montage. While their propaganda content is now terribly dated, Klutsis’ dynamic pictoral sense and imaginative juxtapositions raise his images to the level of art. He often combined photographs of several people to create one stylized composite figure. Modern critics find ambiguity in his posters of the 1930s, theorizing that he used his deliberately flat, anti-realistic style to suggest the falsity of Stalin’s personality cult. Most of his work was created in collaboration with his wife, Valentina Kulagina. Klutsis was born in the Koni Parish of Latvia, and studied art in Riga and Moscow. After World War I he attended Moscow’s Higher Art and Technical Studios, where he would later teach color theory, and experimented with different media. One of his early designs was for an interactive kiosk combining elements of radio, film and graphic art. From 1930 his work was regularly reproduced in Pravda. Klutsis and Kulagina won considerable prestige for the photo montage friezes they designed for the Soviet Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, but neither this nor Klutsis’s faithful service to the regime would save him from Stalin’s political purges. On January 17, 1938, Klutsis disappeared during a xenophobic phase that saw the arrest of many prominent Latvians in Soviet politics, military and culture. For decades it was believed he had died in an Asian labor camp in 1944, but in 1989 it was revealed that the artist was shot and buried at the Butovo killing field near Moscow, just five weeks after his arrest. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956. Examples of Klutsis and Kulagina’s photo montages are displayed at the Tretyakov State Gallery in Moscow and at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. (bio by: Bobb Edwards)