Gustav Klutsis

Gustav Klutsis (Latvian: Gustavs Klucis, Russian: Густав Густавович Клуцис) (January 4, 1895 – February 26, 1938) was a pioneering Latvian photographer and major member of the Constructivist avant-garde in the early 20th century. He is known for the Soviet revolutionary and Stalinist propaganda he produced with his wife and collaborator Valentina Kulagina.

Born in Ķoņi parish, near Rūjiena, Klucis began his artistic training in Riga in 1912. In 1915 he was drafted into the Russian Army, serving in a Latvian riflemen detachment, then went to Moscow in 1917. In the next three years he began art studies under Kazimir Malevich and Antoine Pevsner, joined the Communist Party, met and married longtime collaborator Valentina Kulagina, and graduated from the state-run art school VKhUTEMAS. He would continue to be associated with VKhUTEMAS as a professor of color theory from 1924 until the school closed in 1930.

Klucis taught, wrote, and produced political art for the Soviet state for the rest of his life. As the political background degraded through the 1920s and 1930s, Klutsis and Kulagina came under increasing pressure to limit their subject matter and techniques. Once joyful, revolutionary and utopian, by 1935 their art was devoted to furthering Joseph Stalin's cult of personality.

Despite his active and loyal service to the party, Klucis was arrested in Moscow on January 17, 1938, as he prepared to leave for the New York World's Fair. Kulagina agonized for months, then years, over his disappearance. In 1989 it was found that he had been executed by Stalin's order soon after his arrest.

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