Na chernuyu dosku progul'shchikov, nytikov i maloverov! [(Names of )Truants, Whiners and Skeptics - to the Black Board of Shame!], a Constructivist poster by the Leningrad IZORAM collective. Published by GIZ, Moscow, c. 1929-1930, 70 x 51 cm.

The practice of publicly shaming poor workers became widespread in the beginning of the Five-Year-Plans era. The poster shown is reproduced in Elizabeth A. Wood's Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia.

IZORAM was an association of amateur young artists in the countrywide Workers' Art Studios system, supervised by the Visual Arts Department (IZO) of the Enlightenement Commissariat (Narkompros). The IZORAM symbol appearing in the poster's bottom is the marking of the Leningrad section, the oldest, and, by far strongest regional section; it appears on the cover of The Art of Leningrad Working Youth, the catalog of the 1929 Leningrad IZORAM exhibition in Moscow, and is sometimes attributed to I Chashnik.

In 1928-1929, the decidedly Constructivist collective art of the amateur Leningrad artists was the subject of two major exhibitions. In 1932, it was attacked as too formalistic; but before that, GIZ and its regional branches regularly published IZORAM posters.

Search extension words: Russian poster, Soviet poster.