Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid

A gift from the artists to Douglas Davis in 1974, during his Newsweek Magazine sponsored trip to Moscow

Acquired from the above in the mid 1990s by the present owner

C.Ratcliff, Komar & Melamid, New York: Abbeville Press, 1988, illustrated p.67, no.39

Cloth, oil paint. The cloth is wrinkled and creased in places and has several stains to the surface. There are several small tears and fraying across the upper edge of the composition. Framed under glass in shadow box. Unexamined out of frame.
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Executed in the early 1970s.

The Russian conceptual art duo Komar and Melamid collaborated with American conceptual artist Douglas Davis (b.1933) in the mid 1970s. The fruits of their work together was a conceptual series called 'Questions New York Moscow, New York Moscow' in 1976 (today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).  The offered lot was given by the artists to Davis when he was in Moscow in 1974.  Although undated, it belongs to a small group of slogan works which were made in the early years of Sots Art, an influential moment conceived by the duo, in part inspired by American Pop Art, which lasted for several decades and is still informing contemporary Russian art today.

The banner can be seen as a rare piece of Russian conceptual art with considerable historical importance.  It is a type of 'ready-made', although rather than taking a mass-produced object in this case the artists have painted the banner themselves, tracing the well-worn slogan and signing their names.  The work plays with Soviet mass culture in a complex interaction, in some ways similar to Pop Art's appropriation of advertising imagery.  For a comparable work, see, 'Our Goal – Communism' (1972) in the collection of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, US.