Commie art.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Briefly Noted - Brief article - Book review

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You don't read Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (Tate) for the words, or even for its semi-accurate rendering of the Soviet Union's bloody 74-year history as refracted through the visual arts. David King's coffee-table-sized collection of arresting propaganda posters peters out long before the Leonid Brezhnev era, which, King rightly notes, "was generally as dull and sluggish on the visual front as it was politically." A more historically faithful book would show communism's spirit-crushing--and logically inevitable--tedium. It would also look like...