Victor BURGIN British, b. 1941
Revolutions, 1989
Silkscreened poster, commissioned by the French government
84.1 x 59.4 cm
The Cyrillic characters, reading from top to bottom, spell out LEF – which is the title of the magazine of the “Left Front of the Arts” published in post-revolutionary Russia...
The Cyrillic characters, reading from top to bottom, spell out LEF – which is the title of the magazine of the “Left Front of the Arts” published in post-revolutionary Russia until the Stalin repression.
In modern France, “LEF" is seen everywhere on official buildings as the initial letters of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” – the "Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood” that were the founding principles of the French revolution.
The running silhouette woman is therefore escaping from the masculinist principle of brotherhood to represent the “femme en movement” – she’s the metonymic (“metonymy” in classical rhetoric = “the part stands for the whole”) representative of “Les Femmes en Mouvement”, which is the French equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon “Women’s Liberation Movement”.
’68 refers to the May 1968 revolutionary movement of students and workers in France, and ’89 to the the historic French revolution of 1789.
In modern France, “LEF" is seen everywhere on official buildings as the initial letters of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” – the "Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood” that were the founding principles of the French revolution.
The running silhouette woman is therefore escaping from the masculinist principle of brotherhood to represent the “femme en movement” – she’s the metonymic (“metonymy” in classical rhetoric = “the part stands for the whole”) representative of “Les Femmes en Mouvement”, which is the French equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon “Women’s Liberation Movement”.
’68 refers to the May 1968 revolutionary movement of students and workers in France, and ’89 to the the historic French revolution of 1789.