BOSTON, MA.- The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) just opened Designing the Modern Utopia: Soviet Textiles from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection which features rare textiles and drawings organized around major themes and motifs representing a phase in Soviet history between 1927 and 1933. During this time, textile design was leveraged for visual propaganda in the struggle to transform the Soviet Union from a backward, agrarian country into a modern, industrialized state. Garments and household textiles bore designs embracing the activities in which the new Soviet person would engage––such as labor, education and sports––and became billboards for the revolutionary initiatives being enacted by the first socialist government. Designing the Modern Utopia, on view through January 21, 2007 in the MFA’s Loring Gallery, features approximately ninety works representing themes such as industrialization, transportation, agriculture, youth, and sports from one of the most important private collections of textile arts today. Generous support for this exhibition––the first of its kind for the MFA––and a publication was provided by Lloyd Cotsen. The exhibition is dedicated to Mr. Cotsen’s mother, Sophie Novick Cotsen, who was born and educated in Boston.

“The objects included in this exhibition testify to a short-lived but fascinating experiment, and testify to Mr. Cotsen’s interest in art that is intimately connected to people and history,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA. “We are grateful to Mr. Cotsen for sharing his treasures with the Museum, allowing visitors to witness the ways in which textiles are an integral part of our artistic and cultural heritage.”

In 1928, a small but influential group of artists began to promote the concept of “thematic” designs on textiles. These artists, working in state sponsored factories, favored abstract, yet recognizable, motifs of tractors, factories, airplanes, and Soviet symbols including the hammer and sickle. They believed that designs like these on clothing and household fabrics—such as pillowcases and curtains—would not only educate, but would raise the wearer’s political consciousness, thereby assisting in the transformation of that individual into the new Soviet person. This person, by internalizing Communist credos, would be a reliable supporter—both in word and in deed—of the policies laid out by the State and the Communist Party. By wearing shirts emblazoned with red locomotives and snuggling under smokestack-covered sheets, average citizens everywhere, they theorized, would internalize Soviet credos and be inspired to transform the nation into a cooperative industrial state.

Most of the designs in the textiles illustrate a select group of themes that formed the core of Soviet ideas during this period: the glorification of industry, the celebration of agricultural pursuits, and the promise of youth. Designing the Modern Utopia will include a brief section on the history and production methods of printed textiles in Russia, and descriptions of the political and artistic contexts that produced these intriguing designs. The show will be further organized around major themes and motifs, including industrialization, transportation, agriculture, youth and sports. This exhibition has been organized by the MFA and curated by Pamela Kachurin, Associate Director, National Resource Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and Alex Huff, Curatorial Planning and Project Manager from the MFA’s Textile and Fashion Arts department.

“These rare textiles symbolize the idealism of the early Soviet era,” said Alex Huff. “For most people, ‘Communist art’ conjures up dour scenes of socialist realism, but these pieces from the Cotsen Collection dispel that notion with bold, vibrant, and unexpected images.”

LLOYD COTSEN COLLECTION - Lloyd Cotsen, former CEO of the Neutrogena Corporation, has long been an avid collector of textiles and folk art. In the late 1990s he gave a large collection, which he built over a period of 35 years, to the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, NM, and funded construction of the museum’s Neutrogena Wing dedicated to its display. More recently, he has assembled what he calls the Textile Traces Collection, composed of small textiles, garments and fragments. The collection is one of the most important groups of historical textiles currently in private hands, with pieces that span a huge range of cultures and periods. The Soviet material, which consists of 70 printed textiles and 241 painted textile patterns, is a subset of the Textile Traces Collection.