Russian design after the Bolshevik Revolution (collage to the left) utilized shapes, elemental forms, and emotional color. Visuals filled the layout and were the dominant element (with little type included) so that the message could be accessible to all (even the illiterate could understand the message). The purpose for art at this time in history was mainly politically-centered. The government owned everything and designs were created to propagate the socialist ideals. The Russian's avant-garde art was "a composite of antagonistic groups, each with its own aims; Symbolism, Cubo-Futurism, Rayonism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Productivism, Concretism, and Engineerism were all invented to prove that a minority of the experimental artists were correct and the overwhelming majority wrong" according to art historian George Costakis. Contemporary Russian design, on the other hand (examples above), is more expressionist and free. The works reflect "the major current of Russian alternative culture and describe the history of independent, or “non-conformist,” art processes and movements from the 1960s to the present". Curators Marat Guelman and Juan Puntes also state that "people and the art world in Russia from the 1960s onwards, experienced a period of slow, gradual but real thaw, a defrost of three quarters of a century’s cultural freeze that happened not in a single decade, but over several decades, culminating in the period of the 1990s known as Glasnost." The social and political context at the time of both of these "movements" was the main motive for the creation of the artist's art. It was their driving force and has yielded countless, enduring works of art.
