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Rare Soviet Retro-Future Space Art
abramsv writes "A collection of the most inspiring and hard-to-find retro-futuristic graphics from rather unlikely sources: Soviet & Eastern Bloc 'popular tech & science' magazines, German, Italian, British fantastic illustrations and promotional literature — all from the Golden Age of Retro-Future (1930s to 1970s)."
The Cold War is over.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
This image from the article reminds me of Tintin: Explorers on the Moon published in 1954, a year later.
Notice how few of these images center on a single individual. Mostly they are space-scapes or pictures of massive engineering projects in which people are tiny figures like in an architect's model, if they appear at all.
There's only one image that would be typical of a US sci fi magazine cover, with the handsome space pioneer man in the foreground and his female counterpart in the background. Even so, there is little suggestion that the pioneer man plays a key role as an individual in whatever action is being depicted.
This might be an artifact of selection, but it's tempting to speculate that this reflects a collectivist view of the future. Still, I have a certain kitschy fondness for Socialist Realism school of art, and many such works do use an heroic individual as a focal point -- albeit either an anonymous one or a historical hero like Lenin. Arguably in either case, Socialist Realism uses the individual functioning as a representative of the working class.
These images are quite austere and free of any hint of individuality as a focal point in the imagined future.
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