CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/22/2012

Cards to Write Home About: 'The Postcard Age' Featured in The Wall Street Journal

Today, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston launches The Postcard Age, one of this season's most pleasurable and expert historical exhibitions. Drawn from Leonard A. Lauder's collection of more than 160,000 postcards from the early 1900s, the exhibition is already drawing press, including a full-page preview in the Sunday Wall Street Journal, in which a selection of images are reproduced alongside explanatory captions.
Featured postcard, "RSI Spartakiada, Moscow", is reproduced from the exhibition catalog's chapter on "Healthy Bodies." Designed by Gustavs Klucis and published in Moscow by RSI (Red Sport International) in 1928, it is one in a series of health / propaganda postcards. "Sports and fitness were important to Soviet ideology, but the Soviet Union considered the Olympic Games too closely tied to capitalist and imperial power structures and did not participate until 1952. Instead, Red Sports International (part of the Communist International, or Comintern) organized a parallel competition that took its name from Spartacus, leader of a slave revolt in ancient Rome. Designed when the Soviet Union was still open to artistic experimentation, these energetic cards are dedicated to 'the unity of worker-athletes of the world!'"