The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Yuri BokserOn August 19, 1991, the day that hard-line
Russian communists ousted Mikail
Gorbachev in the famous short-lived coup,
Yuri Bokser, a thirty-seven-year-old Russian
poster artist, boarded an Aeroflot jet at New
York’s Kennedy International to return to his
besieged Moscow knowing that he might be
arrested. Bokser—one of Moscow’s leading
film-poster designers, who also designed
unpublished political posters critical of
Lenin, Stalin, and Gorbachev—had just
finished a short stay in New York where he
received assignments from the New York
Timesand Rolling Stone. Warned against
returning home, he had little choice: his wife
and children had been left behind because
temporary entry visas to the United States
were difficult to get in those days, and his
life’s work was there, too.
Bokser, born in Tashkent in 1954
into a Jewish family with roots deep in the
Russian soil, had drawn cartoons for exported Soviet magazines that had
looser restrictions than internally distributed media, but he wanted to do
something more meaningful, like posters. “This was impossible because I
could not make the kinds of posters that the official publishing houses
would print,” he once recounted. “I made two or three attempts at that and
failed miserably.” It was not his plan to become a nonconformist, but
through the underground artists at the Moscow Art Institute he had seen
Polish magazines like Projekt, the Swiss Graphis,and some American
design journals. “I was inspired by the freedom in that work, and also in
American art in general,” he said.
Bokser made his first unofficial poster around 1981 , a few years
before perestroika(the new openness) took hold. It was for rock-musician
friends and was printed in a small quantity. “But after that I didn’t make
another poster for a long time,” he recalled. Bokser’s first success came
when Reklamfilm, the USSR’s oldest film promotion company, changed264