In 1922, the Moscow-based Latvian-born artist Gustav Klutsis (1895–1938) designed a series of dynamic communication devices for Moscow’s streets and squares. Sparked by the historical coincidence of two events in the early life of the Soviet Union — the fifth anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) — these devices, called “radio orators,” were to display pro-Soviet agitprop slogans and both still and moving images and offer newspapers and journals for sale.

Though never fully realized, we know of Klutsis’s ambitions to imagine a means of revolutionary communication that would activate and agitate the populace thanks to a series of drawings in which he envisioned the details of the radio orator in extraordinarily diverse, intricate, and complex ways. Most of these drawings now reside in the collections of The Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga; the Costakis Collection of the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece; and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. In 1979, The Museum of Modern Art acquired a three-dimensional rendering related to the project: a work known as Maquette for Radio-Announcer, dated 1922, and said to have been made by Klutsis (Figure 1, above). The Maquette was purchased from an art dealer in Paris just as it was about to be featured in the landmark exhibition Paris/Moscow 1900–1930 at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Since its acquisition, the Maquette has often been on view at MoMA, typically in galleries devoted to the Soviet avant-garde. It was believed to be the only extant sculpture by Klutsis.

In 2010, Jodi Hauptman, Senior Curator in MoMA’s Department of Drawings and Prints, and Maria Gough, The Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. Professor of Modern Art at Harvard University and an authority on Klutsis’s work — her book on the radio orators, How to Make a Revolutionary Object, is due out from Inventory Press next year — began collaborating on an exhibition devoted to Klutsis’s radio orator drawings. Given the opportunity to study a work by Klutsis, and with the idea that the Maquette would play a role in the exhibition, they partnered with members of MoMA’s David Booth Conservation Center and Department to look closely at the object’s making and history. As MoMA’s curatorial/conservation partnerships have been tremendously fruitful, the curators and the Conservation team — Senior Conservator Karl Buchberg, Conservator Lynda Zycherman, and I — were especially excited about what this investigation would yield.

The Scientific Investigation

We began by examining the work together, one observation provoking another, and each of us brought our own expertise to bear. We noted and took stock of the Maquette’s basic materials: paper, wood, string, brads, and white, red, and black paint. As a conservation scientist, I use analytical tools to understand the composition of a work of art and how it is made. Many of these tools have greatly improved in recent years, wholly transforming the field and our approach to works of art. For the Maquette, I examined many components, used a variety of analytic tools, and traveled across the globe to study works by Klutsis. Each step, whether with the object or with other works by Klutsis, and each part of the examination, whether with my own eyes or through the lens of the latest scientific technologies, provided information about the construction of the Maquette.

After the initial visual examination, I began my work by testing the bright white paint that can be seen in one of the speakers, the sound drivers at the base of each speaker’s interior, the antennae, and the wooden structure. X-ray fluorescence detected titanium and X-ray diffraction and Raman spectrometry were used subsequent to this discovery because they are able to differentiate the various crystal structures of titanium dioxide. Through these tests, I found that the pigment used on the Maquette was rutile titanium white, a pigment that was only available after Klutsis’s death in 1938. I wondered if the presence of titanium white indicated a later touch-up or repair, but it appears to be the first application of paint in many areas, a detail that can be seen in the way the paint fills the pores in the oak. The discovery of the titanium pigment and its application raised questions about the Maquette’s authorship and dating, casting doubt on Klutsis’s role in its making. So, even after an embargo on loans from Russia to the US forced the postponement of the planned exhibition, research continued, and I took the lead on investigating the issues raised by the Maquette.

I traveled to Riga, Moscow, and Thessaloniki, where I could study examples of Klutsis’s drawings. Together, these visits enabled me to study the breadth of his artistic career and also concentrate on his radio-announcer works. By traveling with handheld X-ray fluorescence equipment (XRF), I was able to identify the elemental composition of the pigments used in these drawings directly, without having to remove any samples. This was a highly efficient approach that allowed me to analyze his most important drawings in a short time. With those works I was able to confirm that he used zinc white throughout his career, never a titanium-based white.