The obvious question about political art from the former Soviet Union is, “Can an artist operating under a totalitarian regime manage to imbue his work with an authentic personal style?”

The answer comes from Jeffrey T. Schnapp, guest curator of Revolutionary Tides at Stanford’s Cantor Center for the Visual Arts.

“Absolutely,” he says. “The posters of masterful graphic artists like Xanti Schawinsky and Gustav Klucis or Valentina Kulagina are highly distinctive works that bear the trace of a distinctive artistic personality, affiliated in all three cases with contemporary avant-garde movements. All three worked under conditions of totalitarianism.”

The exhibit was drawn from collections at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and The Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami Beach. It ranges far afield, including works from New Deal America, China’s Cultural Revolution, the protest movements of the 1960s, and Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. The stylistic range is perhaps best illustrated by two famed American works, Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” illustration and Andy Warhol’s silk-screened portraits of Mao Tse-Tung.

For Schnapp, however, the focus is not just on the big political personalities, but the mass gatherings behind them. Tides is an offshoot of the Crowds project, a sociological and artistic survey created by Schnapp’s Stanford Humanities Lab. The project has produced a visually stunning website (shl.stanford.edu/Crowds) and will produce, in 2006, a multi-author book from Stanford University Press.

The Tides exhibit connects to the Crowds project, says Schnapp, by demonstrating the many ways that a graphic artist can manipulate the emotions of a political poster by altering the angle or movements of a crowd.

“Shots taken from the ground (the so-called goose-eye perspective typical of much Soviet work) tend to heroize the image of the crowd,” he says, “to make it seem to tower above the world of ordinary individuals. Overhead photography abstracts the crowd into visual fields that can then be employed decoratively, or placed in dialogue with the image of the leader.”

Posters that show a crowd from within the mass assembly, says Schnapp, tend to emphasize the “dynamism, power and, even, danger of mass gatherings.” Artists used economical representations of the multitude, clustering single body parts – upraised arms, for instance, which suggest unanimity or solidarity in pursuit of a single cause.

If that last description brings to mind the Sieg Heil salute of Nazi rallies (or, perhaps, the equally eerie “Hook’em Horns” salute at University of Texas football games), well ... join the crowd.

Beyond the Crowds angle lie many other angles, says Schnapp, layers of interpretation brought on by what is, in the end, a highly collaborative art form.

“The ‘art’ of the political poster,” says Schnapp, “is a many-faceted art that encompasses the sometimes brilliant work of artists as simplifiers and translators (into visual language) of complex political matters; the art of survival (many artists did political and commercial work only to support their personal artwork); the art of subterfuge (some poster artists manage to very subtly alter or undermine the political messages that their works convey, or to appropriate state symbolism for anti-state movements); not to mention the graphic artistry that posters themselves demand given that, like advertisements, they must communicate, under pressure, against the backdrop of a million distractions, to an audience that is (most likely) disinterested.”