The Windows on the War exhibition team from the Art Institute contracted
artist Alexis Petroff to re-create a stenciled and painted TASS poster in
order to reveal the amazing amount of handwork required in the production of
these complexly layered images. To reproduce The Moralistic Wolf (TASS 757),
a poster with at least 30 color separations, Petroff traced the image onto
Mylar to create a color map, cut dozens of stencils to articulate the
separations, hand-mixed paint to match the poster's original colors, and
painted each layer on a separate sheet of paper to demonstrate how the
artists of the TASS poster studio painstakingly assembled vibrant images from
a puzzle of color separations. Some of Petroff's color separations are on
view in the exhibition, as is a short film documenting his process.
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