Drawing on the Gilded Life of Pre-Revolutionary Russia : Graphic arts: An exhibit of political posters, menus, advertisements, book covers and placards shows a Russia that hasn’t been seen since 1917.

Russia before 1917 was a thriving capitalist marketplace, a bourgeois society where exotic meals, lavish theater and the latest Western fashions were pursued as eagerly as Gorbachev’s ouster is today.

It was a world where emerging artist Kazimir Malevich pooled his talent with poet Vladimir Mayakovsky to design cartoon-like prints that chronicled World War I for the uneducated masses.

Where advertisements for Petrograd candy shops depicted more than 50 different bonbons--each intricately drawn down to the painted wrappers.

Where gilt-edged menus reminiscent of Orthodox icons celebrated 300 years of Romanov Dynasty rule just four short years before Lenin installed his own rule of the proletariat that endures today.

“Russian Graphic Design Before the Revolution, 1880-1917,” which debuted May 11 at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, re-creates that now-vanquished world in all its kaleidoscopic brilliance. Drawn from holdings of the V.I. Lenin State Library in Moscow, the show includes 101 political posters, menus, advertisements, book covers and exhibition placards never before seen in the United States.

The exhibit, which runs through June 30, is organized by the Lenin Library and the Soviet Ministry of Culture in collaboration with The American Federation of Arts, the nation’s oldest and largest nonprofit visual arts organization. Founded in 1909, the AFA organizes traveling exhibitions to broaden public knowledge and appreciation of the arts.

But don’t look for hammers and sickles in this Russian art show, or zaftig peasant girls astride gleaming tractors. There is little hint of socialist realism here, or of the politically infused Russian avant-garde art from the 1920s and early 1930s that has so captured Western imagination.

Instead, the show offers a window into a nation struggling to transform from centuries of serfdom and domination by the Orthodox Church to an industrialized market-driven society on par with Western Europe. It was to be a brief and doomed effort, abruptly halted by the new Marxist-Leninist government, its relics deposited in archival basements for the next 74 years.

And while the exhibition will travel to the State University of New York at Purchase, then to Amherst College in Massachusetts and then Munich and Frankfurt--there are no plans to show it in the Soviet Union, says its U.S. curator Robert Workman, the AFA’s assistant director of exhibitions.

Workman, who made two trips to the Soviet Union to select individual works, said many of the 100-year-old items had been stored loose or rolled up, like newspapers. Others had begun to crumble at the edges because of the lack of acid paper and other curating tools common in the West but unavailable even today in the Soviet Union. Each item was matted and mounted in New York.

Soviet curators Nina Baburina of the Lenin Library, graphic designer Mikhail Anikst and Elena Chernevich, a leading scholar of graphic design theory and history, have grouped the exhibit into five distinct sections that take the viewer from late 19th-Century Russia into World War I.

Throughout, the works show a reverence for detail that infused the most mundane items of that time with artistic beauty--from soap wrappers to tobacco ads. The goal was to elevate the everyday by careful attention to design.

Malevich--who has several works in this show--is probably the name best known in the West today. Leon Bakst, Victor Vasnetsov and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky also went on to international acclaim as fine artists. Many others in the show however, labored and died in obscurity.

“Russian Graphic Design” begins with examples of what curators call the “Style Russe,” a late 19th-Century period strongly influenced by folkloric themes and the Russian Orthodox Church--including illuminated manuscripts and religious icons.

This was a time when pageantry and royalty played an important role in Russian society, and heraldic crests and imperial crowns resonate throughout these works. There are theater programs from the Imperial Alexander Theater and announcements of the 1896 coronation of the Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Fedorovna and menus from a banquet honoring a visiting French Parliament delegation.

Next the show moves to “Moderne,” the Russian style that paralleled French Art Nouveau. Indeed, the entire Slavic nation seemed obsessed by France. Well-to-do families spoke the language at home; those with the means visited Paris seasonally and returned laden with the newest in music, couture and art.

Moderne’s neoclassical influence can be seen in a poster titled “Equestrian Competitions,” which shows a nude soldier astride a galloping steed. A poster for an exhibition of industrial design in Odessa done in ceramic-like blue, brown and beige shows sleek workers hammering at a stylized anvil.

Other posters--from a 1907 cafe price list offered by D.I. Philippov, the “Supplier by Appointment to the Imperial Families,” to 11 prototype images for perfume labels--conjure up the sumptuous world of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina more than Dostoevski’s rat-poor Raskolnikov.

For those with the rubles, Russia before the revolution was a genteel time of afternoons whiled away at cafes and salons. Advertising placards from the time hawk “Stilnaya,” or “stylish” toffees and teatime biscuits drawn in photo-realist detail.

Exhibits in the “The World of Art” section reflect a Russian philosophical movement whose adherents attempted to synthesize painting, graphics and stage designs. A party invitation designed by Dobuzhinsky in 1912 echoes metal engraving of the time. It invited participants to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the battle of Borodino, a turning point in the war against Napoleon that was widely celebrated in Russia.

“The Kiss” by Konstantin Somov is a silhouette from the arts journal Apollon. There is also an illustrated book cover by Alexandre Benois of Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades” and a romantically eerie illustration of poet Alexander Blok’s volume “The Snow Mask” by Leon Bakst.

Thanks to the technological innovations of mass printing, Russian graphic artists were given free rein in designing commercial advertisements. One of the most stunning such ads in the section, called “Commercial Design,” is a poster for mineral waters from the Shabalovsky Factory of Kareneyev, Gorshanov and Co. in Moscow.

It features a wide-cheeked girl in a flaming red dress against a canary yellow background. Only upon closer examination does one discover that her dress is made up of dangling mineral water bottles, giving the poster a contemporary pop-art feel, says Stephen Nowlin, director of exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Center.

There is also a Moscow ad for the Maria Vasilevna Sadomovaya factory, the “foremost manufactory of knitting and embroidery yarns”; a poster advertising Treugolnik (triangle) galoshes and one proclaiming “Tea Merchants Sergei Alexeyevich Sporov of Moscow.” Russian shoppers used to the dreary, monochromatic hues of today would doubtless form long lines if such products were available now.

Many of the advertisements reflect design styles popular throughout Western Europe at the time. But always the graphic artists have added uniquely Russian flourishes--the onion-shaped domes behind the bazaar; the fur-hatted hunters killing a bear in the snowy forests and, of course, the distinctive Cyrillic script.

Posters for chocolates, for instance, include folksy Russian sayings on the wrappers, including, “If you shoot at two hares, you’ll catch neither” and “Where there’s honey, there’s poison.”

Then, there is this poster from Kiev: “All the latest equipment, refinements and improvements for airplanes and hydroplanes, from the firm of Artur Anatr, Odessa.”

The last section of the exhibit deals with political graphics, including propaganda cartoons, appeals for charity for victims of the war and solicitations to buy war bonds. A poster by L.O Pasternak, whose son, Boris, would win acclaim as the writer of “Dr. Zhivago,” illustrated “Aid for the Victims of the War.”

An unknown artist in Kiev designed form letters for illiterate soldiers to send home from the front in 1916 that opened with “My dear, gentle, little wife.”

The political prints by Makakovsky and Malevich--mass-produced by publishing houses and known as “Lubok”--betray wartime propaganda that sound rather inflammatory to contemporary ears.

“At Lomzhe, where we beat the Kraut, all he did was scream and shout,” reads one. Another, which shows a stout peasant woman spearing a tiny German soldier with a pitchfork, proclaims: “Even a woman can beat Prussian Soldiers.”

Russian Graphic Design

“Russian Graphic Design Before the Revolution, 1880-1917” is at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Drawn from holdings of the V.I. Lenin State Library in Moscow, the show includes 101 political posters, menus, advertisements, book covers and exhibition placards, such as the advertisement for locomotives seen at left.

Art Center main campus gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday.

Parking and admission are free. The exhibit runs through June 30.