UNDER A WATCHFUL EYE: THE CONSERVATION OF SOVIET TASS-WINDOW POSTERS

At some point during the late 194os, well-meaning Art Institute staff carefully collected groups of posters into dozens of neat, brown paper packages, sealed them, and tucked them away for safekeeping with little understanding of their historical significance or the importance of archival storage methods. In the early 1970s, prior to the construction of an enhanced print and drawing study room and art storage area, these same packages were moved en masse several times before finding a permanent home behind a false wall in one of the new facility's storage closets.' There they remained until 1994, when a paper conservator and conservation technician decided to find out what was behind that wall. To their surprise, a peek into the bundles and rolls revealed several thousand bold, brightly colored images of aesthetic and historic significance-a major collection of American and European posters from the 189os to the 1940s.2 As these objects were unwrapped, unrolled, unfolded, and flattened over the intervening months, this inadvertent time capsule revealed words and images recording some of the major sociopolitical issues and events of the twentieth century, including the two world wars. While art historians took advantage of an opportunity to look anew at these works from a twenty-first-century perspective, paper conservators tackled the challenging task of opening and flattening the posters in order to determine their condition and the materials with which they were made. Then they assessed the extent of damage and determined an appropriate course of action to conserve them, rehouse them, and assure their preservation for decades to come. Among this large collection, one group in particular stood out for its forthright images and text, for the extraordinary manner in which it was produced, and for its extremely poor condition. Known as the TASS-OKHO, or TASS-Window, posters, these works (see fig. i) were produced as a daily propaganda effort by the TASS news agency during World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War (June 22, 1941-May 9, 1945). Publicly displayed from the onset of the German invasion, the posters were meant to boost the morale of Soviet troops