Mossel'prom Cooking Oil: Nowhere Else but Mossel'prom

Why it works

What happens when the avant-garde lands an advertising account. During the Soviet New Economic Policy, when a measure of capitalism was briefly allowed, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko set up a two-man agency in 1923, working under the name Reklam-Konstruktor, or "advertising constructor". For Mossel'prom, Moscow's state agency for agricultural products, Rodchenko supplied dynamic graphics and Mayakovsky the jingles. This cooking-oil poster hails the "working masses", promises oil three times cheaper than butter and signs off with the refrain that it is sold nowhere else but Mossel'prom. It is studied because it bent revolutionary design to plain salesmanship, and made it work: Rodchenko recalled that their posters, signs and wrappers covered all of Moscow, and Mayakovsky's Mossel'prom jingle is still known to Russians. MoMA acquired the printed poster and Rodchenko's cut-paper maquette with the Merrill C. Berman Collection, and showcased the agency's work in its 2020–21 exhibition Engineer, Agitator, Constructor.