Video: Recreation of a TASS Print with Alexis Petroff

The Windows on the War exhibition team 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.