Poster by the Battling Pencil group from a portfolio of 24 entitled 'Perestroika For and Against'. Russia, 1989.

Poster depicting a chameleon as a bureaucrat at his desk , changing colour from red to green, symbolising the changing political climate, with keywords on his body encapsulating the changes.

Given by Peggy vance

The fourth poster in the ‘Prerestroika [restructuring] For and Against’ portfolio. It depicts a chameleon as a bureaucrat at his desk, changing colour from red to green, symbolising the ways of the superficially changing bureaucrat, with keywords on his body encapsulating the changes: 'Openess, Pluralism, Opinions, Initiative, Perestroika, Depression under new leadership...etc and accompanied by a short rhyme summing up the prohibitive nature of bureaucracy.

The portfolio contains a series of 25 satirical posters by a group of Leningrad artists known as ‘Battling Pencil’ on the theme of the struggle to restructure communism in the new political atmosphere under the regime of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachov (b.1931), appointed general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, with text and images edited by A.M Murtov and V.I. Kiunap respectively. Each poster is composed of an image with an accompanying verse in the tradition of the Russian lubok.

Attribution note: published in a print run of 5,000

E.363-1990