Totalitarian Aesthetics in Visual Representations of People on Paper Monies in Europe from the 1920s to the 1940s

Abstract This article aims to conceptualize visual representations of people on European paper monies from the 1920s to the 1940s within the framework of totalitarian aesthetics. This work has several objectives. First, it reviews the transformations of human depictions on paper monies in Europe from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Second, it focuses on totalitarian aesthetics using human depictions specific to European dictatorships in the first half of the twentieth century. Third, it provides a visual analysis of banknotes issued by the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Second Polish Republic during the 1920s–1940s. Although the latter is traditionally regarded as an authoritarian dictatorship, further historical contextualization explains its blurred status at the edge of totalitarianism. The conclusion summarizes the types of human depictions and the categories of graphic elements on banknotes identified as having totalitarian aesthetics. Contextualizing the currency designs of the 1920s–1940s in the graphic-design framework of this period, such designs notably reproduce classicist clichés based on the sculptural monumentalism of human depictions, which correlate with the imperial ideologies of totalitarian states.