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Eastern European Modernism: Works on Paper at the Columbia University Libraries and The Cornell University Library Compiled by Robert H. Davis Columbia University Libraries and Cornell University Library With a Foreword by Steven Mansbach University of Maryland, College Park With an Introduction by Irina Denischenko Georgetown University New York 2021 Cover Illustration: No. 266. Dvacáté století co dalo lidstvu. Výsledky práce lidstva XX. Věku. (Praha, 1931-1934). Part 5: Prokroky průmyslu. Photomontage wrappers by Vojtěch Tittelbach. To John and Katya, for their love and ever-patient indulgence of their quirky old Dad. Foreword ©Steven A. Mansbach Compiler’s Introduction ©Robert H. Davis Introduction ©Irina Denischenko Checklist ©Robert H. Davis Published in Academic Commons, January 2021 Photography credits: Avery Classics Library: p. vi (no. 900), p. xxxvi (no. 1031). Columbia University Libraries, Preservation Reformatting: Cover (No. 266), p.xiii (no. 430), p. xiv (no. 299, 711), p. xvi (no. 1020), p. xxvi (no. 1047), p. xxvii (no. 1060), p. xxix (no. 679), p. xxxiv (no. 605), p. xxxvi (no. 118), p. xxxix (nos. 600, 616). Cornell Division of Rare Books & Manuscripts: p. xv (no. 1069), p. xxvii (no. 718), p. xxxii (no. 619), p. xxxvii (nos. 803, 721), p. xl (nos. 210, 221), p. xli (no. 203). Compiler: p. vi (nos. 1009, 975), p. x, p. xiii (nos. 573, 773, 829, 985), p. xiv (nos. 103, 392, 470, 911), p. xv (nos. 1021, 1087), p. xvi (nos. 960, 964), p. xix (no. 615), p. xx (no. 733), p. xxviii (no. 108, 1060). F.A. Bernett Rare Books: p. xii (nos. 5, 28, 82), p. xxix (no. 71). ii Table of Contents Foreword. Steven A. Mansbach, University of Maryland. iv-ix. Compiler’s Introduction. Robert H. Davis, Columbia & Cornell University Libraries. x-xvii. Compiler’s Acknowledgments. xviii-xx. Introduction. Irina Denischenko, Georgetown University. xxi-xlii. Contributors. xliii-xlv. The Checklist. Pp. 1-251. I. The Baltics: Entries 1-99. A. Estonia. Pp. 1-5. Piret Noorhani, Editor B. Latvia. 5-22. Maira Bundža, Editor C. Lithuania. 22-23. Maira Bundža, Editor II. West Slavic: Entries 100-938. A. Czechoslovakia. Pp. 23-208. Meghan Forbes, Editor B. Poland. 208-216. Wojciech Siemaszkiewicz, Editor III. South Slavic: Entries 939-1021. A. Bulgaria. Pp. 216-227. Aleksandar Bošković, Editor B. Croatia. 227-228. Aleksandar Bošković, Editor C. Serbia. 228-233. Aleksandar Bošković, Editor IV. Hungary & Romania: Entries 1021-1101, A. Hungary. Pp. 233-250. Carol Rounds, Editor B. Romania. 251. Indexes A. Personal & Corporate Names. 253-276. B. Title. 277-292. C. Place of Publication. 292-293. D. Holding Institutions in the OCLC WorldCat Database. 293-298. iii Foreword Steven Mansbach Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland at College Park This compendium of works on paper documents the rich collections of Eastern European modernism held by the Columbia and Cornell University Libraries. In depth and range it constitutes one of the great research resources for the study of modern art and culture, only rivaled perhaps by a similar compendium documenting the East Slavic titles at the New York Public Library (NYPL) and Columbia University Library. Moreover, the various entries attest to the acute bibliographical scholarship that informed the selection, analyses, and scope of these two University Libraries’ collections, each mutually reinforcing. Although the comparative strength lies within the Czech holdings, the breadth of genres, topics, and categories is striking, and communally reflects the rich engagement of modernist creators in the full array of the literary and especially in the visual arts, inclusive of architecture, theater, poetry, and advertising, and, unique in its expansiveness, in the study of sexuality. The entries presented in this volume thus constitute far more than an aggregation of individual items – whether of visual and literary, “biotic” and sexual, or industrial and instructional invention. Rather, they point to and creatively engage the most essential – and most overlooked – aspect of the modernist enterprise generally: the priority of a visual “poetics” manifested through the design of book covers, broadsides, and illustrated avant-garde booklets of decisively modern subjects and interests. This was frequently communicated through the most progressive visual styles and employed a “new typography.” Indeed, it was the very centrality of “works on paper” that fundamentally determined the nature, course, and impact of modern culture generally, and of the Eastern European avant-garde in particular. It is arguable that advanced visual artists and their apologists, and especially the European avant-gardists from the Estonian northeast to the Balkan lands in the southwest, produced as many texts as paintings, as many theoretical tracts as sculptures, and even more essays and illustrated articles than architecture. In hundreds of broadsides, manifestos, novellas, and periodicals – many of them documented in this compendium – the makers and advocates of a new culture proved to be as adept with the pen as they were original with the brush, the chisel, or iv the straightedge. And this was true whether creating original works or illustrating the products of others. All were inspired to embrace the word as a visual medium. Of course, painters and sculptors and other practitioners of the visual arts had often written to explain or to justify what they sought to achieve with the customary tools of their craft. From the Italian Renaissance through the nineteenth century, visual artists had expressed themselves eloquently in words, often to explain their intentions or to persuade potential patrons of their talents. But never before the first half of the twentieth century – the focus of the present compendium – did artists seize upon the written word with such prolixity, passion, and purpose. It was as if the modernists aspired to make the word potently visible or, conversely, to empower the visual to be “read” as if a text. This convergence of communication – a type of conjunction of image and text, or at least an interdependence of one with the other – is powerfully demonstrated in a plurality of the items documented in this volume. This compendium rightly adduces the originality and variability of the works on paper produced by modern artists, poets, advertisers, and their advocates in a host of disciplines from aeronautics (No. 389) and “biotics” (No. 398) to Surrealist performances and social revolution. Although differing in their emphases and departing from one another in the methods of application, the major protagonists in the advanced cultural movements represented here sought, in Karel Teige’s memorable words, to constitute a humanistic poetics for a modern era, which is “...to pose a new problem for poetry and redefine its mission: poetry for the five senses, poetry for all the senses.” Teige, whose manifold creativity is well documented in this book’s Czech section, advocated a potent coincidence of the visual and the poetic through which to fashion a “new people, who will create the new society.” The Czech’s belief system, which was widely embraced throughout Eastern Europe just as it was frequently imitated to the West, was advanced under the rubric of “Poetism.” Poetics was both the objective and the modus operandi of many of those authors, artists, and publishers of the works contained in this volume. It served all progressive formations as an aesthetic, social and political motor force, one that was singularly versatile and could be expressed in a medley of visual languages with what was assumed to be a universal resonance. Although it was inflected differently in each of this volume’s geographic sections, and despite functioning under different names, the poetics of Eastern Europe asserted an authority that garnered support from artists across nationalities, backgrounds, and personal characteristics. For v Ljubomir Micić (No. 1009) [Figure 1, below] and his “Zenitist” confederates in Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Belgrade, “poetry is the most liberated art and where our greatest hopes lie.” Likewise, for Lajos Kassák, the great Hungarian impresario and modernist artist well represented in the entries below, an authentic modernism must give rise to a poetics as much visual as textual. Similar views were emphatically advanced in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and in the Baltics – all of which have examples to be noted in the following entries. What united these disparate stylistic expressions was a universal affirmation of poetics as uniquely modern transcendence of traditional aesthetic categories and practices in a heroic endeavor “not to decorate life but to organize it” along new, more humane principles (to quote a Hungarian contemporary of Kassák, Ernő Kállai, who likely borrowed the phrase from his Russian modernist collaborators Ilya Ehrenburg and Lazar El Lissitzky). (Left) Figure 1, No. 1009. Istočni greh .(Beograd, 1920). (Center) Figure 2, No. 900. Život: Sborník nové krásy. Cover. (Right) Figure 3, No. 975. Plamŭk. (Sofiia, 1924-25). The majority of the works on paper presented here are collective endeavors. This is due not only to the nature of “poetics”, which so frequently dictated a close collaboration between visual and literary artists. It also stems from the very character of avant-garde periodicals, also to be evidenced in the present volume. Most every example represented a heroic endeavor to replace the traditional individualism of the artist with a collective aesthetic commitment