Checklist of Russian, Ukrainian & Belarusian Avant-Garde
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Checklist of Russian, Ukrainian & Belarusian Avant-Garde & Modernist Books, Serials & Works on Paper at The New York Public Library & Columbia University Libraries Compiled by Robert H. Davis Jr., Columbia University & Cornell University Megan Duncan-Smith, Harvard University With an Introduction by Steven Mansbach, University of Maryland Academic Commons, 2015 Table of Contents Steven Mansbach. Radical Reading / Revolutionary Seeing. i-xv Robert H. Davis, Jr. Compiler’s Introduction xvi-xx Acknowledgments xxi The Checklist 1-169 Indexes Short Title Index 170-181 Manuscripts or Original Works of Art on Paper 182 Holding Institutions 182-185 Personal Name Index 186-197 Cover illustration of an original textile pattern, from No. 665, a book maquette titled Okt︠i︡abrʹ i profpechatʹ (proftextilʹ). [Moskva], 1924. (Columbia). Copyright © 2015 by Robert H. Davis, Jr. & Megan Duncan-Smith. Radical Reading / Revolutionary Seeing: An Introduction to Checklist of Russian, Ukrainian & Belarusian Avant-Garde & Modernist Books, Serials & Works on Paper at The New York Public Library & Columbia University Libraries Steven Mansbach, University of Maryland The manifold collections of Russian, Ukrainian & Belarusian avant-garde publications in the New York Public and Columbia University Libraries are as impressive in their breadth as they are significant in their history.1 They have become more than a singular research resource for Slavicists, and more than a telling record of the striking inventiveness that occurred in Eastern Europe early in the last century. Indeed, these rich holdings are essential for today’s scholars and for an ever-growing public keenly interested in the art, culture, and political history of Eastern and East-Central Europe during a period of dramatic and revolutionary change.2 Nonetheless, it is through the visual and literary history that the two collections document that one might best appreciate these holdings’ broadest value. At the time of their creation in the early decades of the twentieth-century, avant-garde periodicals, broadsheets, and paper ephemera from Eastern Europe had mostly been intended for restricted audiences. This was especially true for Constructivist and Futurist publications that appeared in the Baltic lands, Russia, Ukraine, and throughout East-Central Europe extending into the Balkans, especially Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Romania.3 In part, small publication runs were the result of prevailing material shortages, as paper, ink, and even 1 See also Russian and Ukrainian Avant-Garde and Constructivist Books and Serials in The New York Public Library: A First Census & Listing of Artists Represented, compiled by Robert H. Davis, Jr., and Margaret Sandler with an Introduction by Gail Harrison Roman and Robert H. Davis. Jr., (New York: Norman Ross Publishing, 1998), pp. vii-xvii. 2 Among the numerous recent exhibition catalogues and scholarly studies, see The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910-1934, Museum of Modern Art (New York: Abrams, 2002) and its remarkable interactive website; Situating El Lissitzky : Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed, eds., (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, c2003); and Breaking the Rules: the Printed Face of the European Avant garde, 1900-1937, Stephen Bury, ed., (London: British Library, 2007). 3 See, S. A. Mansbach, Graphic Modernism, From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910-1935, with Wojciech Jan Siemaszkiewicz and with an essay by Robert H. Davis, Jr. and Edward Kasinec, (New York: New York Public Library, 2007). i The New York Public Library & Columbia University Libraries technical sophistication were limited during the three tumultuous decades of revolution, world war, and radical regime change that extended from the 1905 Revolution in Russia to the decline of the avant-garde throughout the region in the face of ultramontane consolidation by the mid- 1930s.4 Thus, with the exception of posters (both political and advertising, each an arena of avant-garde activity),5 the run of these publications was necessarily small, ranging from roughly an “edition” of a couple dozen hand-drawn or collaged booklets to letterpress or lithographed editions of several hundred (with only a rare few being issued in more than 850 copies).6 There were also other, perhaps more compelling, reasons that decisively circumscribed the circulation of these radically innovative experiments in seeing and reading that we might conveniently gather under the rubric, “avant-garde book arts.” First, the contents as well as the visual means that were often coincident with them were themselves essentially of a revolutionary character, often stridently so.7 Thus, there was always the risk of engendering the hostility of governmental censors, whether from the tottering imperial, fragile democratic, or ascendant leftist authorities. For it must be acknowledged that the designers of these avant-garde publications sought to replace the ossified forms and sanctioned contents of conventional 4 For a discussion of Russian avant-garde publishing in Berlin, see below, n10. See also, Patricia Railing, vol. 3, For the Voice: Voices of Revolution: Collected Essays (Voices of Revolution), (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), especially S. A. Mansbach, “El Lissitzky: A Universal Voice in Russian Berlin,” pp. 159-184. The Centre for European and International Studies Research (CEISR)’s Russian Jewish Artists and Book Design, 1919-28. Berlin as a Showcase for the Old and the New Russia, (Univ. of Portsmouth [UK]) cites 44 Russian publishers in Berlin by 1922 (a count that exceeds the number of German publishers). For alternative numbers of Russian publishers, see also Mansbach,”The First Russian Art Exhibition (1922) or the Politics and Presentation of Propaganda,” in Proceedings of the XXVIII International Congress of the History of Art, Berlin, 1993, vol. 1, pp. 307-320. 5 Posters constitute a different, though highly original, category of avant-garde activity. For recent studies, see the bibliography in Windows on the War: Soviet Tass Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945, edited by Peter Kort Zegers and Douglas Druick, with contributions by Konstantin Akinsha and others, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 6 Although the publication run of many of the most original books is unknown, there is a considerable number that survive in five or fewer copies. Moreover, of those whose original edition is known, perhaps the most rare (in terms of number) is the 5 x 5 = 25: An Exhibition of Painting, which was jointly produced in colored pencil, pencil, gouache, and linoleum cut by Alexandra Ekster, Liubov’ Popova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Aleksandr Vesnin (the five artists of the exhibition) in 1921 in an edition of twenty-five. Although this specific volume is not represented in the present volume, a number of Exter’s works treating the theater are listed. See #189- 195. 7 For an early study, see Mikhail Karasik, Soviet Graphics of the 1920s—1930s. From Private Collections, Leningrad Branch of the Union of Artists (LOSKh). Checklist of Russian, Ukrainian & Belarusian Avant-Garde & Modernist Books, Serials & Works on Paper publishing with a new manner of reading, seeing, and ultimately behaving, almost all of which carried political implications.8 Thus these radical publications often were oriented toward the small circles of open-minded intellectuals and the left-leaning artists themselves. The intelligentsia from which the authors and designers emerged was doubtless the principal audience for these avant-garde publications, despite the authors’ and artists’ frequent claims made for the “universality” of Constructivist, Futurist, or otherwise radical aesthetic forms. This self-reflexiveness merits recognition; for the limited size of the intelligentsia in the lands extending from the Baltic to the Balkans determined the scale of both generation and reception of modernist publications. Only Russia might be understood as having developed a comparatively large number of intellectuals committed to a new type of “book culture” through which to re-educate the public and thereby to transform society. Hence, a further reason for the small publication runs can be attributed to the limited size of the primary audience; namely, fellow members of the intelligentsia, which rarely exceeded a couple hundred in any of the eastern European lands, excepting Russia.9 Nonetheless, the limited editions should not be understood as signifying an-all-too modest readership. Many of the avant-garde books, journals, exhibition guides, and paper ephemera were shared among members of progressive associations or artistic movements. Single copies were frequently exchanged with foreign intellectual formations, and these would then be circulated among affiliates at home. Further, there are examples of avant-garde works that were “re-published” in other formats or fora. Here, for instance, one might cite El Lissitzky’s Suprematist-Constructivist masterpiece, Pro dva kvadrata: suprematicheskii skaz: v 6-ti postroikakh [Concerning two squares: a Suprematist tale: in 6 constructions] (#517), which 8 The utopian ambitions of the Central and Eastern European avant-gardes, which were to be realized mostly through devising a new manner of seeing/reading, have been examined by a host of scholars since the late 1970s. Among many others, see Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917- 1946, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); S. A. Mansbach, Visions of Totality: