Product Description
This illustrated version of the popular Passover song 'Had gadya' was the wonderfully playful offspring of the avant-garde artist El Lissitzky (1890-1941). It dates to a little-known period early in his career when he immersed himself in the Jewish cultural renaissance that flourished in Russia from roughly 1912 to the early 1920s. Signed with his Hebrew given name, this volume-with its wraparound cover, colorful lithographic montages, and stylized use of Yiddish and Aramaic words-celebrates Lissitzky's interest in Jewish folk traditions while looking forward to the dynamic graphic and typographic designs for which he is best remembered. This near-scale facsimile-including the rarely seen cover-allows readers to experience Lissitzky's Had gadya as originally envisioned. It is accompanied here by Nancy Perloff's discussion of the work's cultural and artistic contexts, Arnold J. Band's English translation of Lissitzky's Yiddish version of the song, sections on Lissitzky's iconography and vocabulary, and lyrics set to music. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Correct evaluation
the seller presented the item correctly and sent it off immediately. It arrived in perfect condition, as stated, andI am very happy with this purchase. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
El Lissitzky's first suprematist book is a story about how two squares, one red, one black, transform a world. It is Lissitzky's "scientific romance," an allegory of the fourth dimension and its effect on the three-dimensional world. When it was first published in Berlin in 1922, About 2 [Squares] presented a radical rethinking of what a book was, demonstrating a new way of organizing typography on a page and relating it to visual images. It marked the beginning of a new graphic art and is among the most important publications in the history of the avant-garde in typography and graphic design.This facsimile limited edition is reproduced in letterpress with the English translation printed on a transparent overlay to register over the original Russian.The commentary, More About 2 [Squares], boxed in the same slipcase, provides a detailed analysis of this seminal work. Railing provides a brief historical survey of avant-garde poetry in Russia and shows how the letter/ sound was applied by Lissitzky in About 2 [Squares] as a corollary to the pictorial images - a relationship that forms the basis of abstract or nonobjective language and painting in Russia, and is the theoretical and creative source and device of Lissitzky's graphic design. Railing's is a study both of the philosophical idea of suprematism and the artistic content of Lissitzky's architectural extension of the suprematist painting of Kazimir Malevich, which he called the Proun, and of its particular role as a sequence of images used to create the story About 2 [Squares]. ... Read more

Product Description
Following World War I, a new artistic-social avant-garde emerged with the ambition to engage the artist in the building of social life. Nowhere is this project more evident than in the lives of Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy whose careers covered a broad range of artistic practices and political situations. The remarkable continuity between the various forms of their work stems from their belief that art had to be extended beyond the aesthetic sphere. But given that the social situations they confronted changed radically in their lifetimes, their operative strategies were severely tested and underwent significant revisions. Through close readings of their work as it relates to the situations in which they were active, Victor Margolin examines the way these three artists negotiated the changing relations between their social ideals and the political realities they confronted. He follows them and their affiliations through the 1920s and 1930s in Moscow, Berlin, and Chicago, documenting their contributions to utopian architecture, Constructivist ideology, industrial design, photography, visual communication, and design education. Each essay features one or two of the artist-designers and shifts from one medium to another through a chronological narrative that begins with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and ends in Chicago just after World War II. Focusing on the difficult relationship between art and social change, Margolin brings important new insights to our understanding of the avant-garde's role in a period of great political complexity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Struggle for Utopia
Excellent photos of the Russian Constructivist period covering 1917 through 1946. Easy to leaf through , well organized exciting art work. ... Read more

Product Description
This work explores both the political and aesthetic aspects of Lissitzky's late multimedia work, from his designs for the Abstract Cabinet to his death in 1941. Attention is given to his collaboration with German and Soviet photographers, designers and film-makers. Included is correspondence with his wife and western colleagues. ... Read more

Product Description
Russian avant-garde books made between 1910 and 1934 reflect a vivid and tumultuous period in that nation's history that had ramifications for art, society, and politics. The early books, with their variously sized pages of coarse paper, illustrations entwined with printed, hand-written, and stamped texts, and provocative covers, were intended to shock academic conventions and bourgeois sensibilities. After the 1917 Revolution, books appeared with optimistic designs and photomontage meant to reach the masses and symbolize a rational, machine-led future. Later books showcased modern Soviet architecture and industry in the service of the government's agenda. Major artists adopted the book format during these two decades. They include Natalia Goncharova, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, the Stenberg brothers, Varvara Stepanova, and others. These artists often collaborated with poets, who created their own transrational language to accompany the imaginative illustrations. Three major artistic movements, Futurism, Suprematism, and Constructivism, that developed during this period in painting and sculpture also found their echo in the book format. This publication accompanied an exhibition of Russian avant-garde books at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. All of the books in the exhibition and this publication are part of a gift to the Museum from The Judith Rothschild Foundation.

Edited by DeborahWyeandMargit Rowell. Essays by Jared Ash, Gerald Janecek, Nina Gurianova, Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye.

Clothbound, 304 pages, 594 color and 62 halftone illustrations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A book for designers
This book is the best anthology of Constructivist design I have seen.
But if you want good reproductions of Constructivist painting than this book is not for you.

Excellent!!!!!
This is a hefty volume a large thick 8vo, which is worth every penny spent on it. It's a visual delight, and jam-packed with alot of images, you will not be disappointed.

A Wealth of Illustration
The book is rich in showcasing and reproducing the Russian Avant-Garde books.In some, it included reproduction of contents of some of the books.For those who miss the exhibition from which this book springs forth, it is a wonderful and well-documented catalog.

The book also contains the exhibition's division of the Soviet book era into three different times, each accompanied by one or several essays.Like any good book, it is also preceded by a general discussion of bookarts, and the difference between livre d'artiste and artist's book.

To the contemporary eyes, some of the books featured may not be anything special, but by putting them in context of the time, one will see the daring nature and the revolutionary spirit of these books and their makers.

The Russian Avant-Garde book, 1910Ð1934
This companion volume to a major MoMA exhibition is a treasury for graphic designers and bibliophiles, but it also provides a fascinating portrait of artists who began by spitting in the eye of the bourgeosie, became zealous stalwarts of the revolution, and finallyreverted to the status of outsiders, as StalinÕs apparatchiks snuffed out every trace of invention. The earliest work has a child-like spontaneityÑcrude sketches on cheap paper illustrating tiny editions ofpoetsÕ work. ThereÕs a gradual shift to abstraction in the work of such masters as El Lissitsky and Rodchenko, and finally a slide into the banality of socialist realism. A fascinating portrait of artistic struggle and defeat. ... Read more

Product Description
The Paris of Ilja Ehrenburg knows no Louvre or Notre Dame and shows the Eiffel Tower crouching behind shabby facades and building timber. The Paris in which the Russian revolutionary lived from 1908 to 1940 was a place in which completely normal people with little money and hope struggled through life. Ehrenburg photographed them at their doors and in cafés, at work and at rest, in their poverty and dignity, and wrote brief texts that describe them. My Paris is an impressive work of photographic social reporting, presenting portraits of the elderly and the young, workers and outcasts, standing in stark contrast to the glamorous Paris of so many idealized representations and memories. Originally published in Moscow in 1933 with an exceptionally clear typographic treatment by El Lissitzky that lends a gentle rhythm to the book, Moi Parizh / My Paris is an extremely rare object, presented here anew as a reprint.Now back in print after 70 years, Paris as seen through the eyes of a Russian revolutionary artistHardcover, 7.25 x 6.25 in./240 pgs / 0 color 125 BW0 duotone 0 ~ Item D20429 ... Read more

Product Description
A new title in the Design series, presenting the life and work of El Lissitzky. ... Read more

Product Description
Lissitzky's book is a classic in architectural and planning theory, as well as an important document in social and intellectual history. It contains an appendix of excerpted writings by his contemporaries—M. J. Ginzburg, P. Martell, Bruno Taut, Ernst May, M. Ilyin, Wilm Stein, Martin Wagner, Hannes Meyer, Hans Schmidt, and others—all of whom illuminate the architecture and planning of Europe and Russia during the 1920s. There are over 100 plates and drawings. ... Read more

Product Description
The artist and architect Peter Smithson is one of the best-informed and insightful critics of modernist and postmodernist architecture. In Flying Furniture he sheds light on the construction of furniture-particularly mobile furniture, which has rendered obsolete the old binary distinction between "movables" and "immovables." The works featured here extend from Bauhaus up to the present day, representing such essential designers as Alison and Peter Smithson, Stefan Wewerka, El Lissitzky, Jean Prouv, Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Gerrit Rietveld. The book itself testifies to the possibilities and dynamism of the field of design with its unique shape, its playful layout, and the witty remarks and quotations throughout. ... Read more

Product Description
The early decades of the 20th century saw unprecedented cooperation between the performing and visual arts. Painters and other visual artists working in a variety of avant-garde styles, such as Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Constructivism, and Futurism, worked in the world of theater and dance throughout Europe, creating masterpieces inspired by the explosion of creativity in the performing arts, from the ballets of Diaghilev and Balanchine to the plays of the Russian Meierkhol'd and Futurists such as Marinetti, and operas by the likes of Wagner and Offenbach. It was this burst of integration that led to the formulation of the idea of the "Total Art Creation," (a term coined by Wagner), and enriched both the theater and the visual arts. This handsome volume, published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the Reina Sophia Museum in Madrid, examines these avant-garde experiments in fusion between the arts with extensive color illustrations by virtually every major painter of the period:artists like Picasso, Kandinsky, Leger, and others, as well as in-depth essays on several of the performing art forms and the ways they involved visual artists in their production.

Featuring Works by: Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Fernand Leger, Henri Matisse, Joan Miro, Francis Picabia, Andre Derain, Juan Gris, Georgio De Chirico, Kasimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, George Grosz, El Lissitzky and others.

Essays by John Bowlt, Linn Garafola,Eric Michaud, Maria Teresa Ocana and Marga Paz.

230 color and 20 duotones.
9.5 x 6.75 in. ... Read more