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[1920S EUROPEAN MODERNISM] Khudozhestvennaia kul’tura Zapada [i.e. The Art Culture of the West]

Tugenkhol’d, Ya.

Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1928. Item #1590

[2], 191 pp.: ill. 24,5x20 cm. In 20th-century binding with original wrappers mounted above. Decorated endpapers. Covers rubbed, fragments of back cover paper repaired, otherwise very good and clean internally.
First and only edition. One of 3000 copies.
Collection of articles by art historian and critic Yakov Aleksandrovich Tugendkhold (1882-1928) illustrated with more than 120 reproductions. These texts became a consequence of early Soviet perception of Western art that started at the 1st German Art Exhibition (Moscow, 1924) and then widened.
The edition comprises three sections: “Social Genre in Art of the West”, “Painting of Contemporary France” and “Art Industry”.
In the second section, Tugendkhold turned to “the core of contemporary French art”: P. Picasso, G. Braque, F. Léger, A. Derain, A. Lhote, et al. The author highly evaluated Léger for his passion for industrialism and machinery, as Proletkult artists had. Tugendkhold cited Léger’s article “L’esthétique de la Machine” [Aesthetics of Machine] (1923) where the artist compared two exhibitions, “paintings in golden frames” at the Salon d’Automne and “power of geometrical forms” at a neighboring aviation exhibition. All this brings to mind a relevant to Soviet texts collation of bourgeois and socialist worlds. The text is supplemented with reproductions of “Artillery” by La Fresnaye, “Sleeping peasants” and “Mandolin and Guitar” by Picasso, “Woman with Fruit Dish” by Léger, “Football” by Lhote and others.
The third section opens with contemporary poster designs regarded as street art. Tugendkhold highlights L. Bernhard (Germany), A. Cassandre (France) K. Kollwitz (Germany), B. Uitz (Hungary) and reproduces their works. Likely, Tugendkhold commends Cassandre in a phrase “Cassandre constructs posters instead of drawing”.
Tugendkhold shifts to a recent European industrial exhibition and is severe upon every architect but Le Corbusier who designed a pavilion for Esprit nouveau. He criticizes him for Americanization and individualism but recognizes an attempt to typify housing stock. He calls the pavilion an exception to the general banal image of the exhibition. He writes that the folk arts of Eastern European countries and colonies – Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia – brought a fresh note to the exhibition. A picture of a few Black jewelers supplements the text. He praises Czech book design, as well as designs of the post-WWI French mass books, created by both easel artists and young book designers.

Worldcat shows copies located in LoC, University of Wisconsin-Madison, NYPL.

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