Bookvica

[KLUTSIS & SEN’KIN] Film und Filmkunst in der UdSSR 1917-1928. [i.e. Cinema and Cinema Arts in the USSR, 1917-1928]

Item #2715

[Moscow]: Gesellschaft für kulturelle Verbindung der Sovjetunion mit dem Auslande, 1928. 55 p., 8 l.ill. 21x14,5 cm. Red leather binding with red and black marbled endpapers, original constructivist wrappers bound in with the geometrical design by Gustav Klutsis and Sergey Sen’kin. Slightly trimmed, overall very good. Period advertisement clipping in Dutch on showing of Soviet movies pasted to the front endpaper.

The sophisticated copy: throughout the book blank leaves are bound in, one has the translation to Dutch of the proposed exhibition plan. It’s likely that the book belonged to a Dutch official making the decision on the project. With eight full-page poster reproductions, designed by Klutsis and Sen’kin, that hanged in the exhibit hall and were made specifically for this project.

The book itself is a catalogue of the proposed exhibition, a pitch, made by USSR Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) in 1928. Its head OIga Kameneva (Trotsky’s sister, executed in 1941), outlines in preface the importance of cultural outreach and collaboration between the countries. She overviews the main cinema centers of the USSR with the brief statistics of how many movies are made, how it is engaged in social work and education. The text ends with fifteen-point plan of the exhibition: 21 movies are projected to be screen (in English section of the book Eisenstein’s Potemkin’ is printed with a typo - ‘Potyembin’), 29 photomontage posters to be shown (all designed by Klutsis & Sen’kin). Also the separate exhibition of the movie posters proposed with 64 works by such artists as A.Rodchenko, A.Lavinsky, Stenberg brothers, M.Dlugatch, L.Popova, N.Prusakov and others to be shown.
The exhibition was not held at the scale proposed, but in April of 1928 the Soviet pavilion has opened at the International Movie Festival in Hague. Designs collaborations of Gustav Klutsis and Sergei Sen’kin are regarded as one of the high points in the history of Russian avant garde. Their works in periodicals and books are better known, but the duo participated together in designing of the number of
international exhibitions in 1920-1930s (Soviet pavilion at the International Press Exhibition in Cologne (1928), Soviet pavilion at the 1939 New York World Exhibition, present show).
Likely printed in low number of copies for the committee of the exhibition.

Worldcat shows copies at Northwestern, Columbia, Harvard, John Hopkins, NYPL, MOMA and the Getty.

Price: $3,500.00

Status: On Hold