Heiting/Karasik 190 ff. – Einzige Ausgabe des wichtigen Propaganda-Albums. – „The year 1933 saw the publication of El Lissitzky’s first propaganda album – The USSR Is Building Sociaism, a visual chronicle, a pictorial report on the results of the first Five-Year Plan, an account of victories in the main fields of Socialist construction. The book opens with the text of Stalin’s reporton „The Results of the First Five-Year Plan” on pages VII-XVI (numbered with Roman numerals). In 1933 dozens of books were printed with this title. Three of them were designed by Varvara Stepanova, Solomon Telingater and Boris Titov. In this book there follow (on pages numbered from 1 with Arabic numerals) sections devoted to achievements in the leading branches of industry – mining, heavy industry, machine-building, ag riculture, and the main spheres of life – health services, culture, sport. The technical details about the publication are reduced to a minimum and placed at the start, on the reverse side of the endpaper. There is some interesting information „From the publishing house“: „The textual material and figures end with the editing of August 1932“ – the book was sent for setting in May and went to press in September 1932, so the data included were very much up-to-date. In 1933 statistics, like photography, still reflected the real state of affairs. By 1937 the situation had changed – figures became one of the elements of propaganda, while photography was stripped of the specifics of time and place. … The USSR Is Building Socialism is one of El Lissitzky’s first successful book projects in collaboratio n with IZOGIZ. From 1932 to May 1941 he was actively involved in the creation of the magazine USSR in Construction [SSSR na stroike] that was published by IZOGIZ. As one of the leading artist-designers, he prepared 19 issues and to a large extent determined the look of the magazine. The album The USSR Is Building Socialism is a sort of digest of the first issues of the magazine and includes a large proportion of photographs that had already been published. Many pictures became raw material for photomontages. The montage principle of presenting photographs practically supplanted individual shots: they are nearly all “knocked together“ in pairs along one edge, forming new compositions. The most original are the compositions on the double-page spreads. In them Lissitzky reveals himself to be a master of the photo-projection method of photomontage. The montage principle for the presentation of the material excludes the need to attribute the photographs, but many of them are recognizable. The photographs of Dneprostuoi, also published in USSR in Construction, were the work of Max Alpert, with whom Lissitzky made a special trip to the site of the hydro-electric project; the shots of the Donbas by Yeleazar Langman; those of the Magnitogorsk complex by Anatoly Skurikhin; those of Kuznetskstroi by Pavel Zhukov, Mikhail Kalashnikov and M. Prigozhin. The album ends with a photograph of a military man, one of the heroes of the skiing trek in a Budionny cap and greatcoat dusted with snow – this image, popular with the magazines of th e period, was the work of Arkady Shaikhet. It is a curious fact that while he continued to practice photography in the 1930s, when it had lost its experimental character, Lissitzky in contrast to Rodchenko hardly ever used his own pictures in books. The construction of the album is founded upon the magazine principle – a compilation of issues. The development of the visual blocks is accentuated by the double-page photomontages printed in two colours, black and red. The introduction of short slogan-like texts into the photomontages make these pages look like posters“ (M. Karasik). – Deckel etwas angestaubt und leicht fleckig, nur vereinzelt um Blattrand geringfügig braunfleckig, sehr gutes Exemplar.

Schlagwörter: Avantgarde, Propaganda, Russland, Soviet Union, Sozialismus

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Exilarchiv 3550. Sternfeld-Tiedemann 321. – Erste Ausgabe, erschien zeitgleich auch in Wien. – Mit eigenhändiger Widmung und maschinenschr. Brief von R. Lucas an den Schweizer Rundfunk-Intendanten Erwin Roth (dat. 11. August 1979). – Auswahl aus den von der BBC London während der Kriegsjahre 1940-45 gesendeten „Briefen des Gefreiten Hirnschal“. – Einband leicht fleckig, vorderes freies Vorsatzblatt fehlt, sonst gut erhalten.

Schlagwörter: Autographen, Exilliteratur, Propaganda, Satire, Signierte Bücher, Weltkrieg <1939-1945>, Weltkrieg II, Widmungsexemplar, Zweiter Weltkrieg

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Karasik/Heiting, The Soviet Photobook 1920-1941, 214 ff. (mit zahlr. Abb.). Parr/Badger I, 160 ff. The Book of 101 Books 82 ff. The Open Book 116. – Einzige Ausgabe der sehr seltenen sovietischen Propaganda-Dokumentation. – Es erschien auch eine Luxusausgabe in einer Lederkassette. – „The Industry of Socialism is one of El Lissitzky’s masterpieces. Everything in the book, beginning with the cover image, speaks of the triumph of Soviet Industry. The cover … with an aluminium bas-relief carries the title of the book and Anatoly Skurikhin’s 1930 photograph „The Builders of Kuznetsk: the maschine-operator Maria Rogova and the furnace-man Fiodor Popov“. The shape of the relief – a rounded metal frame with rivets – resambles an aircraft window or a car door… The book is made up of seven brochures, each of which is devoted to a separate theme. The cover sheet of each gathering is designed with a bas-relief, printig in silver and bronze ink and the title in red. … Some of the pages are separate signatures – vertical and horizontal pages (with an area of half or a third of the usual page), fold-outs and book-lets. The pictorial material comprises photographs, photomontages, graphic art, diagrams, maps and reproductions of paintings. … This book makes use of all methods of printing available at the time and all sorts of materials: paper, card, tracing paper, film, fabric, metall and acrylic plastic. … The publication of ‚The Industry of Socialism‘ was itself a triumph of the Soviet heavy and printing industries“ (Karasik/Heiting). – „Following his success with the USSR Buils for Socialism, El Lissitzky was commissioned to disign a multi-volume report along similar lines for the Seventh Congress of Soviets in 1935, an interim review of the progress of Stalin’s second Five-Year Plan. In tone and content Socialist Industry closely follows the style of the magazine USSR in Construction, and El Lissitzky and his wife Sophie Küppers … took many of the more radical design ideas they had conceived for the periodical and developed them in book form. The result is a cornucopia of graphic design and photomontage, arguably the high point both of Lissitzky’s book-designing career and the Soviet propaganda photobook, rivalled, but certainly not surpassed by Moskva Rekonstruirruetsya (Moscow Under Reconstruction, 1938) by Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova. It is the couple’s most cinematic photobook, the result of their theoretical discussions on the techniques of montage with the film-maker Dziga Vertov. In no other book is the imagery quite so brilliantly piled up, one picture upon the other, the ideas constantly inventive and dazzling … All Soviet propaganda books are relentlessly unbeat, but Lissitzky and Küppers have given new meaning to the world ‚possitive‘, investing a down-to-earth subject with a metaphysical quality somewhat at odds with the dialectic materialism of Marxism and much more in keeping with the incessant desire culture of consumers capitalism“ (Parr/Badger). – Kassette berieben, am Rücken und den Deckelrändern etwas aufgehellt, 3 Bl. in Heft VI mit ausgeschnittenen Personen auf den Abb. (bei 1 Bl. mehrere, wohl zensiert), Heft VII (Karten) fehlt, sonst sehr gut erhalten. – Box rubbed, somewhat lightened at spine and cover edges, 3 leaves in booklet VI with cut-out persons on the illustrations (1 leaf with several, probably censored), booklet VII (maps) missing, otherwise very good condition.

Schlagwörter: Avantgarde, Industrie, Industriefotografie, Industriephotographie, Propaganda

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