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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Erste Ausgabe der besten Monographie über den russischen Avantgarde Künstler W. J. Tatlin (1885-1953) der maßgeblichen Einfluss auf die Architektur des Konstruktivismus hatte. – Sehr gutes Exemplar.

Schlagwörter: Architektur, Avantgarde, Constructivism, Konstruktivismus, Russland, Soviet Union

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