MAÏAKOVSKI: 20 ANS DE TRAVAIL
Roman Cieslewicz [Designer]
Pontus Hülten, Marie-Laure Antelme [Organisation et Catalogue]: MAÏAKOVSKI: 20 ANS DE TRAVAIL. Paris: Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, 1975. First edition [Série des catalogues du Départment des Arts Plastique du Centre Georges Pompidou no. 1]. Text in French. Quarto. 96 pp. Fully illustrated in black and red. Elaborate graphic design throughout by Roman Cieslewicz. Wrappers with minor shelf wear including fore edge wear. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A very good copy.
8.25 x 11 soft cover book with 96 well-illustrated pages. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name: Centre National D'Art Contemporain, Paris [November 18, 1975 – January 5, 1976]. The exhibition traveled au Musée des Beaux Arts du Havre, au Musée des Beaux Arts de Bordeaux, a la Maison de la Culture de Rennes, a la Maison de la Culture d'Amiens, au Festival d'Avignon, au Musée d'Art et Industrie de Saint-Étienne, et a la Maison de la Culture de Grenoble.
Includes work by Alexandr Rodchencko, El Lissistzky, Mikael Larionev, László Moholy-Nagy and other artists from the Constructivist era.
Excerpted from the website for the non-profit Poets: Born in Baghdati, Russian Empire (now Mayakovsky, Georgia) on July 19, 1893, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was the youngest child of Ukrainian parents. When his father, a forester, died in 1906, the family moved to Moscow, where Mayakovsky joined the Social Democratic Labour Party as a teenager in 1908 . . . . He spent much of the next two years in prison due to his political activities.
In 1910, Mayakovsky began studying painting, soon realizing he had a talent for poetry. In 1912, he signed the Futurist manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” which included two of his poems. In 1913, he published his first solo project, “Ya,” a small book of four poems. Mayakovsky’s early poems established him as one of the more original poets to come out of the Russian Futurism, a movement characterized by a rejection of traditional elements in favor of formal experimentation, and which welcomed social change promised by technologies such as automobiles.
Living in Smolny, Petrograd, in 1917, Mayakovsky witnessed the early Bolshevik insurrections of the Russian Revolution. This was a fruitful period for the poet, who greeted the revolution with a number of poetic and dramatic works, including “Ode to the Revolution” (1918), “Left March” (1918), the long poem “150,000,000” (1920), and “Mystery-Bouffe” (1918), a political satire and one of the first major plays of the Soviet era.
Mayakovsky returned to Moscow to create graphics and verses for the Russian State Telegraph Agency, and became involved in Left Front of the Arts, editing its journal, LEF. The journal’s objective was to “re-examine the ideology and practices of so-called leftist art, and to abandon individualism to increase art’s value for developing communism.”
In 1919, he published “Collected Works 1909–1919,” which further established his reputation. Mayakovsky’s popularity granted him unusual freedoms, relative to other Soviets. Specifically, he travelled freely, throughout the Soviet Union, as well as to Latvia, Britain, Germany, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba. In 1925, he published “My Discovery of America.”
On April 14, 1930, he allegedly shot himself directly in the heart. Ten days later, the officer investigating the poet’s suicide was himself killed, fueling speculation about the nature of Mayakovsky’s death.
Roman Cieslewicz is considered one of the twentieth century's most influential poster artists. In his interview with Margo Rouard-Snowman, he lamented that "Posters need powerful occasions and significant subjects, which they don't find at the moment. As a means of communication they belong to another age and have very little future."