BUILDING IN THE USSR: 1917 – 1932
O. A. Shvidkovsky
O. A. Shvidkovsky [Editor]: BUILDING IN THE USSR: 1917 – 1932. London: Studio Vista London, 1971. First edition: Chapters 1-5 and 8-16 first published in translation by Architectural Design, London, 1970. A near-fine hardcover book in a near-fine dust jacket: former owners signature on front free endpaper, otherwise, interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print.
8.25 x 10 hardcover book with 144 pages with 285 b/w illustrations. Translated articles on Societ Architectural Associations 1917-1932, Unovis, Vkhutein Vkhutemas, El Lissitzky, The Vesnin Brothers, K. Melnokov, V. N. Semenov, N. A. Ladovsky, G. B. Barkhin, N. A. Milyutin, M. Ya. Ginzburg, M. Barsch, The Golosov Brothers and A. Burov.
Exploration of the one place and time in the 20th century (except, briefly, for the linkage of Italian Fascism and Futurism) when radical art actually did become the house style of a revolution.
"Since the publication in 1962 of Camilla Gray's pioneering study of the Russian avant-garde, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922, over 130 books and catalogues on the subject have appeared in English, French, German, Italian and Japanese. And since the comprehensive exhibition "Paris-Moscow, 1900-1930" organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1979, and then hosted by the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow two years later as "Moscow-Paris, 1900-1930," there have been over 100 exhibitions devoted to the Russian avantgarde in public and private venues throughout the U.S., Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan.
"These statistics alone indicate that the Russian avant-garde -- the mosaic of personalities and events that transformed the face of Russian art, literature and music in the 1910s and '20s -- has already received wide coverage. True, a decade or so ago, the subject was still fraught with the difficulties of territorial access and political bias, but the early and mid '80s witnessed the general recognition in the Soviet Union of the avant-garde as a valuable component of the Russian cultural heritage, and the result was a series of major exhibitions in Europe and Japan that drew substantially on Soviet holdings." [From John E. Bowlt’s review of the Guggenheim's The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932: Art in America, May, 1993 ]