AS I SEE
Boris Artzybasheff
[Notes to folios by the artist]. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1954. First edition. Quarto. Full tan cloth decorated in white. Printed dust jacket. Decorated endpapers. Color frontis [102] pp. One color letterpress plate, otherwise fully illustrated with gravures from the Beck Engraving Company. Lower corner gently bumped. Beautiful bright price clipped jacket with trivial edge wear and a faint dampstain to rear panel. Author portrait by Walker Evans. Exceptionally well preserved and the finest copy available: a nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket. Rare in this condition.
“As I see, so I draw. There is no need for me to smoke marijuana or opium because, being slightly myopic, all I have to do is to take off my glasses and the world around me looks that way.” —Boris Artzybasheff
8.5 x 11.5-inch hardcover book fully illustrated with magnificent Grave plates from the Beck Engraving Company and two color letterpress plates. Author portrait by Walker Evans. Don’t be fooled by the 2008 reprint edition—Artzybasheff’s work has always been about the quality of reproductions, and they don’t get any better than the plates presented in this 1954 edition.
The whimsical endpapers trace the history of human conflict from the first chokehold to our eventual nuclear oblivion fifteen years before Stanley Kubrick retraced the same journey in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This fantastical collection teems with ironic imagery which documents our culture’s vanity, aggression, dreams, and neuroses with biting wit and wisdom. Boris Artzybasheff’s striking graphic style, which includes everything from grotesque experiments in anthropomorphism, to the depiction of vivid and extreme ranges of human psychology and emotion, is displayed to full effect in this seminal collection of his work.
"I am thrilled by machinery’s force, precision and willingness to work at any task, no matter how arduous or monotonous it may be. I would rather watch a thousand ton dredge dig a canal than see it done by a thousand spent slaves lashed into submission... I like machines." - Boris Artzybasheff
Boris Mikhailovich Artzybasheff (Russian, 1899 – 1965) was a Russian-born American illustrator notable for his strongly worked and often surreal designs. Artzybasheff was born in Kharkov, son of the author Mikhail Artsybashev. He is said to have fought as a White Russian. During 1919 he arrived in New York City, where he worked in an engraving shop.
His earliest work appeared in 1922 as illustrations for Verotchka's Tales and The Undertaker's Garland. A number of other book illustrations followed during the 1920s. Dhan Gopal Mukerji's Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon, with his illustrations, was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1928. His book Seven Simeons was a Caldecott Honor Book in 1938. Over the course of his career, he illustrated some 50 books, several of which he wrote, most notably As I See.
During his lifetime, however, Artzybasheff was probably known best for his magazine art. He illustrated the major American magazines Life, Fortune, and Time. He painted 219 Time covers from 1942 to 1966, including portraits of Dmitri Shostakovich, Louis Armstrong, and Dave Brubeck. Other illustrators of Time covers during this period, which has been called the golden age of Time covers, included Robert Vickrey, James Ormsbee Chapin, Bernard Safran and Boris Chaliapin.
During World War II, he also served an expert advisor to the U.S. Department of State, Psychological Warfare Branch. After 1940, he devoted himself to commercial art, including advertisements for Xerox, Shell Oil, Pan Am, Casco Power Tools, Alcoa Steamship lines, Parke-Davis, Avco Manufacturing, Scotch Tape, Wickwire Spencer Steel Company, Vultee Aircraft, World Airways, and Parker Pens.
His graphic style is striking. In commercial work he explored grotesque experiments in anthropomorphism, where toiling machines displayed distinctly human attributes. Conversely, one of his works shows Buckminster Fuller's head in the form of Fuller's geodesic structure. In his personal work, he explored the depiction of vivid and extreme ranges of human psychology and emotion.
As the illustrator of Seven Simeons, which he also wrote, Artzybasheff was one of two runners-up for the Caldecott Medal in 1938, when the American Library Association inaugurated its award for children's picture books. Mukerji won the 1928 Newbery Medal for Gay Neck; Young and Hall were among the runners-up for that annual ALA award, which recognizes the "most distinguished contribution to children's literature.” Finney won one of the inaugural, 1935 National Book Awards for The Circus of Dr. Lao.