THE MAGNANIMOUS CUCKOLD
AN EVENING OF RUSSIAN CONSTRUCTIVIST THEATRE
[Vsevolod Meyerhold] Alma H Law, Mel Gordon, Fernand Crommelynck
[Vsevolod Meyerhold] Alma H Law; Mel Gordon; Fernand Crommelynck: THE MAGNANIMOUS CUCKOLD: AN EVENING OF RUSSIAN CONSTRUCTIVIST THEATRE. New York: The Guggenheim Museum, 1981. Original edition. Slim quarto. Stapled printed wrappers. 20 pp. 23 black and white illustrations. Former owners circular emboss to title page, textblock well thumbed, so a good or better copy of this uncommon catalog.
8.5 x 11 stapled program “The Magnanimous Cuckold: An Evening of Russian Constructivist Theatre" is a re-creation of the 1922 Moscow Production directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold” and produced in conjunction with the exhibition "Art of the Avant-Garde in Russia: Selections from the George Costakis Collection, ” during 4 days in December 1981.
Vsevolod Emilyevich Meyerhold (born German: Karl Kasimir Theodor Meyerhold 1874 – 2 February 1940) was a Russian and Soviet theatre director, actor and theatrical producer. His provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatre setting made him one of the seminal forces in modern international theatre. During the Great Purge, Meyerhold was arrested, tortured and executed in February 1940.
Theatrical recreation produced in association with the groundbreaking Exhibition of September, 1981 that is widely believed to have introduced a whole new generation to the artistic efforts of the Russian Avant-Garde.
During the years 1915-32, Moscow and Petrograd (from 1924, Leningrad) witnessed revolutions in art and politics that changed the course of Modernist art and modern history. Though the great revolution in art — the radical formal innovations constituted by Vladimir Tatlin's "material assemblages" and Kazimir Malevich's Suprematism — in fact preceded the political revolution by several years, the full weight of the new expressive possibilities was felt only after, and to a large extent because of, the social upheavals of February and October 191J. As avant-garde artists, armed with new insights into form and materials , sought to realize the Utopian aims of the Bolshevik Revolution, art and life seemed to merge.
“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 ]