Georges Annenkov

(1889 - 1974)

82

Luc Durtain

Crime a San-Francisco

Crime in San Francisco

Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1927

215 x 167 mm. 90 pages

Edition: 775. Copy nr. 113

In 1925 Annenkov arrived in Paris. Between 1918, the year he published his famous illustrations of Blok’s the Twelve and 1924 he had been working as portraitist and as a theatre designer. He had been a teacher in painting and drawing and had been designing books, posters and placards to commemorate the revolution. In 1924 he went with a delegation to the Venice Biennale, never to return to Russia again. He settled in Paris and continued working as a graphic artist, a portraitist, a painter, a theatre designer and even as a writer under the pseudonym Temeriazev or Beliaev. The first  publication for Au Sans Pareil was a French edition of Blok’s the Twelve, with some of his 1918 illustrations (see nr. 30). The second book was Crime in San Francisco. It was the first book in a series of six called Original Illustrated Editions. The layout of the book is the same as Arland’s Motherhood. Annenkov’s illustrations show an interesting evolution as they leave the picturesque more and more behind to concentrate on the essentials. The simple line drawings are than accentuated by fields of shaded contrast that are placed almost at random over the images, in the whole quite typical for  Annenkov’s illustrative works of the period.         

References:

Fouché 1983, p. 209

Seslavinskii 2009, pp. 92-93