Alexandre Benois (1870 - 1960)

453

Aleksandr Pushkin

Пиковая дама

The queen of spades

St. Petersburg:Golike & Vilborg, 1911

304 x 245 mm. 70 pages

Edition: unknown

The origins of these illustrations for a short novel by Pushkin , can be dated around 1898. It is the period of the founding of Mir Iskusstva [World of Art]. The illustrations are stylistically similar to those Benois did for The Bronze Horseman. During a stay in Paris in 1905 he designed a new set of  pictures for the story, now in watercolours, that eventually were printed in volume 4 of the complete works of Pushkin, published in 1916 by Brockhaus and Efron in St. Petersburg. The set of illustrations used for this de-luxe edition of the tale were designed in 1910 and 1911. The complete series of designs includes 7 colour illustrations and 20 head-pieces. Bilibin, who commented on these illustrations, thought the colour illustrations beautiful and technically well done but in the head-pieces he found some indications of haste work. Nevertheless, the book was a success once it was published and it became one of the pièces-de-résistance of the futurists. They tasted in these illustrations (Benois being one of the key-figures of the Mir-Iskusstva) all the dislike futurists had for art-for-art’s-sake. This book is an object of Burliuk’s sharp criticism of backwardness in art as stated in his The noisy Benoises

References:

Brussels 1928, p.84

Petrov 1975, p. 85

Fekula 1988: nr. 5104

Anikst 1990, p.75

Kamensky 1991, p.180

Petergof 2001: nr. 71