Natalia Gontcharova

(1884 - 1962)

2431

Aleksandr Rubakin

Город

City

Paris: Rubakin, 1920

225 x 160 mm. 44 pages

Edition: 325.

Aleksandr Rubakin privately published this book dedicated to the memory of his wife, who died on 27 January 1918. The lithographic text reproduces the handwriting of the author. The illustrations by Gontcharova complement the grim poetry. She draws a picture of the dynamics of a city in heavy blacks, emphasizing the feeling of loneliness and fear, hence the frightful pictures of animals. Illustration and text were lithographed together on one side of the paper only, resulting in an alternation of a spread with illustrated pages   followed by a spread of blank pages. This intensifies the black-white contrast, already found in the drawings, fitting the mournful theme. For the cover Gontcharova designed a typographic front cover in Russian and a back cover in French. The author’s name and the title are composed of bold letters. The Cyrillic G (from Gorod, on the front cover) resembles an inversed L and is mirrored by the letter L in French (for La Cité on the back cover). Every second letter is marked by a cipher. The design resembles the typographic experiments by Iliazd. The book with its lithographed combination of  text and illustrations is a late  repetition of the pre-revolutionary futurist artist’s books, produced by Gontcharova.

References:

Leningrad 1977, no. 29

Chamot 1979, p. 86-87

Hellyer 2006, nr. 457

Seslavinskii 2009, pp. 182-189