[RARE SOVIET PHOTOBOOK] Stroim piatiletku: al’bom illiustratsii s tekstom [We are building the five-year-plan: an illustrated album with annotations]. Vypusk 1 and 2 [Volumes 1 and 2, all published].
Leningrad: Leningradskoe Oblastnoe Izdatel'stvo, 1931. Quarto (30 × 21 cm). Original embossed cloth; 92, [11] and 104 pp. With four unnumbered plates in color, two of which folded. One full-page photomontage incorporating a photograph of Stalin printed in red and black. Cover design and photomontage by Valentina M. Khodosevich and Andrei R. Diderikhs. Typographic design by Veniamin P. Belkin. As usual with this publication, with condition flaws: front hinge split; general wear and staining; traces of moisture to upper right corner of text; old bookseller description affixed to first leaf; still good or better. Item #50455
This rare album illustrates and promotes the achievements of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) and stylistically captures a transitional moment in Soviet art and culture. Dynamic photographic compositions are accompanied by explanatory texts, which cite recent statistics to demonstrate the resounding success of the first plan. Constructivist design and photomontage are used throughout the album, even as constructivism was getting progressively attacked in the Soviet press, with the anti-formalist campaign and accusations of bourgeois tendencies of constructivism well underway by the mid-1930s. The diagonal and frieze compositions of photographs, texts and graphic material, as well as bold geometric borders printed in two tones, black and red, are reminiscent of avant-garde publications such as LEF. Documentary photography (factography) of the 1920s, as well as complex photomontages are positioned side by side with staged and pavilion shots more typical of the 1930s in this album. The work is divided into seven thematic sections: Tractor Construction of the USSR; Fuel and the Five Year Plan; Ways of Collectivization; Public Catering in the Service of National Construction; Our Achievements on the Cultural Front, and Public Health in the New Phase. As is typical of albums of the period, photographs of Lenin and Stalin introduce the publication.
The album was designed by the husband and wife artistic team of Andrei Diderikhs (1884–1942) and Valentina Khodasevich (1894–1970) and is stylistically similar to their previous collaboration, the five-year plan photographic publication “Udarniki” (Shock Workers). Diderikhs and Khodasevich both studied with modernist masters in Germany and France prior to the Revolution. Upon her return to Russia, Khodasevich worked in the studio of the famous Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin and took part in the exhibits of the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) and Bubnovyi Valet (Jack of Diamonds) art groups. Both Diderikhs and Khodasevich were active in creating the designs for the public festivities in Petrograd in 1918, for the anniversary of the Revolution, subsequently working in theater and book design. The painter and graphic artist Veniamin Belkin (1884–1951) did the typographic design of the album. Other artists included in the publication are Georgii Vereiskii, Evgenii Belukha, and Adrian Kaplun.
Rare; as of February 2024, KVK and OCLC show copies at Chicago (complete), Hoover, and the National Gallery (both only the first two issues).
Price: €2,500.00