Berdiaev, Nikolai.

[EXISTENTIALISM – PICASSO AND THE CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION] Krizis iskusstva [The crisis in art].

Moscow: Izdanie G. A. Lemana i S. I. Sakharova, 1918. Large octavo (25 × 15.7 cm). Original printed wrappers; 47, [1] pp. Five leaves of plates on coated paper. Small chips to wrapper extremities and along spine; owner signature and Soviet bookstore stamps inside rear wrapper; else internally clean and unmarked. About very good. Item #54344

Scarce first edition of three articles by Berdiaev: “The crisis in art,” originally held as a public lecture in Moscow on November 1, 1917; “Picasso”; and “An astral novel”, about Andrey Bely’s novel Petersburg. Berdiaev (or Berdyaev, 1874–1948) was an important Russian religious philosopher and one of the founders of Russian Existentialism. He was one of the first thinkers to openly consider the relationship between historical upheavals in the early twentieth century and the deformation of the human body in both literary and visual arts. Berdiaev saw Cubism and Futurism as paradigmatic of the philosophical and spiritual crisis, writing that in Picasso’s paintings everything is “analytically decomposed and dismembered.” Whereas the futurists, in his view, called for the destruction of the human: “Futurists want to develop accelerated movement and deny the source of creative movement – men. The world is left without the lever with which Futurism can turn the world upside down.” His article on the crisis of the arts was much commented on in the press, as well as in published rebuttals. This book was one of the last works published before Berdiaev’s forced exile from the Soviet Union in 1922. With five full-page reproductions of cubist paintings by Picasso on better paper stock.

Getty 68.

As of May 2024, KVK, OCLC show two copies in North America.