Kozlovskii, S[ergei Vasilievich] and N[ikolai] Kolin, authors and Varvara Stepanova, artist.

[STEPANOVA DESIGN – CONSTRUCTIVISM – ARCHITECTURAL SET DESIGN] Khudozhnik-arkhitektor v kino [The artist architect in film].

Moscow: Tea-kino-pechat’, 1930. Octavo (22 × 15 cm). Original pictorial wrappers; 110, [2] pp. Illustrations throughout. Light soil to wrappers; minor fraying to spine extremities; still about very good. Item #54374

First edition. A pioneering work of set design by a major artist of early Soviet cinema, Sergei Kozlovskii (1885–1962), with wrappers by the avant-garde artist and graphic designer Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958). Broadly considered one of the great innovators of Soviet set design, Kozlovskii introduced the use of prefabricated basic film sets, which could be disassembled into component parts. The process is described in this text with accompanying diagrams and sketches. The process became standardized across Soviet film studios in the late 1930s transforming the film production process. A graduate of Odessa Technical Art School, Kozlovskii worked in theater design in Ukraine, before moving into cinema in 1913. He would go on to work on high-profile avant-garde film productions such as Iakov Protozanov’s sci-fi classic Aelita (1924) and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s revolution trilogy “Mother” (1926), “End of St. Petersburg” (1927), and “Storm over Asia” (1928). Kozlovskii draws on his work on these projects using film stills and drawings to illustrate his process in this text. He also discusses film as a synthetic art, using striking examples such as his quotation of Vincent van Gogh’s painting “Prisoner’s round” in a prisoner scene in Pudovkin’s “Mother” among others.

Varvara Stepanova designed the Constructivist wrappers for the publication. A graduate of the Kazan Art Academy, in 1921 she co-founded the “Working Group of Constructivists” along with Aleksei Gan and Aleksanr Rodchenko, which rejected fine art in favor of “production art” such as graphic art, photography, design of books and agitational posters, typography, and set design. In 1922 she famously designed the avant-garde production “Death of Tarelkin”, including sets and costumes, and would continue working in costume and fashion design throughout the 1920s. In the same period she contributed to the the avant-garde publication Novy LEF (Left Front of the Arts), with the wrappers for this publication characteristic of Stepanova’s designs in this period. Little is known about Kozlovskii’s co-author Nikolai Kolin, who seems to have published two other books texts on art and film which include a libretto and discussion questions for “Storm over Asia” (1930), and an art album Visual Art of the Uzbek SSR (1937).

As of April 2024, KVK, OCLC show two copies worldwide, at Harvard and Monash University (Australia).

Price: €1,800.00

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