[AVANT-GARDE – FUTURISM] Kul'bin.
Moscow: Izdanie Obshchestva Intimnago teatra, 1912. Octavo (17 × 12 cm). Original printed card wrappers; 69 pp with 10 tipped-in illustrations. Light soil to wrappers, else very good. Item #55084
A volume of essays and a poem in honor of one of the leading figures of the Russian avant-garde movement, Nikolai Kul’bin (1868–1917), with ten tipped-in gravures of his drawings and paintings, and writtten contributions by avant-garde masters Serge Sudeikin, Nikolai Evreinov, and Sergei Gorodetskii. The volume was published by Obshchestvo Intimnogo teatra (the Society of Intimate Theatre), co-founded in 1910 by Kul’bin with Evreinov and Vsevolod Meierkhold, among others. The opening essay by Evreinov, a close friend and collaborator of Kul’bin, characterizes his work as “surprising with its abundance of line, color, light, and sound discoveries.” A medical doctor and researcher by training, Kul’bin was in fact deeply interested in synesthesia and became one of the propagators of the ideas of Vasily Kandinsky on the correspondences of sound and color. Meanwhile, Kandinsky published Kul’bin’s 1909 article “Free Music” in the Blaue Reiter almanac in Munich in 1912 (See Isabel Wünsche in Music and Modernism 1849–1950, pp. 87–91). Kul’bin would go on to work on stage designs for Evreinov’s plays and participated in the rehearsal of the Futurist opera “Victory over the Sun” in 1913. In the same year he illustrated Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov's Futurist books (along with Natan Altman, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, and Olga Rozanova). See no. 55 and no. 49, no. 77 in The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934. In 1914 he helped organize Filippo Marinetti’s visit to Russia. Although reputably quiet and polite in his demeanor, the poem by Sergei Gorodetskii in this volume refers to Kul’bin as having a "possessed mind."
As of March 2025, KVK, OCLC show six copies in North America.
Price: €950.00