[Russian Exhibition, 1927] ロシヤ展

Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun, 1927. Edited by Hoshino Tatsuo (星野辰男).
8vo. [2] pp., 6 colour plates, pp. 7–70 (ill.), 6 pp. text. Captions in Japanese and English.

The catalogue of the first major exhibition of Russian art in Japan — and printed to a standard Soviet presses of the period could not match.

Russian contemporary art first reached Japan in 1920, privately, through Burliuk and Pal’mov. Official exhibitions followed the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1925, but none of them produced a catalogue. The 1927 show — variously called Art of New Russia — travelled Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, drew on Bytie, AKhRR, Makovets, Zhar-Tsvet, OST and the Four Arts, and was catalogued only here, in Japan.

The plates run from academic realism to the avant-garde: Petrov-Vodkin’s portrait of Anna Akhmatova, Kustodiev, Tyshler, Mashkov, Konchalovsky, Kuznetsov, Arkhipov, Yuon, Falk, Shterenberg, Lanceray, Altman, Udaltsova, Lebedev, Pakhomov, Favorsky, Kravchenko. There is a self-portrait by Aleksandr Drevin, later shot in the Great Purge, and work by Zinaida Serebriakova, who had left for Paris three years earlier. Two closing essays: Nikolay Punin on the Leningrad school, David Arkin on Moscow.

Binding & condition

Original wrappers with a mounted colour reproduction after Abram Arkhipov; issued without a title page. Good: sunning to the wrappers, light rubbing, small losses and tears to the spine, rust to the staples, small losses around the edges. Fragile, but well preserved.

Rarity

No copy located outside Japan on OCLC.