Moskva, Izdatel’stvo “Plakat”, 1979. In Russian, English and French. Introduction by Boris Efimov.
Oblong 8vo. [118] pp., ill.
The first appearance of Yayoi Kusama in the Soviet Union — an exhibition recorded in none of the standard chronologies of her work that we have been able to consult.
Catalogue of the third international exhibition of satirical art, held in Moscow in 1977 and published two years later. Mounted in support of the antiwar movement and against the arms race, it brought together artists from the USSR, Japan, the United States, France, Germany, Denmark, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Portugal, Turkey, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Mongolia.
Kusama (1929-2026) is represented by "Tidal Wave of War" (戦争の津波), 1977 — watercolour, pastel and collage on paper, one of a group of three antiwar works alongside "War" and "Graves of the Unknown Soldiers", all now in the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. She made them in the year she took up residence at Seiwa Hospital, where she lived for the rest of her life. By the time of her death she had long been the world's top-selling female artist. Her presence in a Soviet state publication of this date is unexpected, and has so far been noted only once: as a name in a list of Japanese exhibitors in a recent Russian survey (V. Belozerov, Iskusstvoznanie, 2025, no. 2, p. 352), which neither identifies nor reproduces the work.
Also included is Ollie Harrington (1912–1995), whom Langston Hughes called "America's greatest African-American cartoonist".
Binding & condition
Original pictorial boards with the shipping box. Good: light wear to the boards, light spotting to the fore-edge, owner’s signature to the verso of the first free endpaper, dampstaining to the lower edge of the box.
