B a diks (1 resultados)

Soft cover. Condición: Very Good. 1st Edition. Quarto. 12 pp (including covers). Illustrated card covers, staple bound. A bright clean copy (covers slightly darkened/dusty) with only one real flaw being a dent in the pages at the lower corner affecting all pages with a crease. An exceptionally rare example of the work of the Ukrainian graphic artist and illustrator Heorhiy Narbut [1886-1920]. In 1906 Narbut moved to St Petersburg where he became involved with the art movement. Mir Iskusstva had produced a magazine since the 1890s edited by the impresario and provocateur, Serge Diaghilev. Narbut returned to Kyiv in 1917 to become Rector of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts where he designed stamps and banknotes for the Ukrainian state. He died of typhus in 1920, a great career cut tragically short. This title is one of two companion volumes with the same title from the Moscow publisher, Josef Knebel [1854-1926]. Knebel, from a German-speaking Jewish family, had a profound influence on Russian publishing for children, his vision helping artists like Narbut make their reputation. Between 1906 and 1918 Knebel produced some 50 or so titles in the 'Gift Book' series for which Narbut drew some dozen books. This period corresponds to the rise of Edwardian luxury children's books illustrated by artists such as Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, and Narbut and the Russian artists whom Knebel commissioned should be seen as a Russian equivalent to their English peers. Narbut took a particular interest in the printing process and worked closely with Golike & Vilborg of St Petersburg, who printed Knebel's titles. Their imprint is on the rear cover. The drawings in the book are dedicated to Narbut's teachers and Mir Iskusstva artists Alexandre Benois and Mstislav Dobuzinsky. Benois was a collector of Russian folk toys and encouraged Narbut to do the same, In the book a little boy is given a hobby horse and makes his way to an enchanted land where toys are alive. Igrushki was one of the few original texts of Knebel's Gift Books and the drawings may predate the text, which Knebel might well have commissioned to fit Narbut's pictures, a rare example of an illustrated book where the text serves the pictures and not the other way around. The author is given here as 'B.A. Diks' about whom there appears to be no readily accessible information.…