STEPANOVA, Varvara Fedorovna

A Leaf from Gaust Chaba [Russian Avant-Garde Artist's Books]

[Moscow]: [1919]. Framed fine art. 6-1/4 x 10-3/4 inches. Watercolor lettering on newsprint fragment. Matted and framed behind UVF acrylic, 17-1/2 x 23 inches overall. From a handmade book produced in a numbered edition of 50 plus 4. With moderate toning, age considered. Very Good. Item #8035

Very early work from the 25-year-old Russian avant-garde artist creating non-objective visual poetry under the sway of cubo-futurists just after the October Revolution. This is a leaf from her artist's book Gaust chaba: the rigid type sense of printed news (Izvestia from July 1918) painted over with red watercolor zaum ("beyonsense") lettering, beginning "O TE TA." The book included eight such sound poems plus six collages. Similar techniques were used in illustrations for Aleksei Kruchenykh's Gly-Gly. Stepanova, her spouse Alexander Rodchenko and others were rejecting traditional aesthetics for abstraction and revolution - and inventing Constructivism.

Provenance Galerie Jean Chauvelin, Paris, May 1977: acquired from Russia.

MoMA holds a few leaves if not a complete copy of the book. One scholar states just three complete copies are known to academia including one at the Moscow Literary Museum. OCLC locates none.

Price: $19,500.00