Iliazd

Niko Pirosmani : Portrait of Ilya Zdanevič , 1913

Ilya Zdanevič , called Iliazd (another pseudonym: Eli Eganbjuri , Russian: Эли Эганбюри ); (* April 21, 1894 in Tbilisi , Georgia ; † September 25, 1975 in Paris ) was a Russian-Georgian-French author, typographer and publisher. Iliazd is considered one of the most innovative typographers of the 20th century. He was one of the founders of Russian Futurism and belonged to the circle of French Dadaists and Symbolists .

He has his unique position in art history as the “godfather”, designer and publisher of illustrated books of the protagonists of the Paris School , such as Georges Braque , Max Ernst , Alberto Giacometti , Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso .

Life

Ilya Zdanevič was born in Tbilisi to a Polish father, a French teacher at the grammar school in Tbilisi, and a Georgian mother. Ilya's brother Kyrill Zdanevič was a painter. The Zdanevič ran a hospitable and culturally open house and often housed French artists and intellectuals who toured Georgia. One of her guests, Boris Lopatinsky, brought futuristic documents from Italy, including Marinetti's Uccidiamo il Chiaro di Luna! that the young Ilya learns by heart with enthusiasm in order to then start an exchange of letters with Marinetti.

In 1911 he began to study law at the University of St. Petersburg, at the same time he wrote art reviews and was an author for a Russian magazine. Through his friendship with Natalija Goncharova he came into contact with artists of the Russian avant-garde . In 1913 a small edition (525 copies) of the biographies of Goncharova and Larionov appeared under the pseudonym Eli Eganbjuri . Twenty-five of the copies were hand-colored.

During a vacation stay in Tbilisi, Zdanevič first saw pictures by the Georgian painter Pirosmani , of whom four pictures were shown publicly for the first time on March 24, 1913, together with works by Goncharova, Larionow and Le-Dantju . In 1916 the Zdanevič brothers organized a comprehensive exhibition of Pirosmani's works in their parents' house.

During the war , Zdanevič was able to continue his studies in St. Petersburg, but in between he also worked as a war correspondent in the Caucasus and also dealt with the architecture of Georgian churches. In 1918, after Georgia declared independence, he returned to Tbilisi, where he learned the craft of a typographer in the Sindikat printing house , which publishes the works of the Russian avant-garde. There he joined the artist group 41 ° and took the pseudonym Iliazd. Co-founders of this short-lived movement were u. a. the Russian poets Alexei Krutschonych and Velimir Chlebnikow , inventors of the Zaoum poetry, who experimented with new forms of poetry and language and made public appearances with their poems. Iliazd himself wrote three pieces ( Yanko Krul Albansky , Ostraf Paskhi and Zga Yakaby ) in this artificial language.

In Paris

In 1920 Iliazd left Georgia and first traveled to Constantinople, traveling to Paris, where a lively and experimental group of artists had come together, which was later summarized under the name of École de Paris . For a whole year he tried to get a visa for France in Constantinople . In 1921 he reached Paris, where he and other compatriots founded the Cherez organization . The group had set itself the task of bringing Russian emigrants together with representatives of French culture.

In 1923 he wrote the story Parizhachi about two couples in the Bois de Boulogne who manage to dine together within two and a half hours - exactly from 11:51 a.m. to 2:09 p.m. - and deceive each other, whereby all the conventions of narrative art and the typography of the book breaks the rules of spelling and punctuation.

41 ° - Le Degré Quarante et Un

From 1940, Iliazd published a series of artist's books under the name of his Tbilisi artist group 41 °, in France Le Degré Quarante et Un , which today regularly fetch top prices at auctions. All books have only limited editions, between 40 and 60 copies, and some are hand-signed by the artists. Design and typography always come from Iliazd, authors are painters and poets from the Parisian art scene, Parisian Dadaists , symbolists and protagonists who were little known at the time, as well as stars of classical modernism .

The books were created in close collaboration with the artists and poets, who all conformed to the strict ideas of the publisher and typographer. Iliazd carefully examined the materials of the books: old Japanese paper , China paper , parchment , French handmade paper (Velin Arches), paper from old paper mills of Auvergne, antique paper from the 18th century, etc.

The first artist book from Iliazd's Paris office was created in collaboration with Pablo Picasso. A collection of 66 sonnets by Iliadz in Russian was published in 1940 under the title Afat in an edition of 64 copies . The book, in which female beauty is sung about, is illustrated with 6 erotic engravings by Pablo Picasso, including two in aquatint . The cover is made of parchment, the pages are made of vellum paper ( Velin de Montval ), the typography still adheres to the traditional rules of printing. With this collaboration between the two artists, a lifelong friendship began between Picasso and Iliazd.

In 1941 Iliazd brought out a second book under the title Rahel . Iliazd's texts, created under the impression of the German invasion of France, are printed in Russian and Cyrillic italics with a French translation by Paul Éluard and framed with woodcuts by Léopold Survages .

A particularly interesting example of his book production is the anthology published in 1949

Poésies des mots inconnus: Poèmes de Arp, Artaud, Audiberti, Ball, Beauduin, Bryen, Dermée, Hausmann, Iliazd, Jolas, Klébnikow, Krutchonykh, Picasso, Poplavsky, Schwitters, Seuphor, Térentiev, Tzara; ornés par Arp, Braque, Bryen, Chagall, Domingues, Férat, Giacometti, Cleizes, Hausmann, Laurens. Léger, Magnelli, Masson, Matisse, Metzinger, Miró, Picasso, Survage, Taeuber-Arp, Tytgat, Villon, Wols, Ribemont-Dessaignes.

- the title reads like a dance of honor by French artists and writers of the 20th century. The book, published in a relatively high edition of 158 copies, was Iliazd's answer to the claim made by Isidore Isou , founder of Lettrism , as the inventor of sound poetry . The book contains a collection of Dada poems, futuristic phonetic poetry, Zaoum poetry from his time in Tbilisi, and also lullabies that Iliadz's Nigerian wife sang to their son Chalva in the Yoruba language, a homage to the late Ronke Akinsemoyna.

The book is one of the highlights of Iliadz's book art. The pages of the book are folded by hand like letters, the paper is hand-made, the printing types have been redesigned for each poem by Iliazd and are set by hand. The illustrations are a constituent part of the individual pages, they are executed using a wide variety of printing techniques.

In 1961 there was a collaboration with Max Ernst , with whom Iliazd had known since his beginnings in Paris. The result of the joint book project was Maximiliana , which is considered by bibliophiles to be one of the most beautiful artist books of the 20th century. The subject of the book was the German lithographer and autodidact of astronomy Wilhelm Tempel , († 1889 in Acetri in Italy), to whom the scientific world owes the discovery of planetoids, comets and star nebulae, including their meticulous registration using lithography .

Travels to the south of France, Italy and Greece

In 1945, during the days of France's liberation from German occupation, Iliazd's Nigerian wife, whom he married in 1943 and who had sparked his interest in Nigerian art and culture, died. From 1947 Iliazd began touring the south of France, Italy and Greece. Picasso had set up his ceramic studio in Vallauris since 1948 and Iliazd also became interested in ancient pottery. In the south of France, he met his future wife, Hélène Douard-Mairé, who was then the head of the ceramics studio of François Hugo, a friend of Picasso's.

Hélène Douard, whom he married in 1968, became his companion on these voyages of discovery, which he followed in the footsteps of Adrien de Montluc-Montesquiou , gallant courtier to Henry IV - free spirit, author, alleged conspirator against Mazarin - and which he discovered in Italy of the outsider of astronomy, Wilhelm Tempel, for whose memory he and Max Ernst created one of his most beautiful artist's books. In Italy, too, he discovered the traveling merchant and humanist Cyriacus of Ancona , who preferred to draw ancient ruins, inscriptions and artefacts on his travels through ancient Byzantium in order to save them from oblivion instead of focusing on the winding up of his Focus on business. The most important book with the invaluable results of his collecting, the Antiquarum Rerum Commentaria , has so far been lost. Iliazd was obviously fascinated by the biography of these unusual people, all in their own way outsiders of their society, who are characterized by their original thinking, their independence from the values ​​and guidelines of their time and the persistence with which they followed their visions.

Portraits

The first portrait of Iliazd by an artist is an oil painting from 1913 by the naive Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani , now in Leningrad in the Schuster Collection. A pen drawing by Giorgio de Chirico from 1927 is u. a. published in Combat of November 8, 1947 and illustrates a polemic of Iliazd against the founder of Lettrism , Isidore Isou . Even Robert Delaunay painted Iliazds portrait; it is now in the Moma in New York. An etching by Alberto Giacometti is contained in the volume 12 portraits du célèbre Orbandale , 1962 in Paris at Iliazd 41 °. The photographer Michel Sima , who portrayed almost all the artists at the École de Paris , also photographed Iliazd.

estate

Since Iliazd's death in 1975, his widow has been managing the estate, unless it has already been handed over to the French National Library in Paris.

literature

• I libri di Iliazd. Dall'avanguardia russa alla scuola di Parigi. Firenze, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale 1991. (Gabinetto Stampe della Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. Cataloghi. NS 5.) ISBN 88-7038-203-6
• Audrey Isselbacher: Iliazd and the illustrated book . New York, Museum of Modern Art . 1987
• Iliazd. Exhibition catalog. Center Georges Pompidou , Paris 1978.
• Johanna Drucker: Iliazd and the Book as a Form of Art . [1]

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bowlt, John E., Tregulova, Zelfira and Rosticher Giordano, Nathalie (Eds.): A Feast of Wonders. Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. 2009. p. 81
2. ↑ Ilya Zdanevich, memories, reprinted in Minuvsee. No. 5. Paris 1897.
3. ↑ Eganbjuri, Eli: Natalija Goncarova. Mikhail Larionov. Moskva 1913
4. ↑ http://www.jstor.org/pss/309949
5. ↑ Natalia Arlauskaite, Неконвенциональные элементы текста в структуре повествования

Web links

Commons : Iliazd  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• John Russell: Art: 'Iliazd and the Illustrated Book' at the Modern. In: The New York Times. November 29, 2009. [2]
• Iliazd. Illustrations of book titles etc. [3]