Beschreibung
32 x 49 cm. (13.25 x 19.5 inches). Oblong foio. Lithograph half-title and title, and 29 additional full-page lithographs. The lithographs measure 10 3/4 x 15", and are all dated 1917 in the stone. Of the 30 half-tone plates (Title + plates numbered from III-XXXI), four are printed in bistre, and the others in sepia The lithographs portray personal memories of life in the shtetl, conveyed in images, reminiscent of Chagall but with a more somber and tragic sentiment, that show influences of Cubism, Expressionism, and Constructivism, with asymetrical designs, exaggerated facial features and other progressive aesthetic concerns, incorporating and transforming prototypical images of Jewish life in rural Eastern Europe. They depict the peaceful daily life of a traditional Jewish shtetl before the upcoming destructions and massacres: a city street, the artisans (including a shoemaker, a tailor and a knife-sharpener), musicians, the market, the synagogue, a wedding, a funeral, the Jewish cemetery, the rabbi and the Hasidic rebbe. Boards with title and striking image on front cover. Shtetl. Mayn Khorever Heym, A Gedekhtnish (Shtetl. My Destroyed Home. A Remembrance) Issachar Ryback (Yelisavetgrad, 1897 ? Paris, 1935) was born in Yelisavetgrad in the Russian Empire, now in Ukraine. Although little known to the general public today, he played a key role in the avant-garde movements that revolutionised Jewish art in the early 20th century.Ryback attended the art school in Kiev between 1911 and 1916. Greatly influenced by the ethnographic expeditions pioneered by S. Ansky (Shloyme Zanvl Rapoport, 1863-1920) to the ?Pale of Settlement?, where most of the Jews in the Russian Empire were forced to reside, he went on two of these expeditions in 1915 and 1916. During the second, Ryback and El Lissitzky (1890-1941) visited numerous synagogues, whose painted and sculpted motifs prompted him to create a new artistic alphabet. After the 1917 revolution, he was employed as a drawing teacher by the central committee of the Kultur Lige, an association promoting a revival of Yiddish culture founded in Kiev in 1918, of which El Lissitky and Chagall were also members. In 1918 Ryback co-wrote an article with Boris Aronson (1899-1980) in the review Oyfgang theorising the importance of folk art in a return to tradition and Jewishness, but also to the Orient and archaism. After brief stays in Moscow and Berlin, Ryback settled in Paris in 1926, showing in leading European galleries until he died suddenly in 1935. This album, regarded as Ryback?s masterpiece, was published in 1923 but most of the plates date from 1917. Shtetl (literally ?small town?) was the name of Eastern European towns and villages with a large Jewish community. The illustrations depict daily life in Ryback?s shtetl before its destruction by the pogroms in Ukraine from 1918 to 1922. The book is haunted by a tragic event, the artist?s father?s murder by Symon Petlioura?s Ukrainian troops in 1921, and his evocation of this village no longer in existence is a reminder of this personal drama. The album comprises thirty-one lithographs numbered in Roman numerals. The dark blue canvas cover is illustrated with an etching of a lion, from a gravestone drawn by Solomon Yudovin (1892-1954), another artist who took part in the ethnographic expeditions to the Pale of Settlement. The lithographs depict scenes inspired by daily life in the shtetl. Several recurrent elements show the extent to which Ryback is emblematic of this new Jewish art he aspired to: the use of black and white referring to books and the written word (so important in Judaism), the use of Hebrew letters as pictorial elements and the influence of Cubism, which also drew inspiration from primitivism. The role of animals in this return to folk art?s sources is central. In this new Jewish art the goat is the animal representing of the shtetl par excellence, as it is in Chagall?s work and in El Lissitzky?s Had Gadya (1919). . . Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 005606
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Bibliografische Details
Titel: Mayn Khorever Heym: A Gedekhnish. (...
Verlag: Schwellen, Berlin, Germany
Erscheinungsdatum: 1923
Einband: Hardcover
Illustrator: Rybak, Issachar
Zustand: Good
Zustand des Schutzumschlags: No Jacket
