Nikolay Punin – "First Cycle of Lectures, Read at Short-term Courses for Teachers of Drawing" – Petrograd, 1920 – ...

Nikolay Punin – "First Cycle of Lectures, Read at Short-term Courses for Teachers of Drawing" – Petrograd, 1920 – Cover Design by Kazimir Malevich

Первый цикл лекций, читанных на краткосрочных курсах для учителей Рисования - современное искусство [First Cycle of Lectures, read at Short-term courses for Teachers of Drawing – Contemporary Art], by Nikolay Punin. Petrograd (St. Petersburg), 1920. Russian.

Transcription of a series of lectures by Russian art historian and critic Nikolay Punin. The lectures, which dealt with new trends in art, were given by Punin in 1919, when he was head of the Petrograd Visual Arts Department (IZO) of the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros).

Suprematist cover design by Kazimir Malevich.

84 pages. 21.5 cm. Good condition. Minor stains. Creases. Pen inscription on title page. Stamps on the rear cover. Stains and defects on the margins of cover and spine. Minor tears to spine.

MoMA 306.

Kazimir Malevich (Казими́р Севери́нович Мале́вич; 1879-1935), artist and theoretician of the Russian avant-garde. One of the pioneers of abstract art in the early 20th century. Malevich was born in Ukraine to a family of Polish origin, the eldest of fourteen siblings. In 1904, he travelled to Moscow to study art and took part in several of the projects that are most identified with the Russian avant-garde (including the design of the stage-set for the Futurist opera "Victory Over the Sun"). In 1915, he exhibited in the "Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10" one of his iconic works – "The Black Square", which is considered one of the seminal works of modern art (Malevich painted four additional versions of the work in his lifetime). The work paved the way for the new style developed by Malevich, Suprematism, and introduced its major characteristics: using simple geometrical forms and a limited selection of colors. In years to come, Malevich's influence increased and in 1920, backed up by an enthusiastic circle of supporters, he took the place of Marc Chagall at the art school of Vitebsk. Due to political changes, in his final years Malevich was forced to alter his revolutionary style and adopt the model of socialist realism. He died in 1935, in poverty and far from the public's eye.

Nikolay Punin (Никола́й Никола́евич Пу́нин; 1888-1953), Russian theoretician and curator, known as the "savior of art collections". In 1914, he graduated from the art history department of the St. Petersburg University and became a critic and editor. His closeness to the revolutionary circles of the day, among them the Constructivists and Formalists, made him one of the important voices in the world of Russian art and in 1918 he was appointed People's Commissar of two of the most famous museums of St. Petersburg and the entire world – The State Russian Museum and the Hermitage Museum. In this role, Punin protected the Western art treasures in the museums, masterpieces by leading European painters, with great ferocity, strongly refusing to enable their destruction.

In the early 1920s, Punin became the partner of poet Anna Akhmatova and their home became a meeting place for the literary milieu of St. Petersburg. When he was arrested for the first time in 1930, Akhmatova sent a petition to Joseph Stalin, which led to his release. Nineteen years later, after claiming that several of Lenin's portraits were tasteless, Punin was arrested for a second time and sent to a Gulag in northern Russia. He died in 1953, after four years of hunger and sickness, in a barrack crowded with two hundred prisoners lit by one light bulb. Anna Akhmatova left his coat hanging on a rack in her house as a memorial. It hangs to this day.