Historical Collections for the Future: A Note on Modernist Books at Columbia and Cornell

ABSTRACT

The two specialized collections from the libraries of Cornell and Columbia Universities represent an expansive array of holdings of keen interest to diverse publics. Capitalizing on the rich scope of materials – from modernist book images and broadsides to sheet music to booklets and pamphlets, many recently and strategically acquired – enables the collections not only to promote original scholarship but also to creatively engage students of the humanities and social sciences broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Modernism
• poetics
• abstraction

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

^1. See Checklist of Russian, Ukrainian & Belarusian Avant-Garde & Modernist Books, Serials & Works on Paper at The New York Public Library & Columbia University Libraries, compiled by Robert H. Davis Jr. and Megan Duncan-Smith, with an introduction by Steven Mansbach, Academic Commons, 2015. https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8542NDZ.

^2. See Eastern European Modernism: Works on Paper at the Columbia University Libraries and The Cornell University Library, Compiled by Robert H. Davis, with a Foreword by Steven Mansbach, and with an Introduction by Irina Denischenko, Academic Commons, 2020. https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-vwef-4a93.

^3. “Poetry for the five senses” was a winning phrase coined by Teige and invoked by many others. Although the phrase appeared in the “Manifest Poetismu” (see Note 7), it was used rather frequently by Teige and others in various publications.

^4. See Julia Khait and Robert H. Davis, The Russian and Early Soviet Sheet Music Collection, The Columbia University Libraries: An Introduction (Columbia: Academic Commons, 2017). https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8W96M1C.

^5. The “artist” was most likely Il’ia Zdanevich (l894-l975), whose was active as a poet, graphic artist, and book designer, as well as a contributor to stage design in Georgia, and later in Paris. It is not impossible that Iliazd was influenced by his equally talented brother Kyrill (1892–1969), or by those Russians, Ukrainians, and others who gathered with their fellow Georgians in Tbilisi (Tiflis) to implement several Futurist groupings of authors and artists, all of whom sought to transcend traditional distinctions among the arts in a monumental attempt to liberate modern humankind from the “gravitational pull” of rationality and conventionality. For a helpful introduction to Georgian Futurism, see Bela Tsipara, “Georgia,” in Handbook of International Futurism, ed. Günter Berghaus (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), 469–83.

^6. Although the “New Vision” and “Neues Sehen” [new seeing] were originally coined for photography, almost immediately the terms were employed by avant-garde theoreticians and artists as a metaphor for new, often ideologically charged, ways of perceiving reality, and almost always with a tendentiousness toward the rational, reproducible, and revolutionary. See Matthew Witkovsky’s exemplary exhibition catalog, Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945, (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 15–16. For an extensive discussion of the purposes and means of this engaged technological world view by one of its most influential creators, see László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (1928), translated as The New Vision: From Material to Architecture (1932).

^7. Excerpted from Kael Teige, “Poetism Manifesto” (originally published as “Manifest poetismu” in ReD [Revue Devĕtsilu] 1, no. 9 (1928) and translated by Gerald Turner in Between Two Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-gardes,1910–1939 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 600.

^8. Ljubomir Micić, “The Spirit of Zenithism” (originally published as “Duh Zenitzma” in Zenit [Zenith] 1, no. 1 (1921) and translated by Maja Starčević in Between Two Worlds: A Sourcebook, 299.

^9. Quotation excerpted from Il’ia Ehrenburg and El Lissitzky, Vesch/Gegenstand/Objet (1922) and cited by Georg Biermann in “Konstruktivismus” [Constructivism], in the Jahrbuch der jungen Kunst [Yearbook of new art] (1924), 381.