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Exploding Tongues: Language, Art, and the Russian Avant-garde

Big Bang: Timeline of Russian Avant-Garde Book Arts and Their Cultural Impacts

This historical timeline is based upon bi-weekly publishing information in Knizhnaia letopis', and reprinted in Susan Compton. The World Backwards: Russian Futurist Books, 1912-16. It is cited in Getty Research Institute metadata. The timeline provides a highly granular historical sequence, which allows for intermedia comparison with other cultural phenomena, and advances the general proposition of this study that the unique synthesis of experiences and products of book arts Russian artist books played a defining role in the cultural explosion known broadly as the Russian Avant-garde. The holistic creative endeavor of book design subsumed other component elements of represented image, decorative graphics and text into a synthetic challenge to "textuality," the internalized expectations of a reading process base upon centuries of exposure to a mechanically printed codex. The book page as a reading space imposed a fundamentally new and different order of meaning upon framed imagery, and, by eliminating marginal boundaries, subsumed within its unprinted paper surfaces even the most radical experimentations in non-Euclidean and nth-dimensional pictorial space.

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In 1912, in parallel to his work on his Rayonist compositions, Mikhail Larionov painted several pictures in the spirit of “Infantile Primitivism”. Among them and affiliated to the Seasons cycle is the canvas “Ha[p]py Autumn”. The artist was captivated by children’s drawings and collected them over the entire course of his lifetime. A spontaneous naivety, borrowed by the artist from these same drawings, is reflected here in the expressive “simplicity” of the colour and the “clumsy” ungrammatical inscriptions. At the same time, the natural drawing of the lips, earrings and letters anticipates Larionov’s later work on Futurist books, where he achieved a similar union of word and image.