"And Yet It Moves" – Book about Avant-Garde Art by Ilya Ehrenburg – Moscow-Berlin, 1922 – Illustrations by Fernand Léger

"And Yet It Moves" – Book about Avant-Garde Art by Ilya Ehrenburg – Moscow-Berlin, 1922 – Illustrations by Fernand Léger
А всё-таки она вертится [And Yet It Moves], by Ilya Ehrenburg. Moscow-Berlin: Геликон (Gelikon), 1922. Russian. Cover design and illustrations by Fernand Léger.
Ilya Ehrenburg's book on modern art in the early 20th century and the Constructivist movement in particular. Featuring images of works by various artists (Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Jacques Lipchitz and others), a photograph of New York, a photograph from one of Charlie Chaplin's films, and more. In addition, the book features three Modernist portraits of The Tramp from Charlie Chaplin's films, by Fernand Léger.
A comment printed by the publishing house at the beginning of the book, notes that "the author wants to emphasize that the book was printed in the old orthography against his will". The author's dedication, printed on the following page, reads: "By means of this book I salute the poets, the painters, the designers, the editors, the comedians, the circus artists, the musicians, all those who are building new things in Russia".
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg (1891-1967), a Jewish-Soviet writer and poet, one of the most important political writers of the 20th century. Ehrenburg grew up in Moscow, where his father was a director of a brewery. In 1905, he joined the Bolshevik underground movement, influenced by his schoolmate Nikolai Bukharin (later one of the leaders of the October Revolution); however, after being caught and tortured by the secret police he left Russia and moved to Paris.
In Paris, he continued to be involved in communist activity (during this period, he even met with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin); however, the Parisian bohemian life and the horrific impressions of World War I distanced him from his original views and he became an anarchist. When he returned to Russia in 1917, he opposed the revolution and published his blunt poem "Prayer for Russia", which compared the storming of the Winter Palace to rape. Subsequently, Ehrenburg was arrested once again by the secret police, this time for espionage for the other side, the Tsar's allies. He was released only due to the intervention of his childhood friend Nikolai Bukharin and in 1921 moved back to Paris.
After the defeat of France in World War II, he returned for the third time to Russia, this time as one of the most fervent supporters of the communist ideology and its leaders. During this period, he published his most radical writings (among them, the article "Kill!" – calling for indiscriminate killing of Germans) and grew closer to Joseph Stalin. In 1946, in collaboration with the writer Vasily Grossman, he published the "Black Book" – one of the earliest collections of testimonies by victims of the Nazis. His close relationship with Stalin, the great liberties he was allowed and the fact that he survived Stalin's Great Purge cast a long shadow over his integrity and his literary work during this period.
Ehrenburg was known as a fierce opponent of Zionism, calling Israel a "Bourgeois State" and David Ben-Gurion "The lowliest Jew in the world". In 1948, when he met the first Israeli ambassador in Moscow, Golda Meir, he refused to speak to her in Yiddish claiming it was a "bastard daughter" of German. Nevertheless, in his last will, he bequeathed the Jewish part of his archive to the "Yad Vashem" Institute in Jerusalem, where it was secretly kept for twenty years. Ehrenburg died in 1967 in Moscow.
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (1881-1955), a French painter, sculptor and filmmaker. Léger initially trained as an architect; yet in 1900 decided to move to Paris, got to know the avant-garde artistic circles of Montparnasse and became a painter himself. With the outbreak of the World War he was drafted to the French army; he was wounded during a mustard gas attack and after prolonged hospitalization was discharged. During his entire military service, he never stopped sketching. He returned to Paris in the 1920s and became a prominent figure in the artistic life of the city; in those years, he also became interested in scenic design and filmmaking, since he believed that "the future of abstraction [was] in mural rather than easel paintings". In 1935, his works were exhibited for the first time at the Moma Museum in New York. Among his well-known works are the paintings "Mona Lisa with Keys", "The Builders", the abstract film "Ballet Mécanique" and many others.
139, [3] pp + [8] plates (printed on both sides), approx. 22 cm. Good condition. Minor blemishes, mostly to margins of leaves. Detached cover, with minor creases, a few stains and blemishes.