Avant-garde magazine. Transition, #18, 1929 Litho cover by Kurt Schwitters; illustr. by El Lissitzky, Paul Klee and ...

Avant-garde magazine. Transition, #18, 1929 Litho cover by Kurt Schwitters; illustr. by El Lissitzky, Paul Klee and others
Transition, An international quarterly for creative experiment. #18, Nov., 1929, edited by John George Eugène Jolas
Paris: Transition, 1929. 1st edition, 291pp., 5pp., Lithographed color cover signed by the artist in the plate. Partly not cut copy.
richly illustrated by avant-garde artists and photographers: El Lissitzky, Paul Klee, Francis Joseph Bruguière, Charles Sheeler, Stella Steyn, Tina Modotti, Harry Crosby.
(short stories, poetry, James joyce, Hart Crane, Harry Crosby, Kay Boyle, William Carlos Williams, Charles Sheeler) Inquire if you need further information.
Condition: Small tears to hinges of spine Edges frayed. Yellow paper.
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany.
Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures.
John George Eugène Jolas (October 26, 1894 – May 26, 1952) was a writer, translator and literary critic.
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (Russian: Ла́зарь Ма́ркович Лиси́цкий, listen (help•info); 23 November [O.S. 11 November] 1890 – 30 December 1941), better known as El Lissitzky (Russian: Эль Лиси́цкий; Yiddish: על ליסיצקי), was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect. He was an important figure of the Russian avant-garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the Soviet Union. His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus and constructivist movements, and he experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate 20th-century graphic design.[1]
Lissitzky's entire career was laced with the belief that the artist could be an agent for change, later summarized with his edict, "das zielbewußte Schaffen" (goal-oriented creation).[2] Lissitzky, of Lithuanian Jewish оrigin, began his career illustrating Yiddish children's books in an effort to promote Jewish culture in Russia. When only 15 he started teaching, a duty he would maintain for most of his life. Over the years, he taught in a variety of positions, schools, and artistic media, spreading and exchanging ideas. He took this ethic with him when he worked with Malevich in heading the suprematist art group UNOVIS, when he developed a variant suprematist series of his own, Proun, and further still in 1921, when he took up a job as the Russian cultural ambassador to Weimar Germany, working with and influencing important figures of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements during his stay. In his remaining years he brought significant innovation and change to typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and book design, producing critically respected works and winning international acclaim for his exhibition design. This continued until his deathbed, where in 1941 he produced one of his last works – a Soviet propaganda poster rallying the people to construct more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany. In 2014, the heirs of the artist, in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum and leading worldwide scholars on the subject, established the Lissitzky Foundation in order to preserve the artist's legacy and to prepare a catalogue raisonné of the artist's oeuvre.
Paul Klee (German: [paʊ̯l ˈkleː]; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance.[1][2][3] He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.
Francis Joseph Bruguière (15 October 1879 – 8 May 1945) was an American photographer
Charles Sheeler (July 16, 1883 – May 7, 1965) was an American artist known for his Precisionist paintings, commercial photography, and the avant-garde film, Manhatta, which he made in collaboration with Paul Strand. Sheeler is recognized as one of the early adopters of modernism in American art.
Stella Steyn (26 December 1907 – 21 July 1987) was an Irish artist. She was born in Dublin in 1907 to William Steyn (a dentist) and Bertha Jaffe, who met and married in Limerick, having moved to Ireland from Akmenė, Lithuania. She was Jewish
Tina Modotti (born Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini, August 16/17, 1896 – January 5, 1942) was an Italian American photographer, model, actor, and revolutionary political activist for the Comintern.[1] She left Italy in 1913 and moved to the United States, where she settled in San Francisco with her father and sister.[2] In San Francisco, Modotti worked as a model and, later, as a photographer. In 1922 she moved to Mexico, where she became an active member of the Mexican Communist Party
Harry Crosby (June 4, 1898 – December 10, 1929) was an American heir, World War I veteran, bon vivant, poet, and publisher who for some epitomized the Lost Generation in American literature. He was the son of one of the richest banking families in New England, a Boston Brahmin, and the nephew of Jane Norton Grew, the wife of financier J. P. Morgan, Jr. As such, he was heir to a portion of a substantial family fortune. He was a volunteer in the American Field Service during World War I, and later served in the U.S. Ambulance Corps. He narrowly escaped with his life.