Description

Definitive translation by Y. Sidersky.
EDITION ILLUSRATED with 14 hors-texte and 5 in-texte Juri Annenkoff (Georges Annenkoff)
ONE OF 15 COPIES ON HOLLANDE, only large paper.

This second French edition (the first was published by Éditions d'Art La cible in 1920 with seven illustrations by Michel Larionow) uses the drawings by Annenkoff that Blok had chosen to illustrate the original Russian edition.

A copy of the pass with very wide margins including a autograph signed letter from the illustrator to the painter Jean Thomas (1923-2019) and his wife :

"To Zon and Jean Thomas
with my fondest memories of our meeting
G. ANNENKOFF"

Painter, set designer, book illustrator, editor of the leading Russian art magazine Mir IskusstvaYury (or Juri) Annenkov (1889-1974) studied art at St Petersburg University with Marc Chagall. He went to Paris in 1911 to work in the studios of Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton.
His first illustrated works were published in the late 1910s; Twelve by Alexander Blok (1918) is considered one of his masterpieces. In 1922, he published Portraits, which contains 80 images of key figures in the Russian art of his time. Forced to leave the Soviet Union for good in 1924, he lived first in Germany and then settled in Paris, where he was naturalised under the name Georges Annenkoff. He then continued his work as an artist, costume designer and set designer for around a hundred plays and ballets and some sixty films.
Rare.

Au Sans Pareil, n°29
Courthion, Pierre, Georges Annenkoff, 1930.