[Picasso (Pablo)] Aksenov (Ivan A.), Exter (Alexandra A.) - Lot 74

[Picasso (Pablo)] Aksenov (Ivan A.), Exter (Alexandra A.) Ɵ Pikasso i okresnosti: s dvenadtsat'iu metstsotintograviurami s kartin mastera [Picasso and surroundings: With twelve black manner engravings of the master's paintings]. Tsentrifuga, Moscow, 1917. Twelve full-page or pastedown mezzoteint plates, original color cover by Alexandra Exter. First edition (26.5 x 20 cm). The very first monograph on Picasso ever published, produced in the Russian cubo-futurist movement just before the revolution, with Alexandra Exter's superb cover. Piquantly, the first monograph devoted to Picasso was published in Moscow, and its text is more of an "anti-Cubist" slur! Ivan Aksenov (1884-1935) was a poet, critic and art historian belonging to the Futurist group Tsentrifuga (Centrifuge). He was a leading figure in the "new art" debates of the 1910-1920s, collaborating with Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Meyerhold on cinema and theater. Alexandra Exter (1882-1949), one of the leading female artists of Russian cubo-futurism, designed the book and its famous color cover. In the early 1910s, she had lived and worked in Paris, where she met Picasso, Braque, Soffici, Gertrude Stein and many other avant-garde figures, before returning to Russia, where she joined Kasimir Malevitch and the Supremus group, before becoming one of the leading figures of Constructivism in Paris with Alexander Rodchenko (notably at the 5x5=25 exhibition in 1921). She settled permanently in Paris in 1924. The work actually dates from 1912-1914, but the Great War postponed publication until 1917, by which time cubism and futurism were already a thing of the past for Exter. Provenance: Private collection.