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ANNENKOV RUSSIAN ART NOTRE UNION

ANNENKOV, Iurii Pavlovich [Georges Annenkoff] (1889-1974). Notre Union #9.

1927. Brush and ink on paper (310 x 310 mm). Design for the cover of the magazine (19 Feb 1927). Provenance: property of Valentina Annenkov, wife of the artist (sale Christie's London 14 Dec 1994, lot 426). Annenkov was a prominent Russian artist best known for his book illustrations. He went to art school with Marc Chagall in St. Petersburg and worked in the studios of Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton in Paris. His pictures for Aleksandr Blok's Dvenadtsat [The Twelve] (1918) established him as a major Russian illustrator. In 1920, the Bolshevik government commissioned him to design a mass demonstration in honor of the October Revolution that was held in the Palace Square in Petrograd. He illustrated many books, including ones by Koreni Chukovsky, Mikhail Kuzman, Aleksei Remizov, Leo Tolstoy and Upton Sinclair. In 1922, he published a successful collection of his modernist portraits of important contemporary Russian writers and artists. He emigrated to the West in 1924 and settled in Paris where he continued to illustrate books and worked as a costume designer for the movies.