Lot 225A email save

SOMOV, Konstantin Andreevich (1869-1939). Le Livr

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St. Petersburg: R. Golike et A. Wilborg, 1918. 203 pp., 8vo (246 x 188 mm). Title in red and black. Uncolored illustrated half-title, uncolored frontispiece, 20 plates (11 colored), numerous illustrations and decorations (16 colored), all after Somov. Original yellow silk, upper cover an spine lettered in gilt. Condition: some soiling to binding, joints partially split, extremities slightly frayed, 'stitching' weak with the second gathering and a few individual leaves detached and loosely inserted. one of 800 copies of the censured edition. Somov was an important Russian Symbolist painter and a founding member of Sergei Diaghilev's Mir Iskusstva [World of Art] group. Aspiring toward the mock Rococco grandeur of Aubrey Beardsley's designs for The Rape of the Lock (1896), Somov filled his eighteenth-century inspired drawings with naughty bits and bobs. Le Livre de la marquis is one of the most important and notorious illustrated books of the Silver Age. Although begun in 1916, the work was not issued until after the October Revolution in the new spirit of artistic and sexual liberation. It was also published in an uncensored version with a false title page to avoid prosecution; however, the relatively chaste censured printing does have its share of erotic and scatalogical details.

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