Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism: A Charter for the Avant-Garde

by Jeremy Howard, Irena Bužinska, Z.S. Strother

Hailed as a brilliant theoretician, Voldemārs Matvejs (best known by his pen name Vladimir Markov) was a Latvian artist who spearheaded the Union of Youth, a dynamic group championing artistic change in Russia, 1910-14. His work had a formative impact on Malevich, Tatlin, and the Constructivists before it was censored during the era of Soviet realism. This volume introduces Markov as an innovative and pioneering art photographer and assembles, for the first time, five of his most important essays. The translations of these hard-to-find texts are fresh, unabridged, and authentically poetic. Critical essays by Jeremy Howard and Irena Buzinska situate his work in the larger phenomenon of Russian ’primitivism’, i.e. the search for the primal. This book challenges hardening narratives of primitivism by reexamining the enthusiasm for world art in the early modern period from the perspective of Russia rather than Western Europe. Markov composed what may be the first book on African art and Z.S. Strother analyzes both the text and its photographs for their unique interpretation of West African sculpture as a Kantian ’play of masses and weights’. The book will appeal to students of modernism, orientalism, ’primitivism’, historiography, African art, and the history of the photography of sculpture.

Contents:
Introduction to Matvejs, Markov, and 'Primitivism' / Z.S. Strother, Irena Bužinska, and Jeremy Howard --
'The Treasure-House of World Beauty': Markov and Russian Primitivism Writ Large / Jeremy Howard --
Markov's Development as a Theoretician / Irena Bužinska (Translated from Russian by Jeremy Howard and Ronald Meyer) --
The Politics of Face in the African Art Photography of Vladimir Markov / Z.S. Strother --
Markov's legacy: Photographs for the 'Art of Northern Asia' / Irena Bužinska (Translated from Russian by Jeremy Howard) --
Voldemārs Matvejs: 'The Russian Secession: Concerning the Union of Youth Exhibition in Riga' (Translated and annotated by Jeremy Howard) --
Vladimir Markov: 'Principles of the New Art' (Translated and annotated by Jeremy Howard) --
Vladimir Markov: 'The Principles of Creativity in the Plastic [Visual] Arts: Faktura' (Translated and annotated by Jeremy Howard) --
Vladimir Markov: 'Negro Art [Iskusstvo Negrov]', with a memoir by Varvara Bubnova and foreword by Levky Zheverzheev (Translated by Jeremy Howard. Annotated by Z.S. Strother and Jeremy Howard) --
Vladimir Markov: 'On the 'Principle of Weightiness' in African Sculpture' (Translated by Jeremy Howard. Annotated by Jeremy Howard and Z.S. Strother. With a note on authorship by Z.S. Strother and Irena Bužinska).

293 pages, Hardcover

Published March 18, 2016

About the author

Jeremy Howard is Senior Lecturer, School of Art History, University of St Andrews, Scotland.