Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet

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Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet: Mezhdunarodnoe obozrenie sovremennogo iskusstva / Internationale Rundschau der Kunst der Gegenwart / Revue internationale de l'art moderne was a journal edited by El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenberg, published in two issues by Skythen Verlag, Berlin, in 1922. The vast majority of articles were in Russian, some in German and French.

Lissitzky had come to Berlin the previous year as representative of new Russian art and culture, and Veshch' begins by celebrating the renewed cultural contacts between Russia and the west after the years of war and revolution. The journal's manifesto goes on to explain that the journal's title was chosen because, "for us, art is nothing other than the creation of new 'objects'". The journal championed Constructivist and Suprematist works. Its publisher specialised in Russian publications - Berlin had a population of over half a million Russians in 1923.

Contributors: Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Sergey Esenin, Aleksandr Kusikov, Nikolay Punin, Igor Glebov (Gleboff), Valentin Parnakh, Charles Vildrac, Ivan Goll, Jules Romains, Gino Severini, Albert Gleize, Theo van Doesburg, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Gino Severini, Le Corbusier, et al. Illustrations: Albert Gleize, Teo van Doesburg, Fernand Leger, Jacques Lipchitz, Richard Eggerling, and others. Cover design by El Lissitzky.

Number 3 was banned for distribution in the USSR, which was due to changes in the ideological politics of the Bolsheviks. With no chance for its distribution in Russia the editors found it pointless to continue. The fourth issue of the magazine was originally planned to be devoted to art and literature of the Soviet Russia. [1]

Issues[edit]

Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet 1-2 (March-April 1922), 32 pages. PDF, JPGs.
Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet 3 (May 1922), 24 pages. PDF.

Reprints[edit]

  • Baden: Lars Müller, 1993. The reprint is accompanied by an additional volume of commentary on the history and contents of the magazine, and includes an English and German translation of the text. [2]
  • Princeton Architectural Press, 1996.
  • Izdaniya avantgarda (Издания авангарда), Fond russkii avantgarde (Фонд русский авангард), S. E. Gordeev (dir), N 1, 2, 3, Moscou, 2010. [3]

Literature[edit]

  • Kristin Romberg, "From Veshch' to SA: Journal as Object", in Richard Anderson and Kristin Romberg, Architecture in Print: Design and Debate in the Soviet Union, 1919-1935, Wallach Art Gallery, 2005. Catalogue text. (English)
  • Stephen Bury, "'Not to adorn life but to organize it': Veshch. Gegenstand. Objet: Revue internationale de l'art moderne (1922), G (1923-6)", in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Volume III: Europe 1880 - 1940, eds. Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop, Oxford University Press, 2013.

See also[edit]

Links[edit]


Avant-garde and modernist magazines

Poesia (1905-09, 1920), Der Sturm (1910-32), Blast (1914-15), The Egoist (1914-19), The Little Review (1914-29), 291 (1915-16), MA (1916-25), De Stijl (1917-20, 1921-32), Dada (1917-21), Noi (1917-25), 391 (1917-24), Zenit (1921-26), Broom (1921-24), Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet (1922), Die Form (1922, 1925-35), Contimporanul (1922-32), Secession (1922-24), Klaxon (1922-23), Merz (1923-32), LEF (1923-25), G (1923-26), Irradiador (1923), Sovremennaya architektura (1926-30), Novyi LEF (1927-29), ReD (1927-31), Close Up (1927-33), transition (1927-38).