Book Graphics by M.M. Tsekhanovsky. To the 130th Birth Anniversary of the Artist

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to consider the book design works of the famous graphic artist and animation movie director M.M. Tsekhanovsky (1889—1965), using the complex of bibliological, art historical and historiographic methods, to identify the most characteristic features of his creative method, to reconstruct the important stage of biography of the master, analysing previously unpublished archival materials. Already in the very first illustrative cycles, the artist finds his theme: he gives a clear preference to inanimate heroes, spectacularly and clearly depicts the attributes of modern life, symbols of technological progress. Further, making illustrations to the works of S.Y. Marshak, B.S. Zhitkov, M. Ilyin, he refines his artistry and takes the prominent place among the creators of children’s “manufacturing”, technical, popular science books. He manages to adapt the extremely complex topics to the perception of a child, to fill dry language schemes, drawings or geographical maps with lively, exciting content and vivid imagery. The visual series of such graphic works is not a banal pictorial parallel of the text, its explanation, but it leads an independent party, significantly complements and enriches the content of the book. People appear quite rarely in these graphic series; they are treated very schematically and mechanistically, sometimes they seem to be the creations of the world of things and machines, so close to the artist. However, in the best works of M.M. Tsekhanovsky, and above all, in the illustrations to the famous “Post” by S.Y. Marshak, human images are shown generically, and at the same time individualized, endowed with characteristic, memorable features, clearly inscribed in the plot and rhythmic outline of the dynamic narrative. In the heritage of the master, there are also completely different works, indicating that he could become a remarkable animalist, illustrator of fairy tales or “adult” historical and revolutionary works. However, these sides of his talent were not demanded by the technocratic era of the 1920s. Transition of the artist from book graphics to cartoon animation was in some sense predetermined by the very nature of his talent: M.M. Tsekhanovsky was always interested in the problem of plastic transfer of movement and unification of disparate episodes into a coherent story.