cover image Alexander Vesnin

Alexander Vesnin

Khan-Magomedov, S. O. Khan-Magomedov. Rizzoli International Publications, $55 (220pp) ISBN 978-0-8478-0773-4

Vesnin's career ran the gamut from Gothic-cubist costume designs to massive architectural projects like the Pravda newspaper building and the Dnieper Dam. A star of the Russian constuctivist movement in the years after the revolution, he carried avant-garde experimentation into painting, graphic art, theater design and architecture. Vesnin's buildings and complexes of the 1930s reveal his constructivist roots but make begrudging concessions to prevailing fashions. Late in his career he produced intense self-portraits as well as pictures of Moscow streets and women that have a monumental gravity and rightness. This album by an authority on Russian architecture is claimed to be the first full-length study on Vesnin (18831959) to be published in English. (April 3)