Two children's books with illustrations by Nathan Altman:

1. Детям [For Children], by Vladimir Mayakovsky. Moscow-Leningrad: Detizdat TsK VLKSM, 1937. Russian.

Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, accompanied by illustrations and three lithographic plates by Nathan Altman. A photograph of Mayakovsky pasted on the page facing the title page.

58, [2] pages. + [3] plates (lithographs). 25.5 cm. Good condition. Wear and blemishes to the binding.

2. Басни [Fables], edited by V. I. Neyshtadt. Moscow-Leningrad: Detizdat TsK VLKSM, 1937. Russian.

A collection published in Moscow at the height of World War II, including stories, tales, legends, and fables, with illustrations by Nathan Altman, who also designed the cover.

The collection features short works by classical authors such as Aesop, Horace, and Phaedrus, medieval and Renaissance writers including Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan, Leonardo da Vinci, La Fontaine, and de la Motte, and authors from the Romantic and later periods, including German writers such as Gellert, Goethe, Lessing, and Heine, and Russians writers such as Ivan Dmitriev, Ivan Krylov, Pyotr Vyazemsky, Lev Tolstoy, and others.

At the end of the volume is a glossary with explanations for difficult and uncommon words.

Between the last page and the endpaper is pasted a note with an error correction: on the title page, the editor's name abbreviation was printed as В.Л. Нейштадт, instead of В. И. Нейштадт.

189, [3] pages. Approx. 20 cm. Good condition. Minor stains and creases. Stains, wear, and minor blemishes to the binding. Inscription and stamp on the rear inner binding.

Nathan Altman (Натан Исаевич Альтман;1889-1970), born in Vinnytsia (present-day Ukraine), an avant-garde artist, painter, graphic designer, sculptor, book illustrator and stage designer. His varied work belongs to various styles – Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, and Suprematism – and reflects the many changes in his world, both artistic and political.

He began his art studies in Odessa; in 1910 he moved to Paris, where he continued his studies and associated with the artists of the "Machmadim" group which advocated Zionist Jugendstil. In 1912, Altman returned to Russia and settled in St. Petersburg. He spent the summer of 1913 sketching reliefs found on Jewish tombstones and developing a Cubist style based on Jewish folk art. At that time, he founded a Jewish Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. Altman was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, after which he was appointed a member of the IZO-Narkompros (the Department of Fine Arts of the People's Commissariat for Education). In 1919, he became one of the prominent artists of the "Kom-Fut" group (Communist Futurists). He worked for the Monumental Propaganda plan conceived by Lenin, and created agitprop art.

During the early 1920s, Altman worked as a stage designer for HaBimah Theater and the Jewish State Theater Goset. His Constructivist costume design for the play "The Dybbuk", staged by HaBimah Theater in 1922, incorporated elements taken from Jewish folk and religious art; and his stage design for the Goset production of "Uriel da Costa" was his most advanced Constructivist work at the time. In 1922, his works were exhibited at the "First Russian Art Exhibition" in Berlin and alongside works by Chagall and Sternberg in the "Exhibition of the Three" of the Kultur Lige group. In the early 1920s, Altman was a prominent artist whose works expressed the spirit of the party and the revolution – the rebellion against the old degenerate order – and in this capacity he created a series of sketches and a bust of Lenin. In 1928, Altman went on a tour with the Goset theater and remained in Paris until 1935. While there, the Party's attitude towards art went through a transformation. Already in the mid-1920s the party began furthering socialist realism and restricting the activity of avant-garde groups, claiming art should serve defined goals, be simple and understood by everyone and portray the beauty of communist reality. In 1932, with Altman still out of the country, the central committee of the communist party banned any union of independent artists. From then on, the party imposed its new and preferred style, socialist realism, and avant-garde was pushed to the new status of "bourgeois" art, enemy of the revolution. Returning to Russia in 1936, Altman settled in Leningrad, and as an undesirable artist worked mainly as a graphic designer, book illustrator and stage designer, trying to adhere to the party's new line.

Literature: Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change 1890-1990, edited by Susan Tomarkin Goodman. Prestel Publishing, Munich / New York, 1995. p. 146.