Sidlina Natalia Libros

In exploring the intersection of art, politics and society, few collections in the world can compare with the David King collection. David King (1943-2016) was not only a passionate collector, but also an artist, designer and historian. Over a lifetime he amassed one of the world's largest collections of Soviet political art and photographs. Every step of the Soviet journey is documented in visual media, photomontage, photographs, paintings, handwritten notes, books (signed with annotations and marginalia), enclosures and ephemera. The collection is also unique in examples of image manipulation techniques, erasures and deletions, and in the survival, despite the purges, of extremely rare books and manuscripts by the early revolutionaries who died in the `Show Trials' of 1936-38. David King mined this material to produce revelatory and award-winning books on Leon Trotsky and the Stalin era, and in 2017 Tate Modern will draw on this unique resource to present a visual history of Russia from the turn of the twentieth century to Stalin's death. Published to accompany the exhibition, this accessible and highly illustrated publication features key pieces from the collection, accompanied by short explanatory texts.

Russian-born Jewish sculptor Naum Gabo (1890–1977) is one of the 20th century’s most unsung artistic masters. In 1917, Gabo developed the theories and practice of a new art movement he called Constructivism, and, along with his brother, he wrote the Realistic Manifesto of 1920, which promoted art as a part of man’s everyday existence without the confinement of artistic terms and convention. In the 1920s and ’30s, Gabo traveled extensively to the hubs of modernism in Europe, including a stint teaching at the Bauhaus. He was with Mondrian’s Abstraction-Creation group in the wake of the Nazi occupation of Paris, and upon the outbreak of WWII, the artist moved to Cornwall, England, and later to the United States. As this new book’s 142 color plates demonstrate, Gabo’s work reveals rigorous inquiries into ways of representing mass, volume, and space. His sensitive and imaginative use of materials, ranging from fishing line to Perspex to wood, created a rhythm and balance within his sculptures that evokes an intense emotional response.