‘Je veus ếtre cubist’: marginals of A. N. Benou on the pages of catalogs of the exhibitions of the society of ‘Union of youth’

Abstract

For 20 years from 1898 to 1917 in the periodical press, and especially for ten years in the newspaper Rech (1908-1917), almost 300 of A. N. Benoit’s art-critical articles were published. These articles covered almost all forms of artistic creativity. It is difficult to find an artist or a major artistic event in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to which Benoit did not respondas a critic, making him a “chronicler” of Russian art. The features of his critical method include unprecedented scale, duration, and regularity of his critical activity, as well as the scope of the readership. His articles reproduced a panorama of Russian artistic life, which in the early twentieth century was bright and multifaceted. One group that sought to learn new topics and new methods of work in the visual arts was the Union of Youth, which included avant-garde artists. A well-known critic, Benoit left his notes on their artistic quest. Benoit’s marginalia in exhibition catalogues for the Union of Youth in 1912-1914, deciphered here by the author, are presented as proof of this great expert’s diversity of views. Among the marginalia on the pages of these catalogues, are those that relate to these young artists, whose works remain unexplored or little-known. This is the first attempt to decipher marginalia that are difficult to understand, and sometimes illegible, on the works of N. Lermontova, N. Liubavina, A. Morgunov, S. Nagubnikov, P. Patipake, O. Rozanova, M. Sinyakova, E. Spanikov, A Shevchenko, I. Shkolnik, and Ts. Schleifer.