Stylogeny combining Kultur-Lige × Russian Futurist Book

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Style combination · Contrasts

Kultur-Lige × Russian Futurist Book

Its parent in method: artists drawing the whole page and printing it by lithography in small runs. The Futurist book is Cyrillic, mostly black and deliberately crude; the Kultur-Lige book is in Yiddish, earnest, and at its most ambitious in colour, and builds its pages from the Hebrew letter and synagogue ornament.

From the research on Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design

Mix them and make something Kultur-Lige Russian Futurist Book

PopKultur-Lige × Russian Futurist Book
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Kultur-Lige, their arrangement from Kultur-Lige, the finish from Russian Futurist Book. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design Russian Futurist Book

Type from Kultur-Lige
Colour from Russian Futurist Book
Form from Kultur-Lige
Composition from Kultur-Lige
Surface from Russian Futurist Book

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The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Kultur-Lige

Pop

Archivo Black; Kultur-Lige used The scribe's square Hebrew script (ktav ashuri), written by a sofer for Sikhes khulin (1917), whose 'wonderful' style Lissitzky set out to match in his illustrations and Lissitzky's hand-drawn Yiddish verses lithographed into each picture of Had Gadya (1919), the refrain running along the margins and closing in a circle at the foot

Text · Russian Futurist Book

The cheap, small-run books of the Russian Cubo-Futurist poets and painters, from Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov to Goncharova, Larionov and Rozanova. Against the luxurious Symbolist book, they lithographed handwriting and crude neo-primitive drawings together, at times with rubber stamps or colour hectograph, or printed mixed letterpress founts on wallpaper, in thin sewn or stapled pamphlets. Transrational zaum words made the letter itself a visual sound. They adopted Marinetti's manifesto but obstructed his 1914 visit. The Burliuks, Malevich and Kruchenykh were Ukrainian-born, Zdanevich Georgian.

Caveat; Russian Futurist Book used The poets' own handwriting transferred to the lithographic stone and Rubber-stamp letters for zaum poems

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The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Russian Futurist Book, with a counter-accent from Kultur-Lige. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design Russian Futurist Book

  • #ede4cf ground · 36%
  • #1c1a17 ink · 14%
  • #d6b44a accent · 18%
  • #b5463a accent · 14%
  • #b8996a accent · 10%
  • #8ea596 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ede4cf;
  --ink: #1c1a17;
  --accent-1: #d6b44a;
  --accent-2: #b5463a;
  --accent-3: #b8996a;
  --accent-4: #8ea596;
  --font-display: "Archivo Black", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Caveat", cursive;
}

Use it with care

Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design: These books quote sacred forms: Hebrew letters, the divine name (written in Had Gadya), scroll formats and scribal square script, synagogue art and tombstone inscriptions. Do not use the letters as decorative glyphs or mirror them; have any Yiddish or Hebrew written and checked by a fluent reader, and keep divine names and scroll and tombstone forms off throwaway or commercial items. The movement was secular and Yiddishist, a modern Jewish culture in Yiddish backed by Jewish socialist parties, Folkists and left-wing Zionists, not the Hebrew, Zionist art of Bezalel and not religious art, so do not present it as a generic 'Jewish look', and do not reduce its folk figures to stereotyped shtetl types. Many of its people were persecuted: Ryback's father was killed in the pogroms, and Hofshteyn, Markish, Bergelson and Kvitko were executed in Moscow on 12 August 1952. Chagall (d. 1985) and Chaikov (d. 1979) are still in copyright: draw your own letters and figures rather than reproducing their pages.

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The two styles

Three angular, stylized figures stride forward carrying books, with the foremost figure raising a red book toward a radiant yellow sun. Large red Hebrew-script lettering tops a colorful landscape of buildings, winding paths, flowers, a fruit tree with a bird, and a leaping goat. 1917–1924 · Eastern Europe, Central Europe Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design The Yiddish modernist book of the Kultur-Lige, the secular Jewish culture league founded in Kyiv in 1918, and its circle: El Lissitzky, Issachar Ber Ryback, Iosif Chaikov, Boris Aronson and others, who sought a new Jewish art in the shtetl synagogues and tombstones they had recorded and in Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism. In children's books and poetry, hand-drawn Hebrew-alphabet letters are built into faceted folk pictures in flat lithographic colour or black line. A distressed, woodcut-style poster shows an angular black figure striding across jagged mountains and reaching toward a golden sun. A red bird, a green antlered deer, evergreen trees and small plants surround the figure beneath large red lettering. 1910–1920 · Eastern Europe Russian Futurist Book The cheap, small-run books of the Russian Cubo-Futurist poets and painters, from Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov to Goncharova, Larionov and Rozanova. Against the luxurious Symbolist book, they lithographed handwriting and crude neo-primitive drawings together, at times with rubber stamps or colour hectograph, or printed mixed letterpress founts on wallpaper, in thin sewn or stapled pamphlets. Transrational zaum words made the letter itself a visual sound. They adopted Marinetti's manifesto but obstructed his 1914 visit. The Burliuks, Malevich and Kruchenykh were Ukrainian-born, Zdanevich Georgian.

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More combinations

With Kultur-Lige

With Russian Futurist Book

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