Narisovannoe Solntse. [Painted Sun].

First edition.
Very rare, especially in such condition.

This is the collection of verses by poet, translator, one of the leaders of the Soviet Nonconformist Art movement and member of the first postwar underground community of artists and poets known as the 'Lianozovo Group' Genrikh Sapgir (1928-1999). He's considered as one of the most exciting innovative poets of the 1960-70s. His biographer and friend David Shrayer-Petrov called Sapgir an 'avant-garde classic' and compared Sapgir's verses to the experiments of Khlebnikov, Kharms and Lewis Carroll. The poet was unable to publish any of his original work for adults in the USSR until 1989.

Book design was prepared by the artists and classic painters of the unofficial art of the 1960-80s Eric Bulatov (born 1933) and Oleg Vassiliev (1931-2013). They studied at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow and later worked in close collaboration as a children's book illustrators. In the 1960s Bulatov formed the Sretensky Boulevard Group with Ilya Kabakov, Edik Steinberg, Oleg Vassiliev, Vladimir Yankilevsky and Viktor Pivovarov. In 1990 Vassiliev emigrated to the USA.

The book is from the children's collection of Inna Shmeleva (1929-2020), an artist, who studied under Ely Bielutin, the founder of The New Reality artistic academy. In 1962 Shmeleva participated in the 30th anniversary of the Moscow Union of Artist at the Central Exhibition Hall (Manège) which was severely criticized by Nikita Khrushchev. This event marked the end of the period called as the Khrushchev Thaw.

OCLC locates one copy of this edition only: in the Stanford University Library.