Ilia Zdanevich

Ilia Zdanevich was a Georgian poet, publisher, translator, writer, and typographer. During the course of his career, he lived and worked in Tbilisi, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Constantinople (modern day Istanbul), and Paris, and collaborated with artists and designers including Coco Chanel, Filippo T. Marinetti, and Pablo Picasso. His many activities—including organizing exhibitions, delivering public lectures, and writing articles in multiple languages—facilitated exchange between international modernist networks.

Born in Tbilisi to a Polish father and a Georgian mother, Zdanevich first became involved in avant-garde activities when he moved to Saint Petersburg to study law in 1911. The city hosted a thriving subculture of experimental artistic and poetry circles that swiftly enticed Zdanevich away from his legal studies. He began collaborating with the painters Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, both pioneers of abstraction. Zdanevich helped them to formulate theories, organize exhibitions, and write manifestos, showcasing his significant skills as a promoter and publicist. Fluent in French and Russian as well as Georgian, Zdanevich translated Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto (originally published in the newspaper Le Figaro in 1909) into Russian in 1911 and became actively engaged in the promulgation of its ideas through a series of public lectures. During this period, new methods for marketing modernism were developing rapidly in step with the art itself. The publicity stunt took pride of place as an advertising tool, and Zdanevich demonstrated a knack for harnessing mass media as a platform for promoting artistic scandal. He participated in artistic “happenings” such as the an event in 1913 when he joined Larionov and Goncharova, the painter David Burliuk, and poet Vladimir Maiakovskii as they paraded through Moscow wearing face paint and outrageous costumes. Zdanevich wrote an article outlining the logic behind this stunt, in which he equated the act of face painting as a micro example of his macro vision: the invasion of art into life.

In the same year he participated in organizing an exhibition of avant-garde artists in Moscow titled Mishen’ (Target) that presented two major painterly trends: abstraction and neo-primitivism. Here Zdanevich showcased the works of Niko Pirosmani, a self-taught Georgian artist whom he had discovered in Tbilisi. Already conscious of the risks of their works being characterized as derivative imitations of Western modernism, the artists involved in Mishen’ emphasized their Eastern influences, exemplified by Pirosmani, an entirely homegrown talent.

Zdanevich left Russia after the revolution in 1917 and returned to Tbilisi. At that time, Georgia was an independent and relatively stable republic, a haven from the upheavals of the Allied-Bolshevik War (1917–25), and numerous emigré artists settled there. Zdanevich organized poetry readings and lectures at a cabaret in a downtown Tbilisi basement called the Fantastic Tavern and, in 1919, established a publishing imprint with the poets Aleksei Kruchenykh and Igor Terentiev. The group’s name, 41°, indicated a feverish artistic temperature as well as the latitude of Tbilisi. Their primary goal revolved around the promotion of an abstracted, untranslatable poetic language called zaum(a portmanteau coined from the Russian terms for “beyond”(za) and “mind”(um), best translated as the nonsense word “beyonsense”).

In July 1919 the group published their manifesto in the inaugural (and only) edition of their “weekly” newspaper. The opening line declared their aim to “establish zaum as the obligatory art form.”Zdanevich trained as a typographer and used these skills to produce inventive designs for several dozen books showcasing their experiments with zaum, including books that combined multiple languages, contrasting materials, and eccentric layouts. He also published a sequence of five plays entirely written in nonsensical zaum.

In October 1920 Zdanevich left Georgia and, after a year spent in Constantinople acquiring a French visa, arrived in Paris in October 1921. There he began using a contracted version of his name, Iliazd, as a pseudonym, a playful exploration of authorial identity. Zdanevich’s artistic activities in Paris connected networks of international artists. He established the group Cherez (Across), which brought together Eastern European émigré artists with representatives of French culture. In 1922 he became the secretary of the Union of Russian Artists in France, the main activities of which were the organization of balls and fêtes with Futurist themes, such as the Zaum Ball of 1923. Continuing his interest in Futurist language, he organized lectures in Montparnasse cafés under the name of a newly invented personal brand, Université du 41°.

In Paris Zdanevich collaborated with the Surrealist and Dada movements, working with Tristan Tzara and Paul Eluard, among others, on salon-style evening soirees featuring poetry readings and music recitals. From 1922 to 1926 he designed fabrics for Sonia Delaunay, establishing skills that he would later use to design textiles for Coco Chanel, for whom he worked from 1928 to 1933.

In 1940 Zdaneivch returned to book production and published a series of artist books. He began a fruitful collaboration with Picasso, with whom he produced nine publications. His most iconic creation of this period was the 1949 anthology Poésie de mots inconnus (Poetry of Unknown Words), an assemblage of experimental visual and sound poetry featuring contributions by Jean Arp, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, Raoul Hausmann, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, Picasso, and Kurt Schwitters, among others.