Our Notes & References

Gladky’s striking first important publication, beautifully produced with more than 25 bright pochoir plates, some with silver and gold highlights.

One of only 350 copies produced, very rare on the market, as we couldn’t trace any other examples at auction in recent decades. Apparently no copies in the French Union Catalogue (CCFr; none at the BnF); WorldCat lists 12 copies in US institutions.

Serge Gladky (also Serhii Hladky) was an architect, designer, and graphic artist born in the 1880s in the Poltava region of Ukraine. He studied in St. Petersburg and, from 1924 to 1926, published the magazine “Umeni Slovanu” (“Slavic Art”) based in Czechoslovakia. From 1924 onwards, he lived in France, where he established an “art and advertising decorating business” (Ermolaeva, our translation). Alongside Sonia Delaunay, George Barbier, Fernand Léger, and others, from there he contributed to the development of Art Deco, early Cubist, and abstract art in Europe.

During or just before World War II, he returned to Ukraine, and since then his fate has remained largely unknown. According to Ermolaeva, he was sent to the Gulag in 1945 for “anti-Soviet activities” and died in the far north in 1952.

These 1926 Compositions ornementales are very much in the style of his celebrated Synthèse du costume théâtral, but published a year earlier, making this album the earliest significant publication of Gladky’s work we could trace, and listed as such in the 1999 Princeton’s catalogue, which includes a bibliography.

Like his later publications, the plates here make a beautiful use of the pochoir (stencil) technique popular in France at the time, employing ornamental and geometric patterns. Gladky’s use of both constructivist and cubist approaches is particularly remarkable, sometimes a bit figurative and often fully abstract, at the cutting edge of contemporary art of that era.

Gladky’s work is introduced by an essay on the artist, his origins and his travel’s influence on his work, by Maurice Raynal (1884–1954), one of the most influential art critics, and a patron of modern art in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century. A friend of Amedeo Modigliani, Maurice Utrillo, and Guillaume Apollinaire, he also wrote about the art of Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Picasso, whom he also knew personally.

While Gladky’s works from his French period are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum, works from Raynal’s personal collection are also present at the Metropolitan Museum.

Bibliography

Anna Ermolaeva, Serzh Gladkii i kartiny russkoi revolutsii, 2022 (online); Art Deco Paris 1900–1925: Catalogue of the Exhibition of Pochoir Color Prints from the Graphic Arts Collection// Roylance, Dale (curator), The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Autumn 1999), pp. 1–72; Lubow Wolynetz, The Art Deco Works of Serhii Hladky // Treasures at the Ukrainian Museum and Library of Stamford, 2010 (online).