CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/23/2012

A suitcase, a hatbox, a couch, a painting, a package, a pouch: Baggage

Featured image is reproduced from Baggage, The Museum of Modern Art's beautiful facsimile translation of the classic Russian children's book from the 1920s—a collaboration between the celebrated Soviet artist and illustrator Vladimir Lebedev and poet, translator and children’s writer Samuil Marshak. (The book was also featured in MoMA's blockbuster 2012 exhibition, Century of the Child, curated by Juliet Kinchin.) In her Afterword, MoMA curator Sarah Suzuki writes, "A modernist golden age for children's books, the 1920s saw some of Leningrad's most important artists and writers applying the tactics of the Russian avant-garde to this type of publishing. After the Revolution, both the new government and its art-world supporters made sweeping efforts to shape an ideologically new, modern Russian people, and they understood children's books as a crucial tool for molding young minds."