BORIS ARONSON (1900-1980) RUSSIA / THE WAKING GIANT.

26x20 1/2 inches. B. Aronson, New York.
Condition B+: vertical and horizontal folds, repaired tears in margins and image. Framed.
The son of a rabbi, Aronson was born in Kiev which was considered to be the center of Jewish avant-garde theatre in pre-revolutionary Russia. He served as an apprentice to the designer Alexandre Exeter and through the influence of Meyerhoff and Tairov adopted a constructivistic style. He moved to Germany and then New York where he began working for the Yiddish theatre. He left the Yiddish theatre in the late 1930s and tried his hand designing sets for Broadway productions. Despite a few early successes he did not really make it big until 1964 when he designed the sets for Fiddler on the Roof. By the time of his death in 1980 Aronson had won a total of 8 Tony Awards for his work in stage design. Most likely executed in the late 1920s or early 1930s this hyper-typographic image, advertising a documentary on Soviet Russia, reflects many of the prevailing avant-garde design trends in Russia, and specifically echoes El Lissitzky's classic "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge".