Description

Large 4°. 32 pp. with original woodcuts within text, original tan wrappers with an original wood-cut illustration on the cover and printed text on the back and inner sides (Very good, slightly age-toned, tiny punch holes on the right hand side, spine reneved with japanese paper).

Zdroj (The Spring) was a Polish bimonthly, founded by art groups Bunt and Zdroj in Poznan. It was published between 1917-1922 and included texts, poems and original modern artwork. This is one of the most famous issues with powerful works of art, made for the second anniversary of the magazine. 

The cover is illustrated with an original wood-cut by a Polish artist Władysław Skotarek (1894 -1969). Born in Poznan, he studied art in Poland and Berlin, and was exhibiting in Moscow and Berlin in 1931. Skotarek was one of the main figures of the magazine Zdroj. In 1920 he married Janina Zofia Przybylska, who was publishing poetry in the same magazine.

The Skotarek’s image from the original wood-cut from the cover of this issue of Zdroj was used in 2017 Polish postal stamp, to commemorate 100 years of Polish Futurism.

The issue features a full page cubistic wood-cut by Czech cubist artist Josef Čapek (1887-1945), who was also a writer and a poet, as well as a brother of a famous writer Karel Čapek. A year later, in 1920, Josef introduced for the first time the word Robot in a sense it is used today. He was arrested after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, and was sent in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he died on an unknown date.

Four smaller original wood-cuts were made by a Polish artist Jan Jerzy Wroniecki (1890-1948), who was mostly active in Poznan.