Description

2 Volumes. 4°.

No. 1: 32 pp. with one full page illustration and 4 interleaved illustrations, 6 pp. musical scores, original illustrated wrappers (professionally restored by institutional restorers, wrappers backed with Japanese paper with repaired small tears and tiny loss of image, spine reinforced with linen, edges of musical scores reinforced with Japanese paper, small pencil annotations in text, otherwise in a good condition).

No. 2: pp. 33-64 with two full page purple illustrations and 4 interleaved full-page illustrations, original illustrated wrappers (professionally restored by institutional restorers, wrappers backed with Japanese paper, spine reinforced with linen, otherwise in a good condition).

This scarce art magazine was published by a group of Slovenian Modernist artists, poets, writers and musicians, creating art in the style of Expressionism, Futurism and Avant-Garde. Founded in Novo Mesto, the group consisted of famous artists such as Anton Podbevšek (1898-1981), Josip Vidmar (1895-1992), Marij Kogoj (1892-1956), and Božidar Jakac (1899-1989).

In the second number a 18^th year old avant-garde poet Srečko Kosovel (1904-1926) published one of his first poetry. He died four years later and most of his collected works were published after his death.

The first volume includes two musical scores by an Expressionist composer Marij Kogoj (1892-1956). Kogoj studied music under Arnold Schoenberg in Schwarzwald and Franz Schreker in Vienna. Born on the coastal area of Slovenia, which after WWI fell under the Fascist Italy, where the Slavic language was supressed, he joined a group of Modernist young artists, who continued expressing themselves in their mother tongue. Kogoj’s career abruptly stopped in 1932, when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalised.

The group of artist, gathered around Anton Podbevšek in Novo Mesto, planned to publish this progressive art magazine six times per year. After the first two numbers the artist had a fall-out, causing the group to fall apart.

The magazine was a predecessor to more famous avant-garde magazine Tank, which was edited in 1927 by some of the artists from the Trije Labodje magazine. 

We could only trace a 6 examples of the magazine in institutions outside Slovenia.