Fly-Fishing the 41st (37 page)

A L
ITTLE-KNOWN
T
WENTIETH-CENTURY
A
RTIST
N
AMED
I
LIAZD AND
H
IS
41
°

F
ew individuals are aware of the geographic parallel on which they live, and fewer have considered whether they are on that parallel for a reason. One man constructed a life philosophy around it—Ilia Zdanevitch, born in 1894, in Tbilisi, Georgia (the former Soviet republic), on the 41st parallel.

At seventeen Ilia Zdanevitch moved to St. Petersburg to study law but soon gave up his studies to paint and write poetry, assuming the name Iliazd, a combination of his first and last names. Through his brother Kiril, who also lived in St. Petersburg, Iliazd met the futurist painters Victor Barthe and Mikhail Ledanter. He became part of their avant-garde circles, continuing to live in that city as a confirmed futurist for six years, developing his modernist ideas.

Iliazd returned to his home city of Tbilisi in 1917 and settled in the Caucasus Mountains working as an apprentice to a publisher. Shortly thereafter, with the help of two poet friends, Iliazd founded a small modernist magazine intended to house the literary experiments of himself and his friends (including writings in a language of their own invention called
zaum,
which advocated a redefinition of language based on word sounds). They named their magazine the
41st Degree,
a reference to the latitude of Iliazd's home.

In Iliazd's mind, the 41st latitude seemed to connect his small Georgian town of Tbilisi with a culturally rich and politically pow
erful world abroad. “It is at forty-one degrees,” Iliazd wrote, “that most of the great cities of light are located—Madrid, Rome, Constantinople, Beijing, and New York.” Numerologically speaking, 41° harbored other relevance to Iliazd. “Jesus remained in the desert forty days and forty nights,” he wrote, “and on the forty-first came out cleansed and emerged stronger. Forty-one degrees Celsius is the body temperature at which a feverish delerium takes over the body and we die.”

In 1921, despite such strong feelings for nationalism concerning his native latitude, Iliazd moved away again, this time to Paris. He was known later for saying that “although Paris was not on the forty-first parallel (it's on the forty-ninth), it should have been.” Now, at the age of twenty-seven, his plan was to impose his futurist ideas (language of
zaum
and avant-garde use of typography in printing) on Parisian and expatriate artists by establishing what he fantasized about calling the University of the 41st Degree. His vision for the university was as

But Iliazd's attempts to start the University of the 41st Degree failed. What ensued for him was a creative desert that lasted eigh
teen years. In 1940 Iliazd emerged as a printer of art books of some renown, creating the works that he is best known for today.

Through 1974, Iliazd published twenty
livres de peintres,
painters' books, each in editions of fewer than one hundred. These books, illustrated by a handful of preeminent artists whom Iliazd had courted as collaborators—Picasso, Miró, Giacometti, Matisse, Max Ernst, and Jacques Villon—conveyed their subjects not only through the meaning of the text but through their typography, illustrations, and materials. In these books he had finally accomplished in print, at least in part, a few of the ideals he had created for himself to live by.

In the words of Françoise Le Gris-Bergmann, Iliazd's view of the book was “both as an object and a receptacle, as a site as well as a stage, as an emanation of the Word as well as of a kind of choreographic imaging.”
2
Ultimately, however, Iliazd's vision of the perfect printed book may have exceeded the possibilities of the tactile world.

His standards for production were uncompromising, he wanted total control, was idealistic and noncommercial. It was a feat for him to find willing collaborators at all, but he did. “He searched for the perfect paper stock as though he was hunting for treasure,” wrote Audrey Isselbacher, “and sometimes invented his own typography to best convey the meaning of the text. Always his subject is the unknown artist or poet, the nobody.”
3

In his book
Le Frère Mendiant,
a tale of a voyage through Africa by an anonymous fourteenth-century Franciscan monk, Iliazd chose materials that he thought would best express a narrative of geographic exploration and movement in order to create a harmony between the book's subject and its appearance. “On any page of
Le Frère Mendiant,
” says Bergmann, “we can read the sinuous outlines of the coast of Africa through the initial letters of each line,
their slight or radical unevenness creating for the navigating eye the entrances to grottoes, lagoons, steeply rising cliffs—and, beyond, the vast spaces of the horizon and the sea. Paragraphs, indentations, the unevenness and gaps of the lines—all constitute the cartography of the page, its geomorphology, the material of a spatial and topical representation.”

Iliazd not only created unique books, he also made elaborate containers, covers, folders, envelopes, and slipcases in several layers of paper to create the atmosphere similar to a stage curtain, to veil what was within. The anticipation of the book for Iliazd was foreplay. “At times,” wrote Isselbacher, “the dramatic quality of his volume's architecture is contextually relevant, as in the narrow verticle format of
La Maigre,
a biting satire on the vanity of a thin woman written by Arian de Monluc in 1630. Its stiff parchment cover is impossible to open—one must remove the leaves to read them—and even the fibrous folder around the parchment is rough and dry to the touch, like the brittle and rigid character so vividly described by Monluc.”

Each of Iliazd's books, through a harmony of text, image, and material, was meant to be a world in itself, a landscape, a geographical site, and always that site was marked with Iliazd's imprint—41°. The forty-first parallel in Iliazd's work was not only a geographic location, but also a philosophical concept.