Le Cantique des Cantiques (The Song of Songs)

The Kiev-born graphic designer and sculptor Joseph Chaikov (Iosif Tchaikov) belonged to a group of young Jewish artists who studied and worked in Paris before and after World War I. He returned to Kiev in 1914. Taking part in the ambitious Yiddishist cultural activism that unfolded across Russia and Ukraine after the fall of the tsarist regime in February 1917, he played an active role in institutional efforts to support a distinctly Jewish plastic-arts “scene” alongside figures like El Lissitzky. He also took part in lively debates about the aesthetic qualities and imperatives of Jewish painting and sculpture. He became (briefly) one of the most prolific illustrators in the newly burgeoning world of Yiddishist book publishing from Moscow to Kiev. Best known perhaps for the uncompromising cubo-futurist illustrations that he produced for Kiev’s Yiddishist and early Soviet Yiddish publishing houses in 1919, he also produced work in an older neo-romantic style for the children’s book Temerl, written in Moscow before the Bolshevik Revolution by the Yiddish poet Moyshe Broderzon. Eventually becoming a supporter of the new Bolshevik order, Chaikov moved to Moscow in 1923 and concentrated on sculpture. With the crackdown on modernist expression, he became a typical practitioner of Party-approved socialist realism.