Lantern, 4th sheet from the Eight Linocuts album

Lantern is a part of an album produced during Iwan Puni’s Berlin exile. The Eight Linocuts album was published by Ernst Wasmuth in 1922 in an edition of 25 copies. This impression carries the number 10. Iwan Puni, who lived in St Petersburg until 1920 was forced to leave Russia on political grounds. Via Berlin he travelled to Paris, where he settled in 1924 and adopted the name Jean Pougny. The core of the series consists of Puni’s pen-and-ink drawings from 1916-1920. The artist was intrigued by a varied perception of the reality of „the urban landscape“, transitions between spaces where the concept of real and imaginary is blurred. In this image, the artist explored the Cubist idiom besides geometric stylization. For his print series, he chose particular sections from each drawing, which he abstracted, thereby dramatizing the tension between reality and imagination. A re-worked linocut album was published in Paris eight years after his death.