Notes on Text and Illustrations
Footnotes and citations by Mikhail Lifshitz are numbered. Asterisk notes are translator’s comments.
The original Soviet edition of The Crisis of Ugliness was generously illustrated with a set of black and white plates in the back of the book depicting classic works of Cubism and Pop Art mentioned in the text. In the USSR, illustrated books with an overview of modern and post-modern art were very scarce, so that Crisis was in high demand. The illustrations themselves were ‘poor’, inky, and heavily retouched, which gave them an intriguing artistic quality of their own. Their selection and positioning was undertaken by Lifshitz himself, who considered them an integral part of the book.
The present edition recreates these illustrations. Their translation into the present is not seamless, however. It proved impossible to reprint the Soviet reproductions due to legal stipulations of the various rights holders. Thus, the current body of illustrations follows the selection and ordering in the original book as far as possible, though using contemporary images supplied by the rights holders, in full colour and at the highest possible resolution.