Montages. Debora Vogel and The New Legend of The City

Montages. Debora Vogel and the New Legend of the City constitutes a superb, thoughtful, and accomplished verbo-visual montage in its own right.The book consists of all manner of targeted scholarly essays, reproductions of avantgarde images [...], photographs of the places (and, above all, the cities) that played an important role in the L'viv author's life, and, finally, of meta-artistic critical texts of Debora Vogel herself, most of them reproduced for the first time in at least eight decades (!). It's a wonder that this book - and the exhibit it accompanies - did not come about considerably sooner.

Montages allows us to see Vogel the creative personality in many not-so-obvious logo-visual frames. There's the erudite, polyglot authour with bold, apt, original views, the flaneuse of art, philosophy, and literature - and, naturally, of urban spaces themselves. The penetrating critic, the able poet, the sharp analyst of a polymorphic and polyphonic modernity. The writer undeservedly wandering till now along the „avantgarde margins" of scholarly reflection, named almost exclusively in the context of the life and work (most often, the life) of her more famous friends, acquaintances, teachers: Bruno Schulz, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Kazimierz Twardowski. [...] Vogel's multilingualism (she wrote in Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew) hardly makes the task easier, but it is a significant testament to the peculiarly cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Polish-Jewish artistic milieu of interwar L'viv - and a token of the writer's own choices with regard to identity. [...]

I do not imagine that any connoisseur of the avantgarde would be uninterested in this wonderfully „montaged", conceptually comprehensive, verbo-visually rich volume. This book can also be a very valuable publication for non-specialists interested in modern literature and art.