VASILY IVANOVICH SHUKHAEV | THE REIGNING MONARCHS OF THE WORLD

Acquired by the father of the present owner in the United States in the 1980s

Vanity Fair, July 1934, pp.28-29 illustrated

E.Yakovleva and E.Kamenskaya (ed.) Vasily Shukhaev: iskusstvo, sud'ba, nasledie. Kollektivnaya monografiya, Moscow: BuksMArt, 2020, p.198 illustrated

In 1929 as the Wall Street Stock Market crashed, Condé Nast employed a new Russian-born art director, Mehmed Fehmy Agha, to oversee the design of both Vogue and Vanity Fair. Born to Turkish Cypriot parents in Nikolayev on the Black Sea, Agha had studied at the Kiev Academy of Fine Arts before emigrating to Paris in 1917. He moved in artistic circles in both Paris and later Berlin (where he was art director of Vogue Berlin before it folded) and was well-versed in the European avant-garde. At Condé Nast he would go on to revolutionise magazine design, introducing then-radical innovations such as sans-serif text, full-bleed images, double-page spreads and the commissioning of full-colour illustrations from artists, many of whom he had met in Europe, such as Paolo Garretto, Constantin Alajalov and Vasily Shukhaev. In the early 1930s Shukhaev produced a number of caricatures for Vanity Fair of cultural and political figures such as Maxim Gorky, George Bernhard Shaw and Stalin.

This group caricature of a motley crew of twenty-one monarchs who had survived the events of the first two decades of the 20^th century was published full-bleed on a double-page spread as part of a typically waspish feature ‘Presenting a few personal idiosyncrasies of the regal galaxy’. The 'regal galaxy' included Kings George V of England and Gustav V of Sweden and Emperors Haile Selassie of Abyssinia and Hiroshito of Japan. Of those depicted many would later abdicate, some would be deposed and all were ripe candidates for Shukhaev’s lightly mocking brush.