Joseph Spinel

Joseph (Iossif) Spinel

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Iosif Spinel, 1948

Born| (1892-10-07)7 October 1892

Bila Tserkva, Ukraine

Died| 2 July 1980(1980-07-02) (aged 87)

Moscow, Russia

Nationality| Ukrainian
Citizenship| Ukraine
Children| Jelena Spinel (born 1930)

Iossif Aronovich Spinel[1] ⁠(September 25 (7 October)1892, White Church, now the Kiev oblast of the Ukraine — 2 July 1980, Moscow) was a Russian painter, graphic artist and stage designer of more than 60 films including Ivan the Terrible and Sergei Eisenstein.

Born as the eighth child in the poor Jewish family of a teacher in Belaya Tserkov (Ukraine), he survived several pogroms. First in Kiev, then in Moscow, he studied architecture. Then he continued his education in Vkhutemas (Higher Art and Technical Studios) with the great master of graphic design Vladimir Favorsky.

As a graphic artist he had illustrated several books in the 1920s, where modernist graphic design was used: Shpinel’s artistic education took place in one of the prominent centres of Soviet avant-garde art and architecture: from 1921 to 1926, he studied in the architecture department of the Higher Art and Technical Workshops in Moscow (VKhUTEMAS). Later he worked as a set designer with such prominent film directors as Aleksandr Dovzhenko (The Arsenal, 1929, and Ivan, 1932), Mikhail Romm (Boule de Suif, 1934), and Sergei Eisenstein (Alexander Nevskyi, 1938, and Ivan the Terrible, 1944–6). His illustrations for Youth, Go! convey an image of the body reduced to a number of basic geometric shapes – circles, triangles, rectangles; a body devoid of symmetry and naturalness, and instead resembling a mannequin with limbs suspended on spherical joints and body parts freely detachable one from another. And yet this was the representative of the new working class – “the class that led a revolt … worthy of the name ‘revolution,’” and that “had charted out its hopes for a century ahead”. In order to fulfil these hopes, its young members had to mobilize their mental selves and to restructure their bodies, so that the bodies as wholes and their separate organs could work in harmony with machines. Montage, a technique popularized not only by Eisenstein but also, in its photographic version, by Aleksandr Rodchenko, was a perfect fit to convey this message on the visual level. Shpinel’s montages challenged the aestheticist approach to the visualization of the working class, offering for young eyes a new form of social imagination that dismantled the human, removing it from the centre of social life and placing it on the same visual level with machines.

As a major film artist, stage designer and architect, he is renowned for his ingenuity:

The film director Grigori Roshal wrote in his memoirs:at our house, the artist Spinel, co-author of all my films since 1928, spoke, delighted and delighted, about his joint work with Eisenstein. He recalled the already completed "Alexander Nevsky" and rendered new sketches for "Ivan". Iosif Shpinel - a man of small stature and great soul, professor at the VGIK, teacher of hundreds of artists - was filled to overflowing with Eisenstein. (Translation from Russian)[2]

He has taught since 1928, since 1940 at the Art Faculty of the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, where he became a professor in 1965. His students became leading set designers at Soviet film studies.

The book about his life and work "Iossif Spinel: The Artist's Way" by Tamara Tarasova-Krasina was published by Iskusstvo Publishing House Moscow in 1979[3].

## Awards and honors[edit]

* 1940 Honoured Artist of Russia
* 1951 Laureate of the State Prize
* 2008 The Film "Ivan the Terrible" got rank 39 on a list of the 100 best films selected by 78 French film critics and historians ref>https://www.imdb.com/list/ls050032005/ Cahiers du Cinéma’s 100 Greatest Films (100 films pour une cinémathèque idéale). In: Internet Movie Database</ref>[4]

## References[edit]

1. ↑ Also known as Jossif, Iosif, Yosif or Joseph / Spinel or Shpinel
2. ↑ Eisenstein in Memoirs. Iskusstvo Publishing House Moscow 1974, P.187
3. ↑ https://books.google.de/books/about/Иосиф_Šпинель.html?id=PDJBwAEACAAJ&redir_esc=y |Tamara Tarasova-Krasina "Iossif Spinel: The Artist's Way" Iskusstvo Publishing House, Moscow 1979 (in Russian)
4. ↑ Claude-Jean Philippe: 100 films pour une cinémathèque idéale. Cahiers du Cinéma, Paris 2009, ISBN 978-2-86642-563-0.

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