Karol Plicka – Zlatá brána. Inscribed to Jaroslav Seifert.

Karol Plicka – Zlatá brána: Slovenské deti vo svojich tradičných hrách [Golden Gate: Slovak Children in Their Traditional Games]
Martin: Osveta, 1964. Large 4to. 128 pp. + summaries and captions in Czech, Russian, English, French, German, and Spanish. Illustrated with 128 gravure plates, including several in color. Original illustrated boards. Inscribed by Karol Plicka to Jaroslav Seifert on the title page, dated 29.VII.1964. From the personal library of Jaroslav Seifert. A remarkable association copy linking three central figures of twentieth-century Czech and Slovak modernism: photographer and filmmaker Karol Plicka, poet and Nobel laureate Jaroslav Seifert, and avant-garde designer Zdeněk Rossmann. Plicka’s Zlatá brána is among the most visually compelling late photobooks produced in Czechoslovakia, a lyrical and highly choreographed study of Slovak folk games, children’s rituals, costume, gesture, and movement. The photographs (many made from dramatic low angles or in suspended motion) transform vernacular culture into a modernist visual language closely aligned with interwar European photographic experimentation. Plicka occupies a foundational place in Czech and Slovak photography and ethnographic film, bridging documentary realism with poetic modernism; his work has long been regarded as central to the visual construction of Slovak cultural identity. The volume was designed by Zdeněk Rossmann, one of the great Central European modernist typographers and graphic designers, associated with the Bauhaus-inflected Czech avant-garde. Rossmann’s work for book design, exhibition architecture, photomontage, and typography helped define the visual vocabulary of Czech modernism in the interwar period. Even in this comparatively late production, the book bears his unmistakable sense of spatial rhythm, asymmetrical typography, cinematic sequencing, and integration of image and page architecture. The recipient, Jaroslav Seifert, was the leading Czech lyrical poet of the twentieth century and later recipient of the 1984 Nobel Prize in Literature. A founding member of Devětsil, Seifert stood at the intersection of poetic avant-garde experimentation and humanist lyricism. This copy therefore embodies a convergence of three major modernist traditions (photography, poetry, and graphic design) within the cultural milieu of Czechoslovakia. An especially desirable provenance copy, preserving the personal connection between two towering cultural figures of the Czech and Slovak avant-garde. Rare signed and with such association. Very good condition. Very nicely preserved.