Drawn Cities
Vladimir Mayakovsky. A Tragedy.
A Tragedy was painted in cubo-futurist style by Iosif Shkolnik and Pavel Filonov. The backdrop depicts the modern city against whose alienating but exciting background the poet rebels. In 1913 it was performed on a double-bill with Victory Over the Sun, the “first Futurist opera”. (via)
Also: Frans Masereel’s Die Stadt, a wordless novel from 1925 depicting the city in 100 woodcut panels
“Perhaps the central fascination of the city, both real and fictional, is that it embodies man’s contradictory feelings - pride, love, anxiety, and hatred - toward the civilization he has created and the culture to which he belongs.”
– Burton Pike, The City as Image, 1981