El Lissitzky

El Lissitzky (born November 11 [November 23, New Style], 1890, Pochinok, near Smolensk, Russia—died December 30, 1941, Moscow) was a Russian painter, typographer, and designer, a pioneer of nonrepresentational art in the early 20th century. His innovations in typography, advertising, and exhibition design were particularly influential.

Lissitzky received his initial art training in Vitebsk (now Vitsyebsk, Belarus), a city that would play a major role in the development of the Russian avant-garde. In 1903 he studied in the art school of Yehuda (Yury) Pen, but he soon left for Germany, dissatisfied with the provincial atmosphere of Vitebsk. Once in Germany, he enrolled in the department of architecture at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, where he studied from 1909 to 1914. During this period he also traveled to France, Italy, and Belgium. When World War I broke out, he made his way back to Russia, settling in Moscow, and studied from 1915 to 1916 at the Riga (Latvia) Polytechnical Institute (now Riga Technical University), which had been evacuated to Moscow. Lissitzky took a degree in engineering and architecture and began work as a draftsman in an architect’s office.

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Lissitzky’s artistic interests at the time were exclusively centred on Jewish themes and culture. He took part in Semyon Ansky’s ethnographical expedition investigating the monuments of Jewish culture in the Pale of Settlement, illustrated Yiddish books (such as Moyshe Broderzon’s Sikhes Khulin [1917; “Profane, or Idle, Chatter”] and Khad gadye [1919; “One Kid”], a popular Passover seder song). The illustrations for these books show the influence of both Cubo-Futurism, a Russian offshoot of European Futurism, and lubki (inexpensive, hand-coloured popular prints).

In 1919 Marc Chagall, who at the time was director of the revolutionary People’s Art School in Vitebsk, invited Lissitzky to teach architecture and graphics there. When Kazimir Malevich—a painter and the founder of a movement he called Suprematism, which advocated the supremacy of pure geometric form over representation—also began to teach there, Chagall and he fell out, and Chagall left, while Malevich assumed the directorship. Lissitzky remained in Vitebsk and became one of Malevich’s principal students and followers.

This set off a radically new period in Lissitzky’s art. He began working under the name El Lissitzky and abandoned figurative art for Suprematism. He created Suprematist designs for a two-year anniversary celebration of the Vitebsk Committee to Combat Unemployment, and he also designed a series of propaganda posters, the most famous of which is Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919–20). During this period Lissitzky began to work on a series of abstract geometric paintings, each of which was called a proun, his acronym for proyekt utverzhdeniya novogo (“project for the affirmation of the new”). The proun works were first shown at an exhibition of the Suprematist collective Unovis (Utverditeli Novogo Iskusstva, “Affirmers of New Art”). They combined Lissitzky’s interests in graphic arts, architectural forms, photography, painting, and other formal types into a unique and dynamic art. They also signalled Lissitzky’s embrace of Constructivism, which sought to use abstract art to express progressive social values and to encourage the transformation of society. In the autumn of 1921 Lissitzky became a professor at the state art school in Moscow, but he left for Berlin in December to establish cultural contact with German artists.

Lissitzky’s period abroad (1921–25) was particularly creative. He participated in the production of a series of art magazines, published a number of books, including Suprematichesky skaz pro dva kvadrata v 6-ti postroykakh (1922; About Two Squares: In 6 Constructions: A Suprematist Tale) and (with Jean Arp) the three-language Die Kunstismen—Les Ismes de l’art—The Isms of Art (1925), and became a member of the well-known Dutch group De Stijl. He also met the artist-designer László Moholy-Nagy, who helped transmit Lissitzky’s ideas on art to western Europe and the United States through his teaching at the Bauhaus. From that point on, photography joined graphic arts as one of Lissitzky’s chief tools. With his frequent travels and contact with other artists, Lissitzky became a transformational figure, intermingling the innovative arts of Europe and Russia and advancing the exchange of experimental forms and ideas.

In 1925 Lissitzky returned to Moscow. Between 1925 and 1928 he cofounded a number of periodicals propagating the most progressive artistic tendencies of the 1920s. He continued to be an innovative force in book and exhibition design. He created Soviet pavilions for a number of international expositions, and he collaborated with Aleksandr Rodchenko and other avant-garde artists on the remarkable propaganda magazine SSSR na stroyke (1930–41; USSR in Construction). Despite his poor health and the increasingly vehement rejection of Modernist aesthetics by the Stalinist establishment, Lissitzky persevered in his artistic endeavours. He died of tuberculosis some six months after Hitler’s invasion of Russia.