El Lissitzky

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  El Lissitzky spent his final months of 1941 ill in Moscow, his tuberculosis now in its gravest stage. Yet he kept working. One of his last pieces was a propaganda poster calling on the Soviet people to build more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany. That image, produced on what was effectively his deathbed, tells you something essential about this man: he never stopped believing that art could change the world.

  Born Lazar Markovich Lissitzky on the 23rd of November 1890 in Pochinok, a small Jewish community fifty kilometers southeast of Smolensk, he died on the 30th of December 1941 in Moscow. In the decades between those two dates he worked as a painter, illustrator, designer, printmaker, photographer, and architect. He helped build the suprematist movement alongside Kazimir Malevich. He designed landmark exhibitions that would influence how art is displayed to this day. He created some of the most recognized images of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

  But who was Lazar Lissitzky before he became El Lissitzky? Why did he change his name? What drove him from illustrating Yiddish children's books to designing Soviet propaganda pavilions for international fairs? And what happened to his family after he was gone? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Jewish Beginning

  ›

  Lissitzky's father Mordukh Zalmanovich was a well-educated travel agent who knew English and German and, in his spare time, translated Heine and Shakespeare. His mother Sarah strictly observed Jewish religious traditions. The household bridged worlds, and that tension between inherited tradition and wider culture would run through Lissitzky's entire life.

  From 1891 to 1898 the family lived in Vitebsk, a city with a rich Jewish communal life. Art historian Nancy Perloff noted that the proximity to the Pale of Settlement fostered a "powerful Jewish solidarity, the community-wide response to the knowledge that Jews would never be considered true Russians." Lissitzky spent his youth near those pressures.

  In 1903, during a summer holiday in Vitebsk, he began taking lessons from Yury Pen, a celebrated Jewish artist and teacher whose other students included Marc Chagall and Ossip Zadkine. By the time Lissitzky was fifteen, he was already teaching other students himself. He later recalled in his diary that "at age fifteen I began to earn a living by tutoring and drawing."

  He applied to the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1909 and was rejected, possibly because of the "Jewish quota" that limited Jewish enrollment under the Tsarist regime. So he left Russia and enrolled at the Darmstadt Polytechnic Institute in Germany to study architectural engineering. While there he made extra money, his wife later wrote, by completing examination projects for fellow students who were "either too lazy or too inept to do their test-pieces for themselves." He also worked as a bricklayer and visited local Jewish historical sites on vacation, including the medieval Worms Synagogue, making drawings of its interior and decorations.

  He graduated cum laude from Darmstadt in 1914 and covered, by his own diary account, more than 1,200 kilometers on foot across Italy on a study tour in 1913, making sketches along the way. When World War I began, he returned to Russia through Switzerland and the Balkans, and by 1915 was studying at the Riga Polytechnic Institute, then evacuated to Moscow.

• 3. Yiddish Books and Jewish Art

  ›

  In 1916, Lissitzky and his colleague Issachar Ber Ryback undertook an ethnographic expedition through Jewish shtetls in the Belarusian Dnieper region and Lithuania, possibly funded by S. An-sky's Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society. The Cold Synagogue in Mogilev stopped Lissitzky cold. He later wrote about it for a Berlin-based Jewish journal in 1923, comparing the visit to entering "Roman basilicas, Gothic chapels, or baroque churches" and praising the interior murals created by a craftsman named Chaim Segal.

  That expedition fed directly into his first book design work. Lissitzky's first book was Moishe Broderzon's 1917 Sikhes khulin (An Everyday Conversation: A Story), created in the form of a Torah scroll and printed in only 110 copies. He followed it with illustrations for Mani Leib's Yingl Tsingl Khvat (The Mischievous Boy) in 1918, creating ten illustrations in which he arranged text and drawing differently on every page. Scholars noted that the style drew on his shtetl expedition and on Chagall.

  His most ambitious Yiddish project was the Had Gadya, the ten-verse Aramaic Passover song. He created two versions, one in 1917 and one in 1919. Art historians described the earlier version as "an expressionist decorativism of color and narrative" and the later one as marked by a significant shift in style. The two versions also differ in what happens at the end: in 1917, the Angel of Death is "cast down but still alive"; in 1919, he is definitively dead and his victims are resurrected. Scholars read those differences as reflecting Lissitzky's sympathies with the October Revolution, after which Jews in the former Russian Empire were freed from official discrimination.

  The 1919 cover was designed in abstract suprematist forms. Art historian Nancy Perloff praised Lissitzky's color-coding system, in which "the color of the principal character in each illustration matches the color of the corresponding word for that character in the Yiddish text." Dukhan called Had Gadya "a quintessence of El Lissitzky's post revolutionary Jewish Renaissance inspiration."

  The Jewish period ended abruptly. Decrees issued in 1919 abolished elected Jewish communal units in Ukraine, and a second decree that June designated all Jewish organizations as enemies of the revolution. According to art historian Eva Forgács, that autumn Lissitzky abandoned his Judaic heritage and became "El Lissitzky." It is unclear whether the name change was legal or simply a pseudonym.

• 4. Vitebsk, Malevich, and UNOVIS

  ›

  Marc Chagall invited Lissitzky in May 1919 to teach graphic arts, printing, and architecture at the newly formed People's Art School in Vitebsk. Chagall had been appointed Commissioner of Artistic Affairs for Vitebsk in 1918 and assembled a remarkable faculty. Lissitzky himself, then on an errand in Moscow that October, persuaded Kazimir Malevich to relocate to Vitebsk.

  Malevich arrived with ideas that clashed with local tastes and eventually with Chagall himself. Suprematism, a movement Malevich had been developing since 1915, rejected imitation of natural shapes entirely in favor of geometric abstraction. Malevich replaced the school's classic curriculum with his own program. Lissitzky was initially loyal to Chagall but ultimately sided with Malevich. Chagall left the school not long after. In his memoirs, Chagall recalled that his "most zealous disciple swore friendship and devotion" to him, and that "at the moment he was appointed professor, he went over to my opponents' camp and heaped insults and ridicule on me."

  On the 17th of January 1920, Malevich and Lissitzky co-founded a group called Molposnovis, short for Young Followers of a New Art. After a dispute and two rounds of renaming, the group reemerged in February as UNOVIS, Exponents of the New Art. All members signed works with a black square as a collective seal, a homage to Malevich's famous painting and a symbolic nod to communist ideals. The black squares members wore as chest badges and cufflinks also resembled the ritual tefillin, which made them, as the source notes, "no strange symbol in Vitebsk shtetl." Lissitzky himself used a red square rather than black.

  In April 1920 UNOVIS was asked to decorate Vitebsk for Workers Day. They painted the entire city in suprematist designs, covering buildings and trams with geometric forms and communist slogans. Filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, visiting briefly, later described the effect: "You see orange circles before your eyes, red squares and green trapeziums.... Suprematist confetti strewn about the streets of an astonished town."

  The group disbanded in 1922. But its earliest handmade publication, the UNOVIS Miscellany, issued in two copies in March-April 1920, contains the first known appearance of the signature "El Lissitzky."

• 5. Prouns and the Proun Room

  ›

  Between 1919 and 1920, while the UNOVIS group was forming around him, Lissitzky developed his own variant of suprematism, a series of abstract geometric works he called Prouns, pronounced "pro-oon," from the Russian for "UNOVIS Project." He rejected any fixed orientation for them, writing "We have made the canvas rotate. And as we rotated it, we saw that we were putting ourselves in space."

  Where Malevich worked in a flat, weightless void, Lissitzky added the illusion of three dimensions. Art historian Eva Forgács wrote that he "insisted on painting voluminous floating geometric objects, thereby rationalizing suprematism" by revealing the full body of geometric solids through foreshortening. He described the Prouns himself using architectural and constructivist vocabulary: "space," "construct," "construction," and compared them to "a geographical map, like a design." He refused to define them precisely, writing "I cannot give an absolute definition of what Proun is, because the work is not yet dead."

  The first Proun was painted on wood. Lissitzky later used both wood and canvas; some works were done in tempera rather than oil. Art historian Alan Birnholz noted the Proun compositions "gradually turned away from color, displayed a growing sense of clarity and economy." Only about twenty-five Prouns have been preserved in total.

  In 1923 Lissitzky created the Proun Room, an installation for the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung. The room measured roughly three by three by two-and-a-half meters. He transformed it into a single unified work of art meant to make visitors "active participants" rather than passive spectators. This was something Malevich had dreamed of but never realized in physical form; his own three-dimensional designs had existed only on paper. Art historian Forgács wrote that Lissitzky "proved himself as one of the progressive artists of 1920s Berlin" but that he violated an unwritten rule by placing price tags on elements of the Proun Room, which alienated his colleague Theo van Doesburg. The Proun Room was reconstructed in 1965 in the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum by Jan Leering.

• 6. Beat the Whites and Weimar Berlin

  ›

  Russia was in the grip of civil war in 1919, fought primarily between the communist Reds and the monarchist Whites. Lissitzky produced that year what became his most recognized single image: a propaganda poster titled "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge." The title, allegedly suggested by Ilya Ehrenburg, is possibly a direct counter to the pogrom slogan "Beat the Jews!", which in its full form read "Beat the Jews - save Russia!" and was used predominantly by right-wing monarchists and the Black Hundreds.

  Art historian Maria Elena Versari linked the poster to an Italian Futurist manifesto, Futurist Synthesis of War, published in 20,000 copies in 1914 and signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo, and Ugo Piatti. Lissitzky never mentioned the manifesto. But his friend Malevich had met Marinetti in 1914 and even called him one of the "two pillars, the two 'prisms' of the new art of the twentieth century." Also in 1918, the architect Nikolai Kolli had created a physical monument in Moscow called The Red Wedge, a red triangle inserted as a wedge into a white rectangular block, intended to symbolize the Red Army's victory over the Whites.

  In 1921, Lissitzky left for Weimar Berlin as a cultural representative of Soviet Russia, charged with establishing contacts between Russian and German artists. Post-war Berlin had an enormous Russian emigre population, estimated between 300,000 and 560,000 people in 1920-1921, including Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, Vasily Kandinsky, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, among many others.

  With Ilya Ehrenburg, Lissitzky launched the short-lived magazine Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet, published in German, French, and Russian. Only two issues appeared, both in 1922. In the first, Lissitzky wrote: "Objet will take the part of constructive art, whose task is not to adorn life but to organize it." The magazine published articles by Le Corbusier, Fernand Leger, and Blaise Cendrars, among others.

  In Berlin Lissitzky also befriended Kurt Schwitters, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Theo van Doesburg. He designed the Dlia Golosa (For the Voice), a collection of Mayakovsky's poems, in 1923, a book called a "masterpiece of modernist typographic design" even at the time of publication. Lissitzky acknowledged that the book "won him election to membership" in the Gutenberg Society.

• 7. Exhibition Design and Soviet Propaganda

  ›

  In October 1923, Lissitzky collapsed with acute pneumonia. Weeks later he was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. By February 1924 he was in a sanatorium in Orselina, near Locarno, Switzerland, where a surgery left him, in the source's phrase, "with only half a lung." He worked even from his hospital bed, completing the design of horizontal skyscrapers he called Wolkenbugel, or "sky-hooks," a concept he had been developing for more than two years.

  Each Wolkenbugel was a flat three-story, 180-meter-wide L-shaped slab raised 50 meters above street level, resting on three pylons. A series of eight such structures was intended to mark the major intersections of the Boulevard Ring in Moscow. One pylon per structure extended underground to double as the staircase into a proposed subway station; the other two sheltered ground-level tram stations. Lissitzky argued that as long as humans cannot fly, moving horizontally is natural and moving vertically is not.

  Back in Moscow from 1925, Lissitzky taught interior design and furniture design at Vkhutemas, a post he held until 1930. In 1926 he wrote in his autobiography that that year marked the beginning of "My most important work as an artist: the creation of exhibitions." He designed a temporary exhibition room for an art show in Dresden and a permanent Abstract Cabinet for Hanover's Provinzialmuseum, showing works by Mondrian, Moholy-Nagy, Picasso, Leger, Mies van der Rohe, and Schwitters, among others. The Nazis destroyed that cabinet in 1937 and later displayed its contents in Munich as "degenerate art."

  In 1927, the Head of Narkompros, Anatoly Lunacharsky, appointed Lissitzky to supervise the Soviet pavilion at the Pressa exhibition in Cologne, scheduled for May 1928. Leading a collective of thirty-eight creators, Lissitzky produced 227 exhibits, with the centerpiece being a photofresco measuring 3.8 meters high and 23.5 meters long titled "The Task of the Press is the Education of the Masses." The pavilion occupied the largest building on the fairground, electrified a giant red star with neon lights, and boasted that the USSR published 212 newspapers in 48 languages. One reviewer described the experience as "a drama that unfolded in time and space. One went through expositions, climaxes, retardations, and finales." Lissitzky received a governmental medal for the design.

  Though Nazi propaganda detested the avant-garde and described the Bauhaus as an "alien" and "Jewish" institute, scholars have traced Lissitzky's visual ideas in the design of fascist and Nazi exhibitions of the 1930s.

• 8. The Final Years

  ›

  In 1932, Joseph Stalin closed down independent artists' unions, and the world Lissitzky had inhabited changed irrevocably. He retained his reputation as a master of exhibition art into the late 1930s, but his tuberculosis was steadily narrowing his world. He grew more dependent on his wife, Sophie Kuppers, whom he had married on the 27th of January 1927 in Moscow. Art historian Peter Nisbet captured the arc of those final years bluntly: "the Prometheus of Proun is transformed into a Stalinist Sisyphus."

  From 1932 to 1940, Lissitzky and Sophie worked together on the USSR in Construction propaganda magazine, published in English, German, French, Russian, and later Spanish, aimed at foreign audiences to create a favorable image of the Soviet state. He worked on multiple issues across the decade, including ones dedicated to the Red Army, Arctic exploration, and the Polar Ship Chelyuskin. In 1937 he served as lead decorator for the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, though his final designs were rejected in 1938 as "primitive" and "schematic."

  His son Jen was born in Moscow on the 12th of October 1930, named after Lissitzky's sister Jenta, who had died by suicide in Vitebsk in 1925 while he was hospitalized in Switzerland. To mark Jen's birth Lissitzky created a photomontage now usually called Birth Announcement of the Artist's Son, superimposing the infant over a smiling female worker, a smoking factory chimney, and a newspaper celebrating Stalin's First Five-Year Plan.

  Lissitzky died on the 30th of December 1941. After his death, Sophie and Jen were sent into exile in Novosibirsk as German nationals. Sophie's son Hans was arrested and placed in a labor camp. Jen eventually became a photographer himself, working for Novosibirsk newspapers. Sophie's exile was officially ended in 1956, but she remained in Novosibirsk. In the 1960s she wrote a book in German about El Lissitzky, unable to publish it in the USSR because it named figures including Malevich, Filonov, Tatlin, and Klucis, whose reputations had been suppressed.