El Lissitzky

• 1. Childhood In The Pale

  ›

  Lazar Markovich Lissitzky was born on the 23rd of November 1890 in Pochinok, a small Jewish community southeast of Smolensk. His father Mordukh Zalmanov worked as an educated travel agent who spoke English and German. He translated works by Heinrich Heine and William Shakespeare in his spare time before returning to Russia after his wife's rabbi advised against emigration. Lazar grew up near the Pale of Settlement where Jewish solidarity defined daily life. Art historian Nancy Perloff noted that this environment created a powerful sense of community-wide response to the knowledge that Jews would never be considered true Russians. From 1891 to 1898 the family lived in Vitebsk where his brother and sister were born. In 1899 Lazar moved to Smolensk to live with his grandfather and attend City School 1. By 1903 he received instruction from Yury Pen during a summer vacation spent with his parents in Vitebsk. Marc Chagall and Ossip Zadkine were also students under Pen. At age fifteen Lissitzky began earning a living by tutoring and drawing according to his diary entries.

• 2. Suprematism And UNOVIS

  ›

  In May 1919 Lissitzky returned to Vitebsk when Marc Chagall invited him to teach graphic arts at the newly formed People's Art School. Chagall had been appointed Commissioner of Artistic Affairs for Vitebsk in 1918. He brought Kazimir Malevich to the school in October 1919 after Lissitzky persuaded him on an errand to Moscow. Malevich developed suprematism since 1915 which rejected natural shapes in favor of distinct geometric forms. On the 17th of January 1920 Malevich and Lissitzky co-founded the Molposnovis group as a proto-suprematist association. The group reemerged as UNOVIS in February after brief disputes and renaming. They disbanded in 1922 but remained pivotal in disseminating suprematist ideology across Russia and abroad. All members shared credit for works produced within the group signing most pieces with a black square. This symbol served as the de facto seal replacing individual names or initials. Black squares worn as chest badges resembled ritual tefillin familiar in Vitebsk shtetls. In April 1920 UNOVIS decorated the whole city for Workers Day celebrations. Sergei Eisenstein described the scene where red bricks were painted white with green circles everywhere. Orange squares and blue rectangles appeared over this background throughout the main streets.

• 3. The Proun Inventions

  ›

  Between 1919 and 1920 Lissitzky developed his own suprematist style called Proun pronounced pro-oon meaning UNOVIS Project. He intended these abstract geometric paintings to have neither top nor bottom orientation. Commenting on the work he wrote that they made the canvas rotate to see themselves in space. These compositions functioned as architectural versions of suprematism taking elements from Russian constructivism. Describing them he used terms like space concrete construct and construction comparing them to geographical maps. In 1923 he published the Kestnermappe containing six lithographs in fifty copies. Art historian Alan C. Birnholz noted that Proun compositions gradually turned away from color displaying growing clarity. They tended to diffuse areas of tension across the entire picture surface. The series represented a problem in defining space while symbolizing utopia envisioned in the new social order. Lissitzky himself stated that Prouns lead us to construct a new body starting as a level surface then turning into three-dimensional models. Only about twenty-five Prouns survived today. In 1923 he created a Proun Room for the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung measuring approximately three by three by two point five meters.

• 4. Photomontage And The Constructor

  ›

  Lissitzky became interested in photography during the 1920s when his future wife Sophie Küppers gave him her father's camera. This monstrosity featured wooden plate-holders measuring thirteen centimeters by eighteen centimeters with a large Zeiss lens. He soon created numerous photomontages using various darkroom techniques including double printing and sandwiched negatives. His famous self-portrait called The Constructor was created between 1923 and 1924 while severely ill with tuberculosis in a Swiss hospital. It is a superimposed image combining a self-portrait with a photo of a hand holding a compass. Graph paper extends to the left and right edges with inverted letters and additional letters XYZ placed between an arrow and backwards L. Multiple versions of this collage exist making it one of the most famous works of the constructivist movement. Designer Jan Tschichold called The Constructor Lissitzky's finest and most important work in 1965. Researchers proposed interpretations showing the author as equivalent to the divine creator of the world through traditional iconography of the eye circle and pair of compasses. Another self-portrait called Self-Portrait with Wrapped Head and Compass showed the author not as measurer but as measured object facing left.

• 5. Exhibition Design Revolution

  ›

  In 1926 Lissitzky began his most important work as an artist creating exhibitions according to his autobiography written in June 1941. He described international art shows resembling zoos where visitors were subjected to roars of thousands of assorted beasts. His space design intended to make objects not assault the visitor all at once. Instead of building their own pavilion for the Pressa exhibition in Cologne scheduled for May 1928 the Soviets rented the existing central pavilion. Anatoly Lunacharsky appointed Lissitzky as supervisor of the Soviet pavilion leading a thirty-eight-member collective including Sergei Senkin and Gustav Klutsis. They produced two hundred twenty-seven exhibits mostly created in Moscow. The centerpiece was a three point eight meter high photofresco titled The Task of the Press is the Education of the Masses depicting history and importance of press in Soviet Russia after the Revolution. In his design he treated viewers as actors who could interact with the exhibition. A giant red star electrified with neon lights sat in the center above a communist slogan Workers of the world unite! The Berliner Tageblatt reported on the 26th of May 1928 contrasting British and Soviet wings noting grandeur in social conditions.

• 6. Architecture And Cloud Hangers

  ›

  While staying in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Switzerland during 1924 and 1925 Lissitzky completed designs for horizontal skyscrapers known as Wolkenbügel or cloud-hangers. He had held this idea for more than two years before finalizing it. A series of eight such structures intended to mark major intersections of the Boulevard Ring in Moscow. Each Wolkenbügel was a flat three-story one hundred eighty-meter-wide L-shaped slab raised fifty meters above street level. It rested on three pylons placed on different street corners. One pylon extended underground doubling as staircase into a proposed subway station while two others provided shelter for ground-level tram stations. Lissitzky argued that since humans cannot fly moving horizontally is natural and moving vertically is not. After returning to Moscow in 1925 he began teaching interior design at the Wood and Metalwork faculty keeping the post until 1930. Besides these utopian projects he designed interiors of communal housing blocks including Ginzburg and Milinis' House for Employees of the Commissariat of Finance. In 1927 he hired to design a printing plant of Ogonyok magazine which became his sole tangible work of architecture.

• 7. Stalinist Adaptation And Final Years

  ›

  In 1932 Joseph Stalin closed down independent artists unions forcing former avant-garde artists to adapt or risk blacklisting. Lissitzky retained reputation as master of exhibition art management into late 1930s despite tuberculosis reducing physical abilities. He became increasingly dependent on wife Sophie Küppers during this period. Art historian Peter Nisbet saw transition from individual work to Stalinist propaganda as transforming Prometheus into Sisyphus. In 1937 Lissitzky served as lead decorator for All-Union Agricultural Exhibition reporting to Vyacheslav Oltarzhevsky but largely independent and critical. The project delayed after arrest of Oltarzhevsky then rejected in 1938. Between 1932 and 1940 he worked with his wife on USSR in Construction magazine published in English German French Russian and Spanish mainly for foreign audiences. One of his last pieces was a propaganda poster titled Davaite pobolshe tankov meaning Give us more tanks produced in 1941. He died on the 30th of December 1941 in Moscow while continuing to work despite worsening tuberculosis.