El Lissitzky
Biography of Russian Abstract Artist, Designer,
Illustrator.
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El Lissitzky
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El Lissitzky (1890-1941)Contents • Biography |
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An active figure in Russian avant-garde art, the versatile painter, designer and illustrator El Lissitzky, explored a number of abstract art movements, before focusing on design. His technical background perhaps explains his career-long focus on "goal-oriented construction", and he remained convinced that the artist's role was to help bring about a new world, constructed in accordance with visionary ideas. Associated with various styles of concrete art, such as Suprematism and later Constructivism, El Lissitzky is most famous for his "Proun" series of works exploring the relationship between the formal concerns of two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional architecture. During the post-Revolutionary shake-up of Russian art, he became Professor of Architecture and Graphic Arts at the Vitebsk school, under Marc Chagall (1887-1985). He spent much of the 1920s in Europe, where he mixed with abstract painters from the De Stijl movement, as well as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) from the Bauhaus Design School, and abstract sculptors like Naum Gabo (1890-1977). In 1928 he returned to Russia, gave up painting and focused on design, typography and poster art, devising exhibition displays and propaganda works for the Bolshevik authorities. One of the best known Russian artists in the West, he was an early pioneer of art photography - notably photomontage - ranking among the greatest photographers of Soviet Russia - he also had a significant influence on book illustration as well as production techniques that shaped much of 20th-century graphic design. |
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Born Lazar Markovich Lisitskii (Eliezer Markowich) in Pochinok, near Smolensk, and grew up in Vitebsk, now part of Belarus. Demonstrating an early talent for drawing, he received art lessons from Yehuda Pen, a local Jewish artist, he was rejected by the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, due to his Jewish faith, and instead trained from 1909 to 1914 as an architect at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany. In the summer of 1912, he took a trip around Europe (covering some 750 miles on foot), visiting Paris and cities in Italy, learning about fine art and sketching buildings and countryside that attracted his interest. In Paris, his interest in ancient Jewish culture was aroused by numerous discussions with Paris-based Jewish artists, including his childhood friend Ossip Zadkine (1890-1967) and Marc Chagall. Meanwhile, back in Russia, some of his early paintings featured for the first time in an exhibition by the St. Petersburg Artists Union. He stayed in Germany until the outbreak of war forced his return to Russia, along with many of his fellows expatriates, including Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Chagall.
Back in Moscow, Lissitzky attended the Polytechnic Institute of Riga, which had been evacuated to Moscow from Latvia, because of the war. (In 1916, he graduated with a diploma in engineering and architecture.) He also worked for the architectural firms of Boris Velikovsky and Roman Klein, while absorbing himself in Jewish art. He collaborated with Chagall in the illustration of numerous Yiddish books for children, and practised his lithography, at which he was already a master. This was his first major project involving book design, a discipline he would revitalize later in his career. |
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In May 1919, he returned to Vitebsk at the invitation of Chagall, the newly-appointed Commissioner of Artistic Affairs for the town, to teach printmaking, architecture and graphic art at the newly formed People's Art School. Another artist who was persuaded to teach at the school was Kasimir Malevich, the Suprematist, whose abstract paintings were a huge influence on Lissitzky. Suprematism - which Malevich proceeded to teach throughout the school - rejected the imitation of natural shapes and focused on non-objective art based on non-natural geometric forms. Chagall, who favoured a more classical approach, found such modernism too much to stomach and left, while Lissitzky was eventually convinced by Malevich's abstract art and broke away from traditional art altogether. He was also an orthodox believer in Communism and exemplified by his famous 1919 propaganda poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. In 1919, Lissitzky also created his first Proun (a Russian acronym for "project for the affirmation of the new"), an early piece in a series of abstract, geometric works, which explored the connections between painting and architecture. Each work was conceived as a self-sufficient aesthetic which could be executed in any medium. The media he chose included lithography, oil painting and illustration. One of the best examples of the genre is the painting Proun 19D (1922, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Another example is Proun P23, no. 6 (1919, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven). Around this time he also helped to establish the UNOVIS group (exponents of the new art). Cultural Ambassador to Germany In 1920, he became a member of INKHUK (Institute for Artistic Culture) in Moscow, and in 1921 he taught for a brief spell at VKhUTEMAS (State Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops) alongside Lyubov Popova (1889-1924) and Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) and joined the Constructivist group. He was then sent to Berlin as the Russian cultural Ambassador to Weimar Germany, in order to supervise a major exhibition at the Van Diemen Gallery - an important showcase of modern art from Russia. During his stay in Berlin, he met the De Stijl founder Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931), who was developing his style of Elementarism in reply to the Neo-Plasticism of his rival Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), and Walter Gropius (1883-1969) the Bauhaus chief, as well as Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) the Dada genius noted for his unique Merzbau assemblage, who introduced him to the Hanover gallery Kestnergesellschaft, where Lissitzky held his first solo exhibition. Lissitzky also designed the 'Proun Room' at the Berlin Railway Station - perhaps the first ever installation. Lastly, he co-founded the short-lived magazine Veshch-Gegenstand Objekt with the Russian-Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg. Designed to promote contemporary Russian art to Western Europe, it was published in German, French, and Russian. Among his many architectural ideas of the period, was his design for horizontal skyscrapers, known as Wolkenbugel, or "cloud-irons". As described by El Lissitzky in a series of articles published in the Muscovite architectural review ASNOVA News (Association of New Architects) and also in the German art journal Das Kunstblatt, a series of eight such structures were to be erected at the major intersections of the Boulevard Ring around Moscow. Each comprised a flat three-story, L-shaped slab raised some 175 feet above street level on three pylons. An illustration of the design appeared on the front cover of Adolf Behne's book Der Moderne Zweckbau. See also: Skyscraper Architecture (1850-present). In October 1923, following two years of intensive work, Lissitzky collapsed with acute pneumonia which developed into pulmonary tuberculosis. As a result, he was forced to convalesce at a Swiss sanatorium near Locarno. Here, he continued his design work, experimenting with typographic motifs and photomontage. Moscow: Exhibitions and Illustration In 1925, being unable to renew his visa, he returned to Moscow and gave up painting to devote himself to applied art and propaganda designs. To this end, he quickly rejoined VKhUTEMAS where he began teaching interior design, metalwork, and architecture until 1930. He was also sent abroad (June 1926) to manage the design and construction of exhibition rooms for the International Art show in Dresden, and Abstraktes Kabinett show in Hanover. Similar projects followed, in connection with displays for the official USSR pavilions at the international exhibitions of the period, up to 1939, as exemplified by his innovative designs for the All-Union Polygraphic Exhibit in Moscow in August 1927, and for the 1928 Press Show. In addition to his exhibition designwork, Lissitzky revitalized book and periodical design, by introducing radical innovations in typography and photomontage, two fields in which he was an acknowledged master. Despite the onset of terminal disease, El Lissitzky kept working throughout the 1930s, though not without controversy. Despite completely changing his designs to fit in with the new Stalinist style of Socialist Realism - his design for the 1937 All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, for instance, included a huge heroic statue of Stalin in front of the central pavilion - his plans for decoration of the Soviet exhibition hall for the 1939 New York World's Fair were rejected. In 1941 his tuberculosis worsened, but he continued to work. He eventually died in Moscow on December 30, 1941. Works by El Lissitzky can be seen in some of the best art museums in Russia and elsewhere. |
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• For biographies of other modern
Russian artists, see: Famous Painters.
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