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Lazar Markovich Lissitzky
Audio|ru-El_Lissitzky.ogg|listen
(Лазарь
Маркови&
#1095;
Лисицки&
#1081;, November 23, 1890 – December 30,
1941), better known as El Lissitzky
(Эль
Лисицки&
#1081;), was a Russian artist, designer,
photographer, teacher, typographer, and architect.
He was one of the most important figures of the
Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism
with his friend and mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and
designed numerous exhibition displays and
propaganda works for the former Soviet Union. His
work greatly influenced the Bauhaus,
Constructivism | Constructivist, and De Stijl
movements and experimented with production
techniques and stylistic devices that would go on
to dominate Graphic_design#20th_century | 20th
century graphic design.

Lissitzky's entire career was laced with the
belief that the artist could be an agent for
change, later summarized with his edict, "das
zielbewußte Schaffen" (The goal-oriented
creation). #fn_4|4 A
Jew, he began his career illustrating Yiddish
Children's literature | children's books in an
effort to promote Jewish culture in Russia, a
country that was undergoing massive change at the
time and had just repealed its Anti-Semitism |
anti-semitic laws. Starting at the age of 15, he
began teaching; a duty he would stay with for the
vast majority of his life. Over the years, he
taught in a variety of positions, schools, and
artistic mediums, spreading and exchanging ideas
at a rapid pace. He took this ethic with him when
he worked with Malevich in heading the suprematist
art group UNOVIS, when he developed a variant
suprematist series of his own, El
Lissitzky#Proun|Proun, and further still in 1921
when he took up a job as the Russian cultural
ambassador in Weimar Republic|Weimar Germany,
working with and influencing important figures of
the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements during his
stay. In his remaining years he brought
significant innovation and change to the fields of
typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and
book design, producing critically respected works
and winning international acclaim for his
exhibition design. This continued until his
deathbed, where in 1941 he produced one of his
last known works — a Soviet propaganda
poster rallying the people to construct more tanks
for the fight against Nazi Germany.

==Early years==



Lissitzky was born on November 23, 1890 in
Pochinok, a small Jewish community 50 km southeast
of  Smolensk, former Russian Empire. During his
childhood he lived and studied in the city of
Vitebsk, now part of Belarus, and later spent 10
years in Smolensk living with his grandparents and
attending the Smolensk Grammar School. Always
expressing an interest and talent in drawing, he
started to receive instruction at the age of 13
from Jehuda Pen, a local Jewish artist, and by the
time he was 15 began teaching students himself. In
1909 he applied to an art academy in Petersburg
but was rejected. While he passed the entrance
exam and was qualified, the law under the Russian
history, 1892-1920 |Tsarist regime only allowed a
limited number of Jewish students to attend
Russian schools and universities.



Like many other Jews living in the Russian Empire
at the time, Lissitzky went to study in Germany.
He left the Russian Empire the same year  to study architecture and
engineering at a Technische Hochschule in
Darmstadt, Germany. During the summer of 1912,
Lissitzky, in his own words, "wandered through
Europe", spending time in Paris and covering 1200
km on foot in Italy, teaching himself about fine
art and sketching architecture and landscapes that
interested him #fn_1|1.
In the same year, some of his pieces were included
for the first time in an exhibit by the St.
Petersburg Artists Union; a notable first step for
Lissitzky. He remained in Germany until the
outbreak of World War I, when he was forced to
return home along with many of his countrymen,
including other expatriate artists born in the
former Russian Empire, such as Wassily Kandinsky
and Marc Chagall.

After the war he went to Moscow and attended the
Polytechnic Institute of Riga, which had been
evacuated to Moscow because of the war. He
received an architectural diploma from the school
and immediately started assistant work at various
architectural firms. During this work, he took an
active and passionate interest in Jewish culture
which, after the downfall of the openly
Anti-Semitism | anti-semitic Tsarist regime, was
flourishing and experiencing a renaissance at the
time. The new Russian Provisional Government, 1917
|Provisional Government repealed a decree that
prohibited the printing of Hebrew alphabet|Hebrew
letters and that barred Jews from citizenship.
Thus Lissitzky soon devoted himself to Jewish art,
exhibiting works by local Jewish artists,
traveling to Mahilyow to study the traditional
architecture and ornaments of old synagogues, and
illustrating many Yiddish Children's literature |
children's books. These books were Lissitzky's
first major foray in book design, a field that he
would greatly innovate during his career.

His first designs appeared in the 1917 book Sihas
hulin: Eyne fun di geshikhten (An Everyday
Conversation), where he incorporated Hebrew
letters with a distinctly Art nouveau flair. His
next book was a visual retelling of the
traditional Jewish Passover song  Had gadya (One
Goat), in which Lissitzky showcased a typography |
typographic device that he would often return to
in later designs. In the book, Lissitzky
integrated letters with images through a system of
color coding that matched the color of the
characters in the story with the word referring to
them. In the designs for the final page (pictured
right), Lissitzky depicts the mighty "hand of God"
slaying the angel of death, who wears the tsar's
crown. This representation links the redemption of
the Jews with the victory of the Bolsheviks in the
Russian Revolution of 1917|Russian Revolution.
#fn_5|5 Visual
representations of the hand of God would recur in
numerous pieces throughout his entire career, most
notably with his 1925 photomontage self-portrait
The Constructor, which prominently featured the
hand.

==The avant garde==

===Suprematism===


In 1919, upon receiving an invitation from fellow
artist and Jew Marc Chagall,  Lissitzky returned
to Vitebsk to teach graphic arts, printing, and
architecture at the newly formed People's Art
School — a school that Chagall created after
being appointed Commissioner of Artistic Affairs
for Vitebsk in 1918. Chagall also invited other
Russian-Jewish artists, most notably the painter
and art theoretician Kazimir Malevich and
Lissitzky's former teacher, Jehuda Pen. Malevich
would bring with him a wealth of new ideas, most
of which both clashed with Chagall and greatly
inspired Lissitzky. After going through
impressionism, primitivism, and cubism, Malevich
started developing and aggressively advocating his
ideas on suprematism. In development since 1915,
suprematism rejected the imitation of natural
shapes and focused more on the creation of
distinct, Geometry | geometric forms. He replaced
the classic teaching program with his own and
disseminated his suprematist theories and
techniques school-wide. Chagall advocated more
classical ideals and Lissitzky, still loyal to
Chagall, became torn between two opposing artistic
paths. Lissitzky ultimately favored Malevich's
suprematism and broke away from traditional Jewish
art. Chagall left the school shortly thereafter.

At this point Lissitzky subscribed fully to
suprematism and, under the guidance of Malevich,
helped further develop the movement. Some of his
most famous works derive from this era, with
perhaps his most famous being the 1919 propaganda
poster "Beat the white with the Red wedge"
(pictured right). Russia was going through a
Russian Civil War |civil war at the time which was
mainly fought between the "Reds", who were the
communists and revolutionaries, and the "Whites"
who were the monarchists, conservatives, liberals
and socialists who opposed the Bolshevik
Revolution. The imagery of the red wedge
shattering the white form, simple as it was,
communicated a powerful message that left no doubt
in the viewers mind of its intention. The piece is
often seen as alluding to the similar shapes used
on military maps and, along with its political
symbolism, was one of Lissitzky's first major
steps away from Malevich's non-objective
suprematism into a style his own. He stated:

:The artist constructs a new symbol with his
brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of
anything that is already finished, already made,
or already existent in the world — it is a
symbol of a new world, which is being built upon
and which exists by the way of the people #fn_2|2

Also in 1919, Lissitzky joined and took a
prominent role in the short-lived but influential
UNOVIS group (Russian abbreviation for "The
Champions of the New"), a proto-suprematist
association of students, professors, and other
artists. Formerly known as MOLPOSNOVIS and
POSNOVIS, the group was re-branded as UNOVIS when
Malevich became leader. In February of 1920, under
the leadership of Malevich, the group worked on a
"suprematist ballet", choreographed by Nina Kogan,
and the precursor to Aleksander Kruchenykh's
influential Futurism (art) | futurist opera,
Victory Over the Sun. Interestingly, Lissitzky and
the entire group chose to share credit and
responsibility for the works produced within the
group, signing most pieces with a single, solitary
black square. This was partly as a homage to a
similar piece their leader, Malevich, and a
symbolic embrace of the Communist ideal. This
would become the de facto Seal (device) | seal of
UNOVIS and took the place of individual names or
initials. The group, which disbanded in 1922,
would play a pivotal role in the dissemination of
suprematist ideology in Russia and abroad as well
as launch Lissitzky's status as one of the leading
figures in the avant garde.



===Proun===

During this period Lissitzky proceeded to develop
a variant suprematist style of his own, a series
of abstract, geometric paintings which he called
Proun (pronounced "pro-oon"). Proun was
essentially Lissitzky's exploration of the visual
language of suprematism with spatial elements,
utilizing shifting axes and multiple perspectives;
both uncommon ideas in suprematism. Suprematism at
the time was conducted almost exclusively in flat,
2D forms and shapes, and Lissitzky, with a taste
for architecture and other 3D| 3-dimensional
concepts, tried to expand suprematism beyond this.
His Proun works (known as Prounen), spanned over a
half a decade and evolved from straightforward
paintings and lithographs into fully 3-dimensional
installations. They would also lay the foundation
for his later experimentations in architecture and
exhibition design. While the paintings were
artistic in their own right, their use as a
staging ground for his early architectonic ideas
was significant. In these works, the basic
elements of architecture — volume, mass,
color, space and rhythm — were subjected to
a fresh formulation in relation to the new
suprematist ideals. 

Jewish symbolism | Jewish themes and symbols also
sometimes made appearances in his Prounen, usually
with Lissitzky using Hebrew letters as part of the
typography or visual code. For the cover of the
1922 book Teyashim (Four Billy Goats)
Media:Design_by_El_Lissitzky_1922.jpg|(JPG), he
shows an arrangement of Hebrew letters as
architectural elements in a dynamic design that
mirrors his contemporary Proun typography. #fn_5|5 This theme was
extended into other works, namely his illustration
for the books "Shifs-Karta" (Passenger Ticket) and
"Shifs-Karta." The exact meaning of the word Proun
was never fully revealed, with some suggesting
that it is a contraction of "proekt unovsia"
("Architectural design of UNOVIS"), or "proekt
utverzhdenya novoga" ("Design for the confirmation
of the new"), and with it later being defined by
Lissitzky ambiguously as "the station where one
changes from painting to architecture" #fn_3|3



===Return to Germany===

In 1921, roughly concurrent with the demise of
UNOVIS, suprematism was beginning to fracture into
two ideologically adverse halves, one favoring
Utopian, spiritual art and the other favoring a
more utilitarian art that serves society.
Lissitzky was fully part of neither and left
Vitebsk in 1921. He took a job as a cultural
representative of Russia and moved to Berlin where
he was to establish contacts between Russian and
Germany|German artists. There he also took up work
as a writer and designer for international
magazines and journals while helping to promote
the avant garde through various art gallery |
gallery shows. He started the very short-lived,
but impressive, periodical Veshch-Gerenstand
Objekt with Russian-Jewish writer Ilya Erenburg.
The periodical was intended to show off
contemporary Russian art to Western Europe, mainly
focusing on new suprematist and constructivist
works, and was published in German language |
German, French language | French, and Russian
language | Russian languages. In the first issue
Lissitzky wrote:


:    We consider the triumph of the constructive
method to be essential for our present. We find it
not only in the new economy and in the development
of the industry, but also in the psychology of our
contemporaries of art. Veshch will champion
constructive art, whose mission is not, after all,
to embellish life, but to organize it. #fn_4|4


During his stay he also developed his career as a
graphic designer with some historically important
works such as the book Dlia Golossa (For the
Voice), a collection of poems from Vladimir
Mayakovsky, and the book "Die Kunstismen" (The
Artisms) together with Jean Arp. There he also met
and befriended many other artists, most notably
Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy, and Theo
van Doesburg. Lissitzky, together with Schwitters
and van Doesburg, presented the idea of an
international artistic movement under the
guidelines of Constructivism while also working
with Kurt Schwitters on the issue Nasci (Nature)
of the periodical Merz (pictured right), and
continuing to illustrate children's books. After
the publishing of his first Proun series in Moscow
in 1921, Schwitters introduced Lissitzky to the
Hanover gallery Kestner-Gesellschaft in 1922,
where he held his first solo exhibition. The
second Proun series, printed in Hanover in 1923,
was a success, utilizing new and sophisticated
printing techniques. Later on, he met Sophie
Kuppers, a widow of an art director of a gallery
which Lissitzky was showing at, who he would later
marry in 1927.

==Later years==



In 1924 Lissitzky went to Switzerland to receive
treatment for his tuberculosis. He kept very busy
during his stay, working on advertisements designs
for Pelikan Industries (who in turn paid for his
treatment), translating articles written by
Malevich into German, and experimented heavily in
typographic design and photography. In 1925, after
the Swiss government denied his request to renew
his visa, Lissitzky returned to Moscow and began
teaching interior design, metalwork, and
architecture at VKhUTEMAS (State Higher Artistic
and Technical Workshops), a post he would keep
until 1930.

While there he all but stopped his Proun works and
became increasingly active in architecture and
propaganda designs. In 1926, he and architect Emil
Roth designed the Wolkenbügel (Cloud-iron), a
unique skyscraper on 3 posts planned for Moscow.
Although never built, the building was a vivid
contradiction to United States of America |
America's vertical building style, as the building
only rose up a relatively modest height then
expanded horizontally over an intersection so make
better use of space. Its three posts were on three
different street corners, canvasing the
intersection. An illustration of it appeared on
the front cover of Adolf Behne's book, Der Moderne
Zweckbau, and articles on it written by Lissitzky
appeared in an issue of the Moscow-based
architectural review, ASNOVA (The Association of
New Architects), and in the German art journal Das
Kunstblatt.

In addition to his work in architecture at the
time he also began designing numerous exhibition
displays for the government including the
Internationale Kunstausstellung in Dresden, and
the Raum Konstruktive Kunst (Room for
Constructivist art) and Abstraktes Kabinett in
Hanover, along with many Soviet pavilions
including one of their pavilions at the 1939 1939
New York World's Fair | World Fair in New York.
One of his most notable exhibits was the
Polygraphic Exhibit in Moscow in 1927, which won
him a state appointment as head of the team of
artists who would design the coming pavilions. His
work on the exhibit was radically new, especially
juxtaposed to the very classical designs of other
participating countries. This garnered Lissitzky
much praise from the foreign and domestic press,
with one United Kingdom | English newspaper
columnist wrote: "Everything in it is so
exceptionally interesting. The author of these
words should consider himself lucky if he could
say the same about the British pavilion."



Along with pavilion design, Lissitzky began
experimenting with print media again. His work
with book and periodical design was perhaps some
of his most accomplished and influential. He
launched new and radical innovations in typography
and photomontage, two fields which he was
particularly adept in. He even designed a
photomontage birth announcement in 1930 for his
recently born son, Jen.
Media:Photomontage_by_El_Lissitzky_1930.jpg|The
image itself is seen as being another personal
endorsement of the Soviet Union, as it
superimposed an image of the infant Jen over a
factory chimney, linking Jen's future with his
country's industrial progress. Around this time,
Lissitzky's interest in book design escalated. In
his remaining years, some of his most challenging
and innovative works in this field would develop.
In discussing his vision of the book he wrote:


::In contrast to the old monumental art the book
itself goes to the people, and does not stand like
a cathedral in one place waiting for someone to
approach... The book is the monument of the future
#fn_3|3


He perceived books as permanent objects that were
invested with power. This power was unique in that
it could transmit ideas to people of different
times, cultures, and interests, and do so in ways
other art forms couldn't. This represented a
thread of ambition that laced all of his work,
particularly in his later years. Lissitzky was
devoted to the idea of creating art with power and
purpose; art that could invoke change. 

A significant portion of his work during this
period was Soviet propaganda. He started working
for the propaganda magazine USSR im Bau (USSR in
construction), where some of his most wild
experiments with book design were produced. Each
issue focused on a particular topic important to
Stalin at the time — a new dam being built,
constitutional reforms, Red Army progress and so
on. In 1941 he became ill again with tuberculosis,
but still continued to produce works, with one of
his latest works being a propaganda poster for
Russia's efforts in World War II, entitled
"Davaite pobolshe tankov!" (Give us more tanks!)
He died on December 30, 1941, in Moscow.

==Legacy==



Throughout his career Lissitzky advanced a number
of methods, ideas, and movements that had a large
and significant impact on contemporary art —
particularly in the fields of graphic design,
exhibition design, and architecture. Partly
because of his constant expansion and
experimentation into many different mediums and
styles, and his spirit of innovation in them,
Lissitzky's work is generally held in high regard
by historians and critics. He was one of the
principal innovators of modern typography and
photomontage, both relatively nascent fields at
the time.

He was also preoccupied from early to late career
with the book design. He thought of the book as a
dynamic object, a "unity of acoustics and optics"
requiring the viewer's active involvement. When
working on USSR im bau he took his experimentation
and innovation with book design to an extreme. In
issue #2 he included multiple fold-out pages,
presented in concert with other folded pages that
together produced design combinations and a
narrative structure that was completely original
at the time. He also invested great effort into
establishing international links between artists
and promoting new ideas, helping the avant-garde
spread across Europe. This started locally with
UNOVIS, where he attempted to spread and promote
new art primarily in Russia, and reached its peak
with his stay in Germany, where he exchanged ideas
internationally and helped influence the German
Bauhaus and The Netherlands | Dutch De Stijl
movements.

Along with his efforts towards the advancement of
art, Lissitzky worked tirelessly for ways to
better life with art. For that purpose he chose to
study architecture in his youth; an artistic
medium that directly affects and contributes to
society. He was an ardent supporter of the
Communist ideology and devoted a great part of his
life and energy in its service. Through his
Prouns, Utopian models for a new and better world
were developed. This approach, in which the artist
creates art with socially defined purpose, could
aptly be summarized with his edict "das
zielbewußte Schaffen" — "the task oriented
creation." #fn_4|4

In his later years he brought revolutionary change
to exhibition design, garnering him respect
internationally as well as prestige within his own
country and government. In exhibition and
propaganda design, he found an area where he could
apply his creative forces in the service of
society. In his autobiography written in June,
1941 (which was later edited and released by his
wife as El Lissitzky, life, letters, texts),
Lissitzky wrote: "1926. My most important work as
an artist begins: the creation of exhibitions."


Large amounts of his work are on permanent display
in galleries worldwide. Much of his collection of
Proun works can be viewed in the Van Abbemuseum
http://www.vanabbe.nl/engels/index.html in the
Netherlands, with other abstract  works on display
in Sprengel Museum in Hannover. His work is also
part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

==Resources==

===Notes===

* #fn_1_back|Note 1:  Book
reference | Author=Lissitzky-Kuppers, Sophie  |
Title=El Lissitzky, life, letters, texts |
Publisher=Thames and Hudson | Year=1980 | ID=ISBN
0500230900
* #fn_2_back|Note 2:  Web
reference | title=formDefined | work=formDefined:
one by one by one |
URL=http://comm2.fsu.edu/programs/comm/interact/sh
owcase/2004/PDF/KF_proposal.PDF | date=March 9 |
year=2005
* #fn_3_back|Note 3:  Book
reference | Author=Lissitzy, El | Title=El
Lissitzky, 1890–1941: Architect Painter
Photographer Typographer | Publisher=Municipal Van
Abbemuseum | Year=1990 | ID=ISBN 9070149281
* #fn_4_back|Note 4:  Web
reference | title=El Lissitzky in Weimar Germany|
work=El Lissitzky in Weimar Germany by Anna
Glazova |
URL=http://spintongues.vladivostok.com/glazova27en
g.htm | date=March 8 | year=2005
* #fn_5_back|Note 5:  Web
reference | title=Monuments of the Future |
work=Getty Institute - Monuments to the Future:
Designs by El Lissitzky |
URL=http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_resea
rch/digitized_collections/lissitzky/index2.html |
date=March 20 | year=2005

===References===

* Book reference | Author=Lissitzky-Kuppers,
Sophie  | Title=El Lissitzky, life, letters, texts
| Publisher=Thames and Hudson | Year=1980 |
ID=ISBN 0500230900
* Book reference | Author=Lissitzy, El | Title=El
Lissitzky, 1890–1941: Architect Painter
Photographer Typographer | Publisher=Municipal Van
Abbemuseum | Year=19901 | ID=ISBN 9070149281
* Book reference | Author=Perloff, Nancy; Reed,
Brian | Title=Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk,
Berlin, Moscow | Publisher=Getty Research
Institute | Year=2003 | ID=ISBN 089236677X
* Book reference | Author=Mayakovsky, Vladimir; El
Lissitzky | Title=For the Voice (Dlia golosa) |
Publisher=The MIT Press | Year=2000 | ID=ISBN
0262133776

===External links===

*http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research
/digitized_collections/lissitzky/index2.html The
Getty Research Institute - Monuments of the Future
(http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_res
earch/digitized_collections/lissitzky/flash/home.h
tml Flash) or
(http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_res
earch/digitized_collections/lissitzky/index2.html
HTML) - The Getty Center's home page for El
Lissitzky - Biography, media, etc.
*http://spintongues.vladivostok.com/glazova27eng.h
tm El Lissitzky in Weimar Germany - A essay and
biography on his life and work, focusing
particularly on his time in Germany
*http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/el/elc.html
Ibiblio.org - Image collection of some of his most
famous works
*http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2002/russian/
MoMA - Macromedia Flash | Flash-navigable
exploration of USSR im bau and Dlia Golossa
(click on "Reading Room" link)
*http://www.roland-collection.com/rolandcollection
/section/16/503.htm The Roland Collection of Films
& Videos on Art - Free streaming download of an
entire 88-minute documentary, El Lissitzky, by Leo
Lorez (Realplayer required)

	Web Quotableonline.com Frasescelebres.org Greatbookscollection.org

Lazar Markovich Lissitzky
Audio|ru-El_Lissitzky.ogg|listen
(Лазарь
Маркови&
#1095;
Лисицки&
#1081;, November 23, 1890 – December 30,
1941), better known as El Lissitzky
(Эль
Лисицки&
#1081;), was a Russian artist, designer,
photographer, teacher, typographer, and architect.
He was one of the most important figures of the
Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism
with his friend and mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and
designed numerous exhibition displays and
propaganda works for the former Soviet Union. His
work greatly influenced the Bauhaus,
Constructivism | Constructivist, and De Stijl
movements and experimented with production
techniques and stylistic devices that would go on
to dominate Graphic_design#20th_century | 20th
century graphic design.

Lissitzky's entire career was laced with the
belief that the artist could be an agent for
change, later summarized with his edict, "das
zielbewußte Schaffen" (The goal-oriented
creation). #fn_4|4 A
Jew, he began his career illustrating Yiddish
Children's literature | children's books in an
effort to promote Jewish culture in Russia, a
country that was undergoing massive change at the
time and had just repealed its Anti-Semitism |
anti-semitic laws. Starting at the age of 15, he
began teaching; a duty he would stay with for the
vast majority of his life. Over the years, he
taught in a variety of positions, schools, and
artistic mediums, spreading and exchanging ideas
at a rapid pace. He took this ethic with him when
he worked with Malevich in heading the suprematist
art group UNOVIS, when he developed a variant
suprematist series of his own, El
Lissitzky#Proun|Proun, and further still in 1921
when he took up a job as the Russian cultural
ambassador in Weimar Republic|Weimar Germany,
working with and influencing important figures of
the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements during his
stay. In his remaining years he brought
significant innovation and change to the fields of
typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and
book design, producing critically respected works
and winning international acclaim for his
exhibition design. This continued until his
deathbed, where in 1941 he produced one of his
last known works — a Soviet propaganda
poster rallying the people to construct more tanks
for the fight against Nazi Germany.

==Early years==


Lissitzky was born on November 23, 1890 in
Pochinok, a small Jewish community 50 km southeast
of  Smolensk, former Russian Empire. During his
childhood he lived and studied in the city of
Vitebsk, now part of Belarus, and later spent 10
years in Smolensk living with his grandparents and
attending the Smolensk Grammar School. Always
expressing an interest and talent in drawing, he
started to receive instruction at the age of 13
from Jehuda Pen, a local Jewish artist, and by the
time he was 15 began teaching students himself. In
1909 he applied to an art academy in Petersburg
but was rejected. While he passed the entrance
exam and was qualified, the law under the Russian
history, 1892-1920 |Tsarist regime only allowed a
limited number of Jewish students to attend
Russian schools and universities.

Like many other Jews living in the Russian Empire
at the time, Lissitzky went to study in Germany.
He left the Russian Empire the same year  to study architecture and
engineering at a Technische Hochschule in
Darmstadt, Germany. During the summer of 1912,
Lissitzky, in his own words, "wandered through
Europe", spending time in Paris and covering 1200
km on foot in Italy, teaching himself about fine
art and sketching architecture and landscapes that
interested him #fn_1|1.
In the same year, some of his pieces were included
for the first time in an exhibit by the St.
Petersburg Artists Union; a notable first step for
Lissitzky. He remained in Germany until the
outbreak of World War I, when he was forced to
return home along with many of his countrymen,
including other expatriate artists born in the
former Russian Empire, such as Wassily Kandinsky
and Marc Chagall.

After the war he went to Moscow and attended the
Polytechnic Institute of Riga, which had been
evacuated to Moscow because of the war. He
received an architectural diploma from the school
and immediately started assistant work at various
architectural firms. During this work, he took an
active and passionate interest in Jewish culture
which, after the downfall of the openly
Anti-Semitism | anti-semitic Tsarist regime, was
flourishing and experiencing a renaissance at the
time. The new Russian Provisional Government, 1917
|Provisional Government repealed a decree that
prohibited the printing of Hebrew alphabet|Hebrew
letters and that barred Jews from citizenship.
Thus Lissitzky soon devoted himself to Jewish art,
exhibiting works by local Jewish artists,
traveling to Mahilyow to study the traditional
architecture and ornaments of old synagogues, and
illustrating many Yiddish Children's literature |
children's books. These books were Lissitzky's
first major foray in book design, a field that he
would greatly innovate during his career.

His first designs appeared in the 1917 book Sihas
hulin: Eyne fun di geshikhten (An Everyday
Conversation), where he incorporated Hebrew
letters with a distinctly Art nouveau flair. His
next book was a visual retelling of the
traditional Jewish Passover song  Had gadya (One
Goat), in which Lissitzky showcased a typography |
typographic device that he would often return to
in later designs. In the book, Lissitzky
integrated letters with images through a system of
color coding that matched the color of the
characters in the story with the word referring to
them. In the designs for the final page (pictured
right), Lissitzky depicts the mighty "hand of God"
slaying the angel of death, who wears the tsar's
crown. This representation links the redemption of
the Jews with the victory of the Bolsheviks in the
Russian Revolution of 1917|Russian Revolution.
#fn_5|5 Visual
representations of the hand of God would recur in
numerous pieces throughout his entire career, most
notably with his 1925 photomontage self-portrait
The Constructor, which prominently featured the
hand.

==The avant garde==

===Suprematism===


In 1919, upon receiving an invitation from fellow
artist and Jew Marc Chagall,  Lissitzky returned
to Vitebsk to teach graphic arts, printing, and
architecture at the newly formed People's Art
School — a school that Chagall created after
being appointed Commissioner of Artistic Affairs
for Vitebsk in 1918. Chagall also invited other
Russian-Jewish artists, most notably the painter
and art theoretician Kazimir Malevich and
Lissitzky's former teacher, Jehuda Pen. Malevich
would bring with him a wealth of new ideas, most
of which both clashed with Chagall and greatly
inspired Lissitzky. After going through
impressionism, primitivism, and cubism, Malevich
started developing and aggressively advocating his
ideas on suprematism. In development since 1915,
suprematism rejected the imitation of natural
shapes and focused more on the creation of
distinct, Geometry | geometric forms. He replaced
the classic teaching program with his own and
disseminated his suprematist theories and
techniques school-wide. Chagall advocated more
classical ideals and Lissitzky, still loyal to
Chagall, became torn between two opposing artistic
paths. Lissitzky ultimately favored Malevich's
suprematism and broke away from traditional Jewish
art. Chagall left the school shortly thereafter.

At this point Lissitzky subscribed fully to
suprematism and, under the guidance of Malevich,
helped further develop the movement. Some of his
most famous works derive from this era, with
perhaps his most famous being the 1919 propaganda
poster "Beat the white with the Red wedge"
(pictured right). Russia was going through a
Russian Civil War |civil war at the time which was
mainly fought between the "Reds", who were the
communists and revolutionaries, and the "Whites"
who were the monarchists, conservatives, liberals
and socialists who opposed the Bolshevik
Revolution. The imagery of the red wedge
shattering the white form, simple as it was,
communicated a powerful message that left no doubt
in the viewers mind of its intention. The piece is
often seen as alluding to the similar shapes used
on military maps and, along with its political
symbolism, was one of Lissitzky's first major
steps away from Malevich's non-objective
suprematism into a style his own. He stated:

:The artist constructs a new symbol with his
brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of
anything that is already finished, already made,
or already existent in the world — it is a
symbol of a new world, which is being built upon
and which exists by the way of the people #fn_2|2

Also in 1919, Lissitzky joined and took a
prominent role in the short-lived but influential
UNOVIS group (Russian abbreviation for "The
Champions of the New"), a proto-suprematist
association of students, professors, and other
artists. Formerly known as MOLPOSNOVIS and
POSNOVIS, the group was re-branded as UNOVIS when
Malevich became leader. In February of 1920, under
the leadership of Malevich, the group worked on a
"suprematist ballet", choreographed by Nina Kogan,
and the precursor to Aleksander Kruchenykh's
influential Futurism (art) | futurist opera,
Victory Over the Sun. Interestingly, Lissitzky and
the entire group chose to share credit and
responsibility for the works produced within the
group, signing most pieces with a single, solitary
black square. This was partly as a homage to a
similar piece their leader, Malevich, and a
symbolic embrace of the Communist ideal. This
would become the de facto Seal (device) | seal of
UNOVIS and took the place of individual names or
initials. The group, which disbanded in 1922,
would play a pivotal role in the dissemination of
suprematist ideology in Russia and abroad as well
as launch Lissitzky's status as one of the leading
figures in the avant garde.


===Proun===

During this period Lissitzky proceeded to develop
a variant suprematist style of his own, a series
of abstract, geometric paintings which he called
Proun (pronounced "pro-oon"). Proun was
essentially Lissitzky's exploration of the visual
language of suprematism with spatial elements,
utilizing shifting axes and multiple perspectives;
both uncommon ideas in suprematism. Suprematism at
the time was conducted almost exclusively in flat,
2D forms and shapes, and Lissitzky, with a taste
for architecture and other dimension|3-dimensional
concepts, tried to expand suprematism beyond this.
His Proun works (known as Prounen), spanned over a
half a decade and evolved from straightforward
paintings and lithographs into fully 3-dimensional
installations. They would also lay the foundation
for his later experimentations in architecture and
exhibition design. While the paintings were
artistic in their own right, their use as a
staging ground for his early architectonic ideas
was significant. In these works, the basic
elements of architecture — volume, mass,
color, space and rhythm — were subjected to
a fresh formulation in relation to the new
suprematist ideals. 

Jewish symbolism | Jewish themes and symbols also
sometimes made appearances in his Prounen, usually
with Lissitzky using Hebrew letters as part of the
typography or visual code. For the cover of the
1922 book Teyashim (Four Billy Goats)
Media:Design_by_El_Lissitzky_1922.jpg|(JPG), he
shows an arrangement of Hebrew letters as
architectural elements in a dynamic design that
mirrors his contemporary Proun typography. #fn_5|5 This theme was
extended into other works, namely his illustration
for the books "Shifs-Karta" (Passenger Ticket) and
"Shifs-Karta." The exact meaning of the word Proun
was never fully revealed, with some suggesting
that it is a contraction of "proekt unovsia"
("Architectural design of UNOVIS"), or "proekt
utverzhdenya novoga" ("Design for the confirmation
of the new"), and with it later being defined by
Lissitzky ambiguously as "the station where one
changes from painting to architecture" #fn_3|3



===Return to Germany===

In 1921, roughly concurrent with the demise of
UNOVIS, suprematism was beginning to fracture into
two ideologically adverse halves, one favoring
Utopian, spiritual art and the other favoring a
more utilitarian art that serves society.
Lissitzky was fully part of neither and left
Vitebsk in 1921. He took a job as a cultural
representative of Russia and moved to Berlin where
he was to establish contacts between Russian and
Germany|German artists. There he also took up work
as a writer and designer for international
magazines and journals while helping to promote
the avant garde through various art gallery |
gallery shows. He started the very short-lived,
but impressive, periodical Veshch-Gerenstand
Objekt with Russian-Jewish writer Ilya Erenburg.
The periodical was intended to show off
contemporary Russian art to Western Europe, mainly
focusing on new suprematist and constructivist
works, and was published in German language |
German, French language | French, and Russian
language | Russian languages. In the first issue
Lissitzky wrote:


:    We consider the triumph of the constructive
method to be essential for our present. We find it
not only in the new economy and in the development
of the industry, but also in the psychology of our
contemporaries of art. Veshch will champion
constructive art, whose mission is not, after all,
to embellish life, but to organize it. #fn_4|4


During his stay he also developed his career as a
graphic designer with some historically important
works such as the book Dlia Golossa (For the
Voice), a collection of poems from Vladimir
Mayakovsky, and the book "Die Kunstismen" (The
Artisms) together with Jean Arp. There he also met
and befriended many other artists, most notably
Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy, and Theo
van Doesburg. Lissitzky, together with Schwitters
and van Doesburg, presented the idea of an
international artistic movement under the
guidelines of Constructivism while also working
with Kurt Schwitters on the issue Nasci (Nature)
of the periodical Merz (pictured right), and
continuing to illustrate children's books. After
the publishing of his first Proun series in Moscow
in 1921, Schwitters introduced Lissitzky to the
Hanover gallery Kestner-Gesellschaft in 1922,
where he held his first solo exhibition. The
second Proun series, printed in Hanover in 1923,
was a success, utilizing new and sophisticated
printing techniques. Later on, he met Sophie
Kuppers, a widow of an art director of a gallery
which Lissitzky was showing at, who he would later
marry in 1927.

==Later years==



In 1924 Lissitzky went to Switzerland to receive
treatment for his tuberculosis. He kept very busy
during his stay, working on advertisements designs
for Pelikan Industries (who in turn paid for his
treatment), translating articles written by
Malevich into German, and experimented heavily in
typographic design and photography. In 1925, after
the Swiss government denied his request to renew
his visa, Lissitzky returned to Moscow and began
teaching interior design, metalwork, and
architecture at VKhUTEMAS (State Higher Artistic
and Technical Workshops), a post he would keep
until 1930.

While there he all but stopped his Proun works and
became increasingly active in architecture and
propaganda designs. In 1926, he and architect Emil
Roth designed the Wolkenbügel (Cloud-iron), a
unique skyscraper on 3 posts planned for Moscow.
Although never built, the building was a vivid
contradiction to United States of America |
America's vertical building style, as the building
only rose up a relatively modest height then
expanded horizontally over an intersection so make
better use of space. Its three posts were on three
different street corners, canvasing the
intersection. An illustration of it appeared on
the front cover of Adolf Behne's book, Der Moderne
Zweckbau, and articles on it written by Lissitzky
appeared in an issue of the Moscow-based
architectural review, ASNOVA (The Association of
New Architects), and in the German art journal Das
Kunstblatt.

In addition to his work in architecture at the
time he also began designing numerous exhibition
displays for the government including the
Internationale Kunstausstellung in Dresden, and
the Raum Konstruktive Kunst (Room for
Constructivist art) and Abstraktes Kabinett in
Hanover, along with many Soviet pavilions
including one of their pavilions at the 1939 1939
New York World's Fair | World Fair in New York.
One of his most notable exhibits was the
Polygraphic Exhibit in Moscow in 1927, which won
him a state appointment as head of the team of
artists who would design the coming pavilions. His
work on the exhibit was radically new, especially
juxtaposed to the very classical designs of other
participating countries. This garnered Lissitzky
much praise from the foreign and domestic press,
with one United Kingdom | English newspaper
columnist wrote: "Everything in it is so
exceptionally interesting. The author of these
words should consider himself lucky if he could
say the same about the British pavilion."



Along with pavilion design, Lissitzky began
experimenting with print media again. His work
with book and periodical design was perhaps some
of his most accomplished and influential. He
launched new and radical innovations in typography
and photomontage, two fields which he was
particularly adept in. He even designed a
photomontage birth announcement in 1930 for his
recently born son, Jen.
Media:Photomontage_by_El_Lissitzky_1930.jpg|The
image itself is seen as being another personal
endorsement of the Soviet Union, as it
superimposed an image of the infant Jen over a
factory chimney, linking Jen's future with his
country's industrial progress. Around this time,
Lissitzky's interest in book design escalated. In
his remaining years, some of his most challenging
and innovative works in this field would develop.
In discussing his vision of the book he wrote:


::In contrast to the old monumental art the book
itself goes to the people, and does not stand like
a cathedral in one place waiting for someone to
approach... The book is the monument of the future
#fn_3|3


He perceived books as permanent objects that were
invested with power. This power was unique in that
it could transmit ideas to people of different
times, cultures, and interests, and do so in ways
other art forms couldn't. This represented a
thread of ambition that laced all of his work,
particularly in his later years. Lissitzky was
devoted to the idea of creating art with power and
purpose; art that could invoke change. 

A significant portion of his work during this
period was Soviet propaganda. He started working
for the propaganda magazine USSR im Bau (USSR in
construction), where some of his most wild
experiments with book design were produced. Each
issue focused on a particular topic important to
Stalin at the time — a new dam being built,
constitutional reforms, Red Army progress and so
on. In 1941 he became ill again with tuberculosis,
but still continued to produce works, with one of
his latest works being a propaganda poster for
Russia's efforts in World War II, entitled
"Davaite pobolshe tankov!" (Give us more tanks!)
He died on December 30, 1941, in Moscow.

==Legacy==



Throughout his career Lissitzky advanced a number
of methods, ideas, and movements that had a large
and significant impact on contemporary art —
particularly in the fields of graphic design,
exhibition design, and architecture. Partly
because of his constant expansion and
experimentation into many different mediums and
styles, and his spirit of innovation in them,
Lissitzky's work is generally held in high regard
by historians and critics. He was one of the
principal innovators of modern typography and
photomontage, both relatively nascent fields at
the time.

He was also preoccupied from early to late career
with the book design. He thought of the book as a
dynamic object, a "unity of acoustics and optics"
requiring the viewer's active involvement. When
working on USSR im bau he took his experimentation
and innovation with book design to an extreme. In
issue #2 he included multiple fold-out pages,
presented in concert with other folded pages that
together produced design combinations and a
narrative structure that was completely original
at the time. He also invested great effort into
establishing international links between artists
and promoting new ideas, helping the avant-garde
spread across Europe. This started locally with
UNOVIS, where he attempted to spread and promote
new art primarily in Russia, and reached its peak
with his stay in Germany, where he exchanged ideas
internationally and helped influence the German
Bauhaus and The Netherlands | Dutch De Stijl
movements.

Along with his efforts towards the advancement of
art, Lissitzky worked tirelessly for ways to
better life with art. For that purpose he chose to
study architecture in his youth; an artistic
medium that directly affects and contributes to
society. He was an ardent supporter of the
Communist ideology and devoted a great part of his
life and energy in its service. Through his
Prouns, Utopian models for a new and better world
were developed. This approach, in which the artist
creates art with socially defined purpose, could
aptly be summarized with his edict "das
zielbewußte Schaffen" — "the task oriented
creation." #fn_4|4

In his later years he brought revolutionary change
to exhibition design, garnering him respect
internationally as well as prestige within his own
country and government. In exhibition and
propaganda design, he found an area where he could
apply his creative forces in the service of
society. In his autobiography written in June,
1941 (which was later edited and released by his
wife as El Lissitzky, life, letters, texts),
Lissitzky wrote: "1926. My most important work as
an artist begins: the creation of exhibitions."

==Selected works==


Large amounts of his work are on permanent display
in galleries worldwide. Much of his collection of
Proun works can be viewed in the Van Abbemuseum
http://www.vanabbe.nl/engels/index.html in the
Netherlands, with other abstract  works on display
in Sprengel Museum in Hannover. His work is also
part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

==Resources==

===Notes===

* #fn_1_back|Note 1:  Book
reference | Author=Lissitzky-Kuppers, Sophie  |
Title=El Lissitzky, life, letters, texts |
Publisher=Thames and Hudson | Year=1980 | ID=ISBN
0500230900
* #fn_2_back|Note 2:  Web
reference | title=formDefined | work=formDefined:
one by one by one |
URL=http://comm2.fsu.edu/programs/comm/interact/sh
owcase/2004/PDF/KF_proposal.PDF | date=March 9 |
year=2005
* #fn_3_back|Note 3:  Book
reference | Author=Lissitzy, El | Title=El
Lissitzky, 1890–1941: Architect Painter
Photographer Typographer | Publisher=Municipal Van
Abbemuseum | Year=1990 | ID=ISBN 9070149281
* #fn_4_back|Note 4:  Web
reference | title=El Lissitzky in Weimar Germany|
work=El Lissitzky in Weimar Germany by Anna
Glazova |
URL=http://spintongues.vladivostok.com/glazova27en
g.htm | date=March 8 | year=2005
* #fn_5_back|Note 5:  Web
reference | title=Monuments of the Future |
work=Getty Institute - Monuments to the Future:
Designs by El Lissitzky |
URL=http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_resea
rch/digitized_collections/lissitzky/index2.html |
date=March 20 | year=2005

===References===

* Book reference | Author=Lissitzky-Kuppers,
Sophie  | Title=El Lissitzky, life, letters, texts
| Publisher=Thames and Hudson | Year=1980 |
ID=ISBN 0500230900
* Book reference | Author=Lissitzy, El | Title=El
Lissitzky, 1890–1941: Architect Painter
Photographer Typographer | Publisher=Municipal Van
Abbemuseum | Year=19901 | ID=ISBN 9070149281
* Book reference | Author=Perloff, Nancy; Reed,
Brian | Title=Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk,
Berlin, Moscow | Publisher=Getty Research
Institute | Year=2003 | ID=ISBN 089236677X
* Book reference | Author=Mayakovsky, Vladimir; El
Lissitzky | Title=For the Voice (Dlia golosa) |
Publisher=The MIT Press | Year=2000 | ID=ISBN
0262133776

===External links===

*http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research
/digitized_collections/lissitzky/index2.html The
Getty Research Institute - Monuments of the Future
(http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_res
earch/digitized_collections/lissitzky/flash/home.h
tml Flash) or
(http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_res
earch/digitized_collections/lissitzky/index2.html
HTML) - The Getty Center's home page for El
Lissitzky - Biography, media, etc.
*http://spintongues.vladivostok.com/glazova27eng.h
tm El Lissitzky in Weimar Germany - A essay and
biography on his life and work, focusing
particularly on his time in Germany
*http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/el/elc.html
Ibiblio.org - Image collection of some of his most
famous works
*http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2002/russian/
MoMA - Macromedia Flash | Flash-navigable
exploration of USSR im bau and Dlia Golossa
(click on "Reading Room" link)
*http://www.roland-collection.com/rolandcollection
/section/16/503.htm The Roland Collection of Films
& Videos on Art - Free streaming download of an
entire 88-minute documentary, El Lissitzky, by Leo
Lorez (Realplayer required)