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El Lissitzky was a Russian and Soviet artist, active as a painter, illustrator, designer, printmaker, photographer, and architect. He was an important figure of the avant-garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the Soviet Union.
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culture · Soviet Avantgarde artist (1890–1941) · painter · architect · graphic designer · photographer · type designer · teacher · designer · typographer · draftsperson · visual artist · also El Lissitzky, El' Lisickij, Ėlʹ Lisit︠s︡kiĭ, El Lissickij, Eliezer Markovich Lissitzky, Lasar Lissitzky
Born 10 November 1890 · Died 30 December 1941 · Q152233
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Archimedes would have regarded modern mathematics as a clever, but curious GAME (because its aim is not an end result like three buns, forty five kopecks, etc ... but the actual operation, combination and construction of dependences which we find with Gauss, Riemann and Einstein).
My pages stand in much the same relationship to the poems as an accompanying piano to a violin. Just as the poet in his poem united concept and sound, I have tried to create an equivalent unity using the poem and typography
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“Archimedes would have regarded modern mathematics as a clever, but curious GAME (because its aim is not an end result like three buns, forty five kopecks, etc ... but the actual operation, combination and construction of dependences which we find with Gauss, Riemann and Einstein).”
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“My pages stand in much the same relationship to the poems as an accompanying piano to a violin. Just as the poet in his poem united concept and sound, I have tried to create an equivalent unity using the poem and typography”
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“The letter is an element which is itself composed of elements”
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In Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum by Jan Leering
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Designer Jan Tschichold called The Constructor Lissitzky's "finest and most important work"
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Pablo Picasso declared that the "painting was not invented for decorating houses, but as a weapon of attack and defence"
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Died 1941-12-30.
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“1926. My most important work as an artist begins: the creation of exhibitions.”
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Lissitzky's tuberculosis worsened, but he continued to work; one of his last pieces was a propaganda poster for USSR's efforts in World War II, titled "Davaite pobolshe tankov
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Produced one of his last works – a Soviet propaganda poster rallying the people to construct more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany
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Sophie and Jen were sent into exile to Novosibirsk as German nationals
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Lissitzky's project was rejected
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Lissitzky served as the lead decorator for the upcoming All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (Vsesoyuznaya
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By the Nazis, its contents were shown later in Munich in a "degenerate art" (Entartete Kunst) exhibition
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Joseph Stalin closed down independent artists' unions; former avant-garde artists had to adapt to the new climate or risk being officially criticised or even blacklisted
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Their son Jen was born in Moscow on 12 October 1930, named after Lissitzky's sister, Jenta.
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Article, "The film of El's Life", Lissitzky described his eyes as "Lenses and eye-pieces, precision instruments and reflex cameras, cinematographs which magnify or hold split seconds, Roentgen and X, Y, Z rays have all c
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Published his "The Artistic Pre-Requisites for the Standardisation of Furniture", where he stated his view on mass-produced objects
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Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Head of Narkompros, appointed Lissitzky as a supervisor of the Soviet pavilion for the Pressa exhibition in Cologne, scheduled for May 1928
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Lissitzky and Sophie Küppers married at 27 January 1927 in Moscow; she left her two sons in a boarding school in Germany, planning to take them on holidays to USSR.
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Lissitzky left the country again, this time for a brief stay in the Netherlands with Mart and Leni Stam in Rotterdam; he also visited Cornelis van Eesteren and J
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Lissitzky joined Nikolai Ladovsky's Association of New Architects (ASNOVA) and designed the only issue of the association's journal Izvestiia ASNOVA (News of ASNOVA) in 1926
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His sister Jenta committed suicide in Vitebsk, while he was in a hospital in Switzerland
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Lissitzky met his father and brother Ruvim:
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After his return from Germany in 1925, Lissitzky met his father and brother Ruvim:
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After the Swiss government denied to renew his visa, Lissitzky returned to Moscow and began teaching interior design and furniture design at the Wood and Metalwork faculty (Dermetfak) of the Vkhutemas (State Higher Artis
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His future wife, Sophie Küppers, gave him her father's camera, "a monstrosity with wooden plate-holders measuring 13 x 18 cm
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“Am now working on a self-light-portrait [Selbstlichtportrait]. A colossal piece of nonsense, if it all goes according to plan.”
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Lissitzky created a Proun Room, an installation for the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung
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Wrote an article for Berlin-based Jewish journal Rimon-Milgroim: "On the Mogilev Shul: Recollections"
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Lissitzky designed (or "constructed" in his words) the book Dlia Golosa ("For the Voice"), a collection of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poems
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Lissitzky published his Victory over the Sun figurines portfolio, called by Bois to be an "anthropomorphization of the Prouns"
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Lissitzky published the so-called Kestnermappe (Kestner Portfolio or Proun Portfolio), that included six lithographs and was published in fifty copies
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Or 1924, he and Lissitzky met in Weimar
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And 1923, but based on the style of illustrations scholars consider both books to be created before 1919
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Illustration for Shifs-Karta, and 1927 VKhUTEMAS book cover
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Was pivotal in the dissemination of suprematist ideology in Russia and abroad and launch Lissitzky's status as one of the leading figures in the avant-garde
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In a Tatlin at Work on the Monument to the Third International collage; he also used them in the Pelican advertisement, in the Vkhutemas bulletin, and in Film and Foto exhibition
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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 a more utilitarian art that served society
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Also started to teach at Vkhutemas, but soon left Moscow for Germany; he stayed in Berlin for several years
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Schwitters introduced Lissitzky to the Hanover gallery Kestnergesellschaft, where he held his first solo exhibition
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“Here are signs of Earth and Mars. The savage does not understand the content of the first. We do not understand the content of the other.”
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In Vitebsk and published in 1922 in Berlin and then in De Stijl
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Lissitzky left Vitebsk for Moscow and became member of INKhUK (the Institute of Artistic Culture); on 23 September 1921 he gave a lecture there about his Prouns
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Article "The New Culture" Lissitzky wrote:
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Lissitzky together with Joseph Chaikov, Issachar Ber Ryback, Mark Epstein and some others founded the art section of the Kultur-Lige movement in Kiev
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Young architect Nikolai Kolli created The Red Wedge monument in Moscow, that "consisted of a red triangle vertically inserted as a wedge into a white rectangular block
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Illustrated Mani Leib's book Yingl Tsingl Khvat (The Mischievous Boy), incorporating typography into the illustrations
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Became secretary of the organizing committee of the Moscow Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Jewish Artists
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And 1919 Lissitzky created two variants of the book Had Gadya (The Only Kid), a ten-verse Aramaic song based on a German ballad, sung in a conclusion of a Passover seder
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And started to work with Yiddish book design
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Lissitzky and his artist-colleague Issachar Ber Ryback undertook an ethnographic expedition to Jewish shtetls, possibly funded by S
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Started studies at Riga Polytechnic Institute, that was evacuated to Moscow, and started to participate in exhibitions
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And even called him one of the "two pillars, the two 'prisms' of the new art of the twentieth century"
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And signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Ugo Piatti
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Went to a tour of Italy; he wrote in his diary that "I covered more than 1,200 kilometers in Italy on foot – making sketches and studying
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But was rejected, possibly because he failed the exams or due to the "Jewish quota" under the Tsarist regime that limited the number of Jewish students in Russian schools
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Moved to Germany to study architectural engineering at the Darmstadt Polytechnic Institute
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During a summer vacation he spent with his parents in Vitebsk, he started to receive instruction from Yury Pen, a famous Jewish artist and teacher
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Lazar moved to Smolensk, where he lived with his grandfather and attended City School 1
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Born 1890-11-10.
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