37 Facts About El Lissitzky

El Lissitzky was an important figure of the Russian avant-garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the Soviet Union.

El Lissitzky 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, Proun, and further still in 1921, when he took up a job as the Russian cultural ambassador to Weimar Germany, working with and influencing important figures of the Bauhaus and movements during his stay.

El Lissitzky was born on 23 November 1890 in Pochinok, a small Jewish community 50 kilometres southeast of Smolensk, former Russian Empire.

El Lissitzky left in 1909 to study architectural engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany.

El Lissitzky remained in Germany until the outbreak of World War I, when he was forced to return home through Switzerland and the Balkans, along with many of his countrymen, including other expatriate artists born in the former Russian Empire, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall.

El Lissitzky's next book was a visual retelling of the traditional Jewish Passover song Had gadya, in which Lissitzky showcased a typographic device that he would often return to in later designs.

El Lissitzky was engaged in designing and printing propaganda posters; later, he preferred to keep quiet about this period, probably because one of main subjects of these posters was the exile Leon Trotsky.

Malevich would bring with him a wealth of new ideas, most of which inspired El Lissitzky but clashed with local public and professionals who favored figurative art and with Chagall himself.

El Lissitzky replaced the classic teaching program with his own and disseminated his suprematist theories and techniques school-wide.

El Lissitzky ultimately favoured Malevich's suprematism and broke away from traditional Jewish art.

At this point El Lissitzky subscribed fully to suprematism and, under the guidance of Malevich, helped further develop the movement.

El Lissitzky designed On the New System of Art by Malevich, who responded in December 1919: "Lazar Markovich, I salute you on the publication of this little book".

On 17 January 1920, Malevich and El Lissitzky co-founded the short-lived Molposnovis, a proto-suprematist association of students, professors, and other artists.

Jewish themes and symbols sometimes made appearances in his Prounen, usually with El Lissitzky using Hebrew letters as part of the typography or visual code.

El Lissitzky was fully aligned with neither and left Vitebsk in 1921.

El Lissitzky took a job as a cultural representative of Russia and moved to Berlin where he was to establish contacts between Russian and German artists.

El Lissitzky started the very short-lived but impressive periodical Veshch-Gegenstand Objekt with Russian-Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg.

Together with Schwitters and van Doesburg, El Lissitzky presented the idea of an international artistic movement under the guidelines of constructivism while working with Kurt Schwitters on the issue Nasci of the periodical Merz, and continuing to illustrate children's books.

Later on, he met Sophie Kuppers, who was the widow of Paul Kuppers, an art director of the kestnergesellschaft at which El Lissitzky was showing, and whom he would marry in 1927.

El Lissitzky argued that as long as humans cannot fly, moving horizontally is natural and moving vertically is not.

All eight buildings were planned identically, so El Lissitzky proposed color-coding them for easier orientation.

El Lissitzky kept very busy during his stay, working on advertisement designs for Pelikan Industries, translating articles written by Malevich into German, and experimenting heavily in typographic design and photography.

In 1925, after the Swiss government denied his request to renew his visa, El Lissitzky returned to Moscow and began teaching interior design, metalwork, and architecture at, a post he would keep until 1930.

In June 1926, El Lissitzky left the country again, this time for a brief stay in Germany and the Netherlands.

In 1926, El Lissitzky joined Nikolai Ladovsky's Association of New Architects and designed the only issue of the association's journal Izvestiia ASNOVA in 1926.

Back in the USSR, El Lissitzky designed displays for the official Soviet pavilions at the international exhibitions of the period, up to the 1939 New York World's Fair.

El Lissitzky's work was perceived as radically new, especially when juxtaposed with the classicist designs of Vladimir Favorsky and of the foreign exhibits.

The state delegated El Lissitzky to supervise the Soviet program; instead of building their own pavilion, the Soviets rented the existing central pavilion, the largest building on the fairground.

El Lissitzky's work was praised for near absence of paper exhibits; "everything moves, rotates, everything is energized".

El Lissitzky designed and managed on site less demanding exhibitions like the 1930 Hygiene show in Dresden.

El Lissitzky launched radical innovations in typography and photomontage, two fields in which he was particularly adept.

El Lissitzky even designed a photomontage birth announcement in 1930 for his recently born son, Jen.

El Lissitzky perceived books as permanent objects that were invested with power.

El Lissitzky was devoted to the idea of creating art with power and purpose, art that could invoke change.

El Lissitzky retained his reputation as the master of exhibition art and management into the late 1930s.

In 1937, El Lissitzky served as the lead decorator for the upcoming All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, reporting to the master planner Vyacheslav Oltarzhevsky but largely independent and highly critical of him.

El Lissitzky simultaneously worked on the decoration of the Soviet pavilion for the 1939 New York World's Fair; the June 1938 commission considered Lissitzky's work along with nineteen other proposals and eventually rejected it.