1. 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.
90 Facts About El Lissitzky
1. 2.
El Lissitzky started teaching at the age of 15, maintaining his teaching career for most of his life.
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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 moved to Weimar Republic.
4.
Lazar Markovich El Lissitzky was born on 23 November 1890 in Pochinok, a small Jewish community 50 kilometres southeast of Smolensk, Russian Empire.
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El Lissitzky emigrated to America, but returned to Russia as his wife's rabbi advised against emigration.
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From 1891 to 1898 El Lissitzky's family lived in Vitebsk, where Lazar's brother and sister were born.
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El Lissitzky applied to the St Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1909, 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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El Lissitzky worked as a bricklayer, and visited local Jewish historical sites on vacations, like the medieval Worms Synagogue, of which he made drawings of the interior and decorations.
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El Lissitzky had travelled to Paris and Belgium during 1912, and spent several months in St Petersburg.
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When World War I began, El Lissitzky returned to Russia via Switzerland and Balkans; and in 1915 started studies at Riga Polytechnic Institute, that was evacuated to Moscow, and started to participate in exhibitions.
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El Lissitzky started to work for the architectural firms of Boris Velikovsky and Roman Klein.
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Much of El Lissitzky's childhood was spent in Vitebsk, large city with affluent Jewish life.
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El Lissitzky spent his childhood and youth near the Pale of Settlement; art historian Nancy Perloff noted that it influenced him because of "a powerful Jewish solidarity, the community-wide response to the knowledge that Jews would never be considered true Russians".
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El Lissitzky moved to Kiev in 1917, and started to work with Yiddish book design.
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One of the goals of El Lissitzky and his Jewish colleagues was an attempt to create new, secular Jewish culture; one of his main ideas and desires of that time was creation of "an all-inclusive art and culture in Russia".
16.
El Lissitzky was particularly impressed by the Cold Synagogue in Mogilev; he made several drawings of its decorations and interior, and in 1923 wrote an article for Berlin-based Jewish journal Rimon-Milgroim: "On the Mogilev Shul: Recollections".
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El Lissitzky went on to praise Chaim Segal, the creator of the synagogue's interior murals:.
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El Lissitzky created ten illustrations for the book; for each page he arranged text and his drawings differently.
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El Lissitzky is too much aware of this double cultural heritage not to use its visual potential.
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El Lissitzky's Tsingl grows out of a double Slavic-Jewish oral and visual tradition and.
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In 1917 and 1919 El Lissitzky created two variants of the book Had Gadya, a ten-verse Aramaic song based on a German ballad, singed in a conclusion of a Passover seder.
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El Lissitzky used Yiddish for the book verses, but introduced each verse in a traditional Aramaic, written in Hebrew alphabet.
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Art historian Haia Friedberg notes that the illustration closely resemble the binding of Isaac, but El Lissitzky impose quite different meaning:.
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El Lissitzky invented a system of color coding in which the color of the principal character in each illustration matches the color of the corresponding word for that character in the Yiddish text.
25.
Yiddish translation of Rudyard Kipling's book The Elephant's Child, or Elfandl, illustrated by El Lissitzky, was published in Berlin in 1922; scholars note "clear parallels" between folktale illustrations and the Kipling ones.
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The book is not colored except for its cover; El Lissitzky's illustrations was interpreted as having a symbolic ties to Revolution:.
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One of the last Yiddish books that El Lissitzky worked on was 1922.
28.
Jewish period was rather short for El Lissitzky; he illustrated the last Jewish book in 1923.
29.
El Lissitzky's writings do not show the his support of Communism; in one of his essays he even wrote that Suprematism will surpass Communism.
30.
El Lissitzky was engaged in designing and printing propaganda posters and illustrations for a local Vitebsk newspaper; later, he never mentioned his works of this period, probably because he portrayed Leon Trotsky and other early revolutionaries, who later became enemies of the Soviet state.
31.
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.
32.
El Lissitzky replaced the classic teaching program with his own and disseminated his suprematist theories and techniques school-wide.
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El Lissitzky ultimately favoured Malevich's suprematism and broke away from traditional Jewish art.
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At this point El Lissitzky subscribed fully to Suprematism and, under the guidance of Malevich, helped further develop the movement.
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On 17 January 1920, Malevich and El Lissitzky co-founded short-lived Molposnovis group, a proto-suprematist association of artists.
36.
El Lissitzky himself used a red square as a seal, all other group members used black.
37.
In 1920 El Lissitzky left Vitebsk for Moscow and became member of INKhUK ; on 23 September 1921 he gave a lecture there about his Prouns.
38.
El Lissitzky never mentioned the manifesto, but his friend and colleague Malevich met Marinetti in 1914, and even called him one of the "two pillars, the two 'prisms' of the new art of the twentieth century".
39.
Versari argues that El Lissitzky "adopted an almost identical language" for his Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, though he never mentioned it.
40.
El Lissitzky later used similar idea, a wedge in a circle, for a cover of Yiddish magazine Apikojres.
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El Lissitzky suggests here that a revolution requires sacrifice and transformations in the name of the new, better world.
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El Lissitzky was fully aligned with neither and left Vitebsk in 1921.
43.
El Lissitzky worked as a writer and designer for international magazines and journals while helping to promote the avant-garde through various gallery shows.
44.
In 1923 El Lissitzky designed the book Dlia Golosa, a collection of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poems.
45.
El Lissitzky acknowledged that his work on the book "won him election to membership" in the Gutenberg Society.
46.
In Berlin El Lissitzky met and befriended other artists, most notably Kurt Schwitters, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Theo van Doesburg.
47.
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.
48.
In 1923, El Lissitzky published the so-called Kestnermappe, that included six lithographs and was published in fifty copies.
49.
El Lissitzky adopted Malevich's cosmic void, although he did not paint it white, but insisted on painting voluminous floating geometric objects, thereby rationalizing suprematism inasmuch as he tended to reveal the entire body of the geometric solids through foreshortening, even if he used several systems of perspective within the frame of a single painting.
50.
In 1923 El Lissitzky created a Proun Room, an installation for the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung.
51.
Forgacs writes that by designing and constructing the Proun Room El Lissitzky proved himself as one of the progressive artists of 1920s Berlin; however, he violated unwritten rule "to reject the commercialization of art and had put price tags on three three elements of the Proun Room".
52.
El Lissitzky was not the first artist working in real space; in 1920s a number of artists in Berlin experimented with such ideas and El Lissitzky certainly knew it.
53.
In 1923 El Lissitzky published his Victory over the Sun figurines portfolio, called by Bois to be an "anthropomorphization of the Prouns".
54.
Birnholz states that El Lissitzky modeled the New Man figurine after the Leonardo's Vitruvian Man.
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Samuel Johnson notes that El Lissitzky substituted messiah with "the interplanetary imagery of futurists poets like Velimir Khlebnikov".
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The first known photo work by El Lissitzky was made together with the Dutch De Stijl artist Vilmos Huszar, published in Merz with a caption "El Huszar and Vilmos El Lissitzky".
57.
El Lissitzky made a portrait of Kurt Schwitters, where he is photographed in front of the title page of Nasci journal issue; Hans Arp is portrayed in front of the Parisian Dada magazine of late 1920.
58.
El Lissitzky created a second self-portrait, called Self-Portrait with Wrapped Head and Compass, where the author is not a measurer, but a measured object; El Lissitzky is facing left, his head covered with a white cap.
59.
In 1928 article, "The film of El's Life", El 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 combined to place in my forehead 20,2,000,200,000 very sharp, polished searching eyes".
60.
Kamczycki argues that El Lissitzky was inspired by Chagall's works Homage to Apollinaire and Dedicated to Christ from 1912; he connects the work with earlier Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, saying that both works have the "same layout".
61.
The motif of an incomplete circle containing a wedge in its outline, present in El Lissitzky's art, is an illustrative, kabbalistic, cosmogonic metaphor for the process of creating the world through the act of "breaking up" or "cutting through".
62.
Two or three negatives were used for the resulting image; photo of the Broadway was taken by an architect Knud Lonberg-Holm in 1923 or 1924, he and El Lissitzky met in Weimar.
63.
El Lissitzky probably took the photo from Erich Mendelsohn's book Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten.
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Malevich was mostly unknown in Germany in the 1920s, and El Lissitzky tried to compile his best articles to be presented to Western audience.
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El Lissitzky tried to publish that book with several publishers, but was rejected by all; van Doesburg wrote a report for one of them, that, according to Forgacs, "singlehandedly killed the publication project of Malevich's writings".
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El Lissitzky used Lenin's photo and changed the words used on Chashnik's work, resulting poster was called "The Lenin's Tribune".
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El Lissitzky argued that as long as humans cannot fly, moving horizontally is natural and moving vertically is not.
68.
In 1925, after the Swiss government denied to renew his visa, El Lissitzky returned to Moscow and began teaching interior design and furniture design at the Wood and Metalwork faculty of the, a post he would keep until 1930.
69.
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.
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El Lissitzky became a head of "38-member 'collective of creators'", with Sergei Senkin and Gustav Klutsis among them.
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El Lissitzky received a governmental medal for the design of the pavilion.
72.
El Lissitzky designed several other exhibitions, including All-Union Polygraphic Exhibit, "Film and Photography", the International Fur Trade Exhibition and the International Hygiene Exhibition.
73.
El Lissitzky retained his reputation as the master of exhibition art and management into the late 1930s.
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Margarita Tupitsyn writes that though El Lissitzky was severely ill, multiple commissions were beneficial for him, because the government-sponsored work gave El Lissitzky stable income and allow him to be treated in state sanatoriums.
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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.
76.
Later, El Lissitzky agreed to design only the central pavilion; his designs were criticesed for being "primitive" and "schematic".
77.
El Lissitzky was not the only avant-garde artist who worked on the magazine, another one was Alexander Rodchenko.
78.
El Lissitzky brought El Lissitzky's archives from Moscow to Sophie.
79.
El Lissitzky worked with numerous printed forms, including scrolls, codexes, pamphlets, portfolios, newspapers and posters.
80.
El Lissitzky started as a children's book designer and illustrator, but soon started to create avant-gardist books.
81.
El Lissitzky called it an "architecture of the book", and wrote in length about importance of books.
82.
El Lissitzky wrote about Jewish traditions, for example in his 1923 article On Mogilev shul:.
83.
El Lissitzky became interested in Malevich's Suprematism; John G Hatch writes that it was based on thermodynamics, "describing the coloured forms of Suprematism as representing nodes or concentrations of energy, and its whole narrative as one paralleling the universe's evolution toward thermal death, as postulated by the second law of thermodynamics".
84.
El Lissitzky thought about himself as of "artist-engineer" contrasting it to the "artist-priest" tradition of Malevich.
85.
El Lissitzky used photo of Mars even earlier, in his 1920 article "Suprematism of Creativity" in the Unovis Almanac.
86.
Manuel Corrada analysed mathematical ideas that El Lissitzky described in his essay; he found that El Lissitzky's explanations "can be easily expressed in mathematical terms".
87.
El Lissitzky lived in Berlin in the early 1920s and was aware of the Bauhaus school and works through his friends and colleagues; in 1923 he was introduced to Walter Gropius and later visited Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar.
88.
In 1927 El Lissitzky even proclaimed that Bauhaus was inspired by Vkhutemas, though it did not exist when the Bauhaus school was founded.
89.
El Lissitzky had one of the most diverse and extensive careers in the history of twentieth century art.
90.
El Lissitzky's works are now exhibited in many major museums, including Tretyakov Gallery, Vitebsk Center of Contemporary Art, MoMA, Van Abbemuseum, Stedelijk and others.