El Lissitzky (; born Lazar Markovich Lissitzky; , ; – 30 December 1941) 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.
Lissitzky began his career illustrating Yiddish children's books in an effort to promote Jewish culture. He started teaching at the age of 15, maintaining his teaching career for most of his life. Over the years, he taught in a variety of positions, schools, and artistic media, spreading and exchanging ideas. 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, Proun, and further still in 1921, when he moved to Weimar Republic. In his remaining years he brought significant innovation and change to 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 works – a Soviet propaganda poster rallying the people to construct more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany.
Early years
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky was born on 23 November 1890 in Pochinok, a small Jewish community southeast of Smolensk, Russian Empire. His father Mordukh Zalmanovich (Mark Solomonovich) Lissitzky was a well-educated travel agent who knew English and German, "in his spare time he translated Heine and Shakespeare". He emigrated to America, but returned to Russia as his wife's rabbi advised against emigration. Lissitzky's mother Sarah strictly observed Jewish religious traditions. From 1891 to 1898 Lissitzky's family lived in Vitebsk, where Lazar's brother and sister were born.
In 1899 Lazar moved to Smolensk, where he lived with his grandfather and attended City School 1. In 1903, 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. Marc Chagall and Ossip Zadkine were also Pen's students. By the time Lissitzky was 15 he was teaching students himself; he later recalled in his diary that "[a]t age fifteen I began to earn a living by tutoring and drawing."
He 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. Instead, in 1909 he moved to Germany to study architectural engineering at the Darmstadt Polytechnic Institute. His wife later wrote that while studying Lissitzky "earned extra money by doing examination projects for fellow-students who were either too lazy or too inept to do their test-pieces for themselves". He also 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.
Lissitzky had travelled to Paris and Belgium during 1912, and spent several months in St. Petersburg. In 1913 he 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." He graduated cum laude from Darmstadt Polytechnic in 1914 . When World War I began, 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. He also started to work for the architectural firms of and Roman Klein. Klein was also a Egyptologyst, and he was responsible for creating the Egyptian Department of the Pushkin Museum. Lissitzky also took part in arranging this exhibition.
Jewish period Much of Lissitzky's childhood was spent in Vitebsk, a large city with affluent Jewish life. The art historian noted that "there were Litvaks, Hasidim, and early Jewish bourgeoisie, as well as public organizations of diverse and even contradictory character – a Jewish literary–musical society, a Society for the Enlightenment of Jews in the Russian Empire, a Society for Jewish Language, as well as Bundist and Zionist-oriented groups". 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".
While in Darmstadt, Lissitzky travelled to Worms to study its medieval synagogue, when he returned to Russia he became involved in a Jewish artistic circle. In 1917, he became secretary of the organizing committee of the Moscow Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Jewish Artists. After the Revolution the Tsarist 1915 decree that prohibited usage of Hebrew lettering in print was abolished, and Jews acquired the rights as any other people of the former Russian Empire. Lissitzky moved to Kiev in 1917, and started to work with Yiddish book design. One of the goals of 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".
Ethnographic expeditions
In 1916, Lissitzky and his artist-colleague Issachar Ber Ryback undertook an ethnographic expedition to Jewish shtetls, possibly funded by S. An-sky's Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society. They toured a number of cities and towns of the Belarusian Dnieper region and Lithuania in order to identify and document monuments of Jewish antiquity. 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". In the article, Lissitzky compared his visit to Mogilev synagogue with visits to "Roman basilicas, Gothic chapels, or baroque churches". He went on to praise Chaim Segal, the creator of the synagogue's interior murals:
The walls—wooden, oaken beams that resound when you hit them. Above the walls, a ceiling like a vault made out of boards. The seams all visible. ... the whole interior of the shul is so perfectly conceived by the painter with only a few uncomplicated colors that an entire grand world lives there and blooms and overflows this small space. The complete interior of the shul is decorated, starting with the backs of the benches, which cover the length of the walls, all the way to the very pinnacle of the vault. The shul, which is a square at the level of the floor, becomes an octagonal vaulted ceiling, resembling a yarmulke. ... These walls and ceiling are structured with an immense feel for composition. This is something completely contrary to the primitive. This is the fruit of a great culture. Where does it come from? The master of this work, Segal, says in his inscription, full of the most noble enthusiasm: "Long already have I wandered through the world of the living..."
Yiddish children's book design
Lissitzky's first book design was Moishe Broderzon's 1917 Sikhes khulin: Eyne fun di geshikhten (An Everyday Conversation: A Story, also called The Legend of Prague), created in a form of a Torah scroll. The book was printed in 110 copies. Lissitzky explained in the colophon that he "intended to couple the style of the story with the 'wonderful' style of the square Hebrew letters." In 1918 he illustrated Mani Leib's book Yingl Tsingl Khvat (The Mischievous Boy), incorporating typography into the illustrations. Lissitzky created ten illustrations for the book; for each page he arranged text and his drawings differently.
Scholars trace Lissitzky's style of the book to be inspired by his earlier expedition to the shtetls and by Chagall. The first illustration features a Christian church and beys-medresh to show peaceful coexistence of Christians and Jews mentioned by Mani Leib; a goat and a pig in the bottom symbolizes Jews and Christians. Another illustration was described as "reminiscent of Ryback ... while the Jew sitting at the table, the clock on the wall and the window cut in cubist triangles bear a resemblance to some of Chagall's interiors." Scholars note that Lissitzky greatly expanded the meanings of Leib's book, his "brave Tsingl corresponds to the numerous mounted heroes of the Russian fairy tales and the traditional oral epic bylina which ... were a source of inspiration for leading Russian artists like Ivan Bilibin or Viktor Vasnecov. Lissitzky is too much aware of this double cultural heritage not to use its visual potential. ... Lissitzky's Tsingl grows out of a double Slavic-Jewish oral and visual tradition and ... responds to the requirements of modern Jewish art combining avant-garde techniques and Jewish folk art."
In 1918, Lissitzky together with Joseph Chaikov, Issachar Ber Ryback, Mark Epstein and some others founded the art section of the Kultur-Lige movement in Kiev.
In 1917 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. The song tells a story of a young goat purchased by a father, who was eaten by a cat; the song continues to talk about the succession of attackers until God destroys the final aggressor. The song is usually considered as an allegory for the oppression and execution of the Jews, with attackers being different peoples mistreating Jews throughout history. Lissitzky used Yiddish for the book verses, but introduced each verse in a traditional Aramaic, written in Hebrew alphabet. These two versions differ in style: art historians Igor Dukhan and Nancy Perloff called the 1917 version "an expressionist decorativism of color and narrative" and "a set of brightly colored, folklike watercolors", respectively, and 1919 version being "marked by a stylistic shift".
Two versions also differ in narrative: in the earlier book the Angel of Death is "cast down but still alive", in the later one he is definitely dead, his victims are resurrected. Dukhan treats these differences as Lissitzky's sympathies towards the October Revolution, after which Jews of the Russian Empire were liberated from discrimination. Perloff also thinks that Lissitzky "viewed the song both as a message of Jewish liberation based on the Exodus story and as an allegorical expression of freedom for the Russian people." Several researched noted a similarity between Lissitzky's drawing and first stamp issued in Soviet Russia, with a hand gripping a sword under the Sun, as a symbol of new Soviet people. The Angel of Death is depicted crowned, symbolically linked to the tzar, "killed by the force of revolution"; by merging the hand of God with the hand of Soviet people, Lissitzky "implies a divine component to the revolution ... but also suggests that the oppressive czarist monarchy ... was rendered powerless in the face of revolutionary Justice". Above the angel's palm are Hebrew letters pei-nun, used on Jewish tombstones and meaning "here lies". Art historian Haia Friedberg notes that the illustration closely resemble the binding of Isaac, but Lissitzky impose quite different meaning: