El Lissitzky, byname of Eliezer Lissitzky, additionally spelled Elizar Lissitzky, Russian in full Lazar Markovich Lisitsky, Yiddish Lasar Markowitsch Lissitzky, (born November 11 [November 23, New Style], 1890, Pochinok, close to Smolensk, Russia—died December 30, 1941, Moscow), Russian painter, typographer, and designer, a pioneer of nonrepresentational artwork within the early twentieth century. His improvements in typography, promoting, and exhibition design have been notably influential.
Lissitzky obtained his preliminary artwork coaching in Vitebsk (now Vitsyebsk, Belarus), a metropolis that might play a significant function within the growth of the Russian avant-garde. In 1903 he studied within the artwork college of Yehuda (Yury) Pen, however he quickly left for Germany, dissatisfied with the provincial ambiance of Vitebsk. Once in Germany, he enrolled within the division of structure on the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, the place he studied from 1909 to 1914. During this era he additionally traveled to France, Italy, and Belgium. When World War I broke out, he made his manner again to Russia, settling in Moscow, and studied from 1915 to 1916 on the Riga (Latvia) Polytechnical Institute (now Riga Technical University), which had been evacuated to Moscow. Lissitzky took a level in engineering and structure and commenced work as a draftsman in an architect’s workplace.
Lissitzky’s inventive pursuits on the time have been completely centred on Jewish themes and tradition. He took half in Semyon Ansky’s ethnographical expedition investigating the monuments of Jewish tradition within the Pale of Settlement, illustrated Yiddish books (equivalent to Moyshe Broderzon’s Sikhes Khulin [1917; “Profane, or Idle, Chatter”] and Khad gadye [1919; “One Kid”], a well-liked Passover seder tune). The illustrations for these books present the affect of each Cubo-Futurism, a Russian offshoot of European Futurism, and lubki (cheap, hand-coloured common prints).
In 1919 Marc Chagall, who on the time was director of the revolutionary People’s Art School in Vitebsk, invited Lissitzky to show structure and graphics there. When Kazimir Malevich—a painter and the founding father of a motion he referred to as Suprematism, which advocated the supremacy of pure geometric kind over illustration—additionally started to show there, Chagall and he fell out, and Chagall left, whereas Malevich assumed the directorship. Lissitzky remained in Vitebsk and have become one in all Malevich’s principal college students and followers.
This set off a radically new interval in Lissitzky’s artwork. He started working below the identify El Lissitzky and deserted figurative artwork for Suprematism. He created Suprematist designs for a two-year anniversary celebration of the Vitebsk Committee to Combat Unemployment, and he additionally designed a sequence of propaganda posters, essentially the most well-known of which is Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919–20). During this era Lissitzky started to work on a sequence of summary geometric work, every of which was referred to as a proun, his acronym for proyekt utverzhdeniya novogo (“project for the affirmation of the new”). The proun works have been first proven at an exhibition of the Suprematist collective Unovis (Utverditeli Novogo Iskusstva, “Affirmers of New Art”). They mixed Lissitzky’s pursuits in graphic arts, architectural types, pictures, portray, and different formal sorts into a singular and dynamic artwork. They additionally signalled Lissitzky’s embrace of Constructivism, which sought to make use of summary artwork to precise progressive social values and to encourage the transformation of society. In the autumn of 1921 Lissitzky turned a professor on the state artwork college in Moscow, however he left for Berlin in December to ascertain cultural contact with German artists.
Lissitzky’s interval overseas (1921–25) was notably artistic. He participated within the manufacturing of a sequence of artwork magazines, printed plenty of books, together with Suprematichesky skaz professional dva kvadrata v 6-ti postroykakh (1922; About Two Squares: In 6 Constructions: A Suprematist Tale) and (with Jean Arp) the three-language Die Kunstismen—Les Ismes de l’artwork—The Isms of Art (1925), and have become a member of the well-known Dutch group De Stijl. He additionally met the artist-designer László Moholy-Nagy, who helped transmit Lissitzky’s concepts on artwork to western Europe and the United States by means of his educating on the Bauhaus. From that time on, pictures joined graphic arts as one in all Lissitzky’s chief instruments. With his frequent travels and call with different artists, Lissitzky turned a transformational determine, intermingling the progressive arts of Europe and Russia and advancing the trade of experimental types and concepts.
In 1925 Lissitzky returned to Moscow. Between 1925 and 1928 he cofounded plenty of periodicals propagating essentially the most progressive inventive tendencies of the Nineteen Twenties. He continued to be an progressive power in e book and exhibition design. He created Soviet pavilions for plenty of worldwide expositions, and he collaborated with Aleksandr Rodchenko and different avant-garde artists on the exceptional propaganda journal SSSR na stroyke (1930–41; USSR in Construction). Despite his poor well being and the more and more vehement rejection of Modernist aesthetics by the Stalinist institution, Lissitzky persevered in his inventive endeavours. He died of tuberculosis some six months after Hitler’s invasion of Russia.