El Lissitzky

Born Lazar Markovich (El) Lissitzky in 1890 to a Jewish family in Pochinok, Smolensk Province, Russia. 1903 takes lessons with the artist Iurii (Yehuda) Moiseevich Pen in Vitebsk. 1909 turns down by the St. Petersburg Academy of Art; enrolls as a student of architectural engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany. 1912 travels in Germany, France, and Italy. 1914 returns to Russia during the summer, after the outbreak of World War I. 1915-16 works in various architectural offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg. 1916 receives a diploma in engineering and architecture from the Riga Technological University, which is temporarily quartered in Moscow; embarks on an expedition organized by the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society to explore the synagogues along Russia’s Dnieper River. 1917-19 lives and works in Kiev; participates in a national movement to revive Jewish cultural traditions for modern Russian Jews; designs Yiddish books, some for children. 1918 becomes a member of IZO Narkompros (Art Section of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment) in Moscow. 1919 helps found in Kiev the Yiddish publishing house Kultur Lige, which becomes a leading force in the dissemination of Jewish culture in the Ukraine; invited in May by Marc Chagall to teach graphic arts, printing, and architecture at the People's Art School in Vitebsk; introduced to Kazimir Malevich's system of nonobjective art, Suprematism, after Malevich arrives in Vitebsk in November to teach painting; works in the Suprematist collective UNOVIS (Affirmers of the New Art), along with Malevich and other artists; participates in decorating Vitebsk for the revolutionary holidays. 1920 invents the term Proun (Project for the Affirmation of the New) for his new form of abstract art. 1921 returns to Moscow; teaches architecture at the recently established art school VKhUTEMAS (State Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops); delivers a series of four lectures at INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) on the topics of new art, Communism and Suprematism, monumental art, and the new city; travels to Berlin via Warsaw during the fall on a mission to establish cultural contacts between Soviet and German artists. 1922 collaborates with the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg to produce the periodical Veshch. Objet. Gegenstand; meets the typographer Jan Tschichold; in May, participates in the First Congress of Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf; in September, takes part in the Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists in Weimar, where he meets the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters; in October, meets Sophie Küppers, widow of Dr. Paul Erich Küppers, who had been the assistant to the director of the Kestner Society in Hanover; in December, gives an important lecture in Berlin on Russian art. 1923 lectures on Soviet art in Rotterdam, Utrecht, and The Hague and at the Kestner Society; becomes seriously ill with tuberculosis and is treated in Switzerland; joins the editorial board of Hans Richter’s journal G and becomes a member of the De Stijl group; becomes a member of ASNOVA (Association of the New Architects), an organization founded in Moscow by Nikolai Ladovsky, Nikolai Dokuchaev, and Vladimir Krinsky, and assumes responsibility for developing connections with foreign architects. 1924 with Mart Stam and Emil Roth, edits the architectural review ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen; produces advertising designs for Gunther Wagner’s Pelikan office supply company; with the technical help of Roth, begins work on the Wolkenbügel (CloudIron), a horizontally expanding skyscraper intended for the Nikitsky Square in Moscow; in November, the Swiss authorities turn down his request to renew his visa, but grant him a six-month extension "on humanitarian grounds." 1925 returns to Moscow in June. 1926 in January, appointed head of the Department of Furniture and Interior Design for the wood and metal workshop at VKhUTEMASl; in June, receives assignment from Narkompros to travel to Dresden, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Hamburg, and Lübeck to study modern architecture; commissioned by the directorate of the International Art Exhibition in Dresden to design the Room for Constructivist Art; returns to Moscow and, in collaboration with Ladovsky, publishes the single issue of the architectural review ASNOVA. 1927 marries Sophie Küppers on January 27; appointed chief artist for the All-Union Printing Trades Exhibition in Moscow; begins work on the design of the Abstract Cabinet for the Provinzialmuseum (Sprengel Museum) in Hanover. 1928 appointed chief artist for the Soviet Pavilion at the International Press Exhibition in Cologne; meets with Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, and Le Corbusier while on vacation in Austria and Paris. 1929 commissioned by the All-Union Society for Foreign Cultural Exchange to construct the Soviet Room at the Film and Photo Exhibition in Stuttgart. 1930 takes part in the competition to design the House of Heavy Industry; appointed chief artist for the Soviet Pavilion at the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden; commissioned to design the Soviet section at the International Fur Trade Exhibition in Leipzig; his son, Jen Lissitzky, is born on October 12. 1931 appointed chief architect for the Gorky Park of Culture and Rest in Moscow in March; Sophie’s older sons come to Russia to live with her and Lissitzky in the village of Khodnya, thirty miles from Moscow. 1932 signs his first contract with the editors of USSR in Construction, a Soviet propaganda publication intended for Western audiences and published in Russian, English, German, and French; becomes one of the principal artists for the journal, along with Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Solomon Telingater; designs seventeen issues, ten of them in collaboration with Sophie Küppers. 1934 appointed chief artist for the Agricultural Exhibition of the Soviet Union in Moscow. 1935-36 frequently hospitalized; convalesces in a sanatorium in the Caucasus. 1940 appointed chief artist for the Soviet Pavilion at the Belgrade International Exhibition, a project left unfinished due to the outbreak of World War II. 1941 works on anti-Nazi posters and other war-related projects until his death in Moscow on December 30.

Literature

• Franz Roh, Jan Tschichold (eds.), Foto-Auge / Oeil et Photo / Photo-Eye, Akademischer Verlag Dr. Fritz Wedekind, Stuttgart, 1929. [1] [2]
• Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946, University of Chicago Press, 1998. [3]
• Nancy Lynn Perloff, Brian Reed (eds.), Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, Getty Publications, 2003. [4]

External links

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Lissitzky
• http://www.incorm.eu/lissitzky.html
• http://vanabbe.nl/lissitzky/nederlands/
• Some works by El Lissitzky
• About 2 Squares by El Lissitzky, 1922
• [5]
• http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/guides_bibliographies/lissitzky/index2.html