El Lissitzky, 1890-1941

Probably gifted to Kunsthalle Bremen in 1948
Deaccessioned by Kunsthalle Bremen in 1978
Acquired by the father of the present owner from the above

El Lissitzky's contribution to the Russian avant-garde encompassed an extraordinarily wide range of activities, including painting, architecture, photomontage, theoretical investigations, book design, and typography. Lissitzky's work expresses a strong social vision while at the same time exemplifying new forms of visual expression. His achievements in the area of graphic arts had a profound impact on many progressive artists in Europe and the United States. These included the German typographer and design theorist Jan Tschihold (1902-1974), who identified Lissitzky as a precursor of the "New Typography."
In retrospect, Lissitzky emerges as a central figure in the international Constructivist movement. Like the Constructivists, Lissitzky sought to align his art with the needs of the new revolutionary society. Yet unlike the Constructivists, he did not believe that the design of utilitarian objects was the artist's true goal. As an artist, Lissitzky was often caught between the agitational and utilitarian goals of the Constructivists and the mysticism of his mentor, the Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich. As the scholar Alexandra Shatskikh has noted, after Lissitzky embraced many Constructivist ideas, Malevich—who was a virulent opponent of Constructivism—considered Lissitzky a "traitor" to Suprematism.

Lissitzky trained in engineering and architecture in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1909-14. He also studied at the Riga Polytechnical Institute from about 1915 to 1916. As a result of his studies, science and technology became extremely important for the artist's worldview.  

Under the influence of Marc Chagall, Lissitzky began to work in book design, and was invited to join Chagall at the Vitebsk School of Art in 1918. Chagall's departure from Vitebsk, and the subsequent arrival of Malevich, had a major impact on Lissitzky, who under Malevich's influence abandoned his figurative mode. In 1919, Lissitzky began to paint Prouns, an acronym for the Russian "Proekt utverzhdeniia novogo" (Project for the Affirmation of the New). Prouns were abstract representations of form relations in space—in Lissitzky's words, "an interchange station between painting and architecture."

The spatial ideas embodied in the Prouns influenced Lissitzky's designs for Figurinen. Die plastische Gestaltung der elektro-mechanischen Schau „Sieg über die Sonne" (Figurine Portfolio Victory Over the Sun), published in 1923 in Hanover, Germany. This portfolio of lithographs, produced in an edition of 75, is extremely rare because many copies of it were destroyed in Germany in the late 1930s as examples of "degenerative art."

The development of the Figurine Portfolio Victory Over the Sun, which exemplifies Lissitzky's fusion of scientific thought and mysticism, is well documented.

The portfolio reflects Lissitzky's profound engagement with Malevich's ideals and practice and asserts the visual and geometric components of the latter's new aesthetic. Lissitzky's designs use as their point of departure the famous 1913 Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, by Aleksei Kruchenykh and Mikhail Matiushin. Malevich did the original set and costume designs for the 1913 production of the opera—designs, it is generally agreed, that anticipated the artist's landmark painting of 1915, Black Square.

Victory Over the Sun broke with existing artistic and theatrical conventions: the text was written in the "transrational" language of zaum and dissonant music accompanied the actors' movements and speech. Its plot envisioned a mechanized world of the future, and involved the capturing of the sun by a group of futurist strongmen. Influenced by Italian Futurism, the opera glorifies speed, technology, and male strength. The opera was re-staged in Vitebsk in 1920 by Malevich's students from the Unovis group. Inspired by this production, Lissitzky created his designs for the figures from the opera, which he conceived as an electro-mechanical theatre of the future.

Lissitzky's advocacy of international Constructivist art, begun on the pages of Veshch (Object), continued throughout 1922. He was invited to participate in the Erste internationale Kongress progressiver Künstler (International Congress of Progressive Artists) held in Düsseldorf in 1922. The success and visibility that these activities afforded him led Lissitzky to Hanover, Germany, where he had his first solo exhibition in 1923 at the Kestner-Gesellschaft. The directors of the Gesellschaft commissioned Lissitzky to create lithographs for the portfolio 1 Kestnermappe Proun. That same year, Lissitzky revived his project for Victory Over the Sun, for which he had already made gouaches in 1920-21, before going to Germany.

Lissitzky replaced Malevich's non-representational decorations for the 1913 production of the opera with his "Spectacle Machine," whose parts could go up and down while transporting the characters in this "electro-mechanical theatre" through space. The figurines were to move about mechanically within an open network of scaffolding, situated on a plaza that was accessible from all sides. The idea of the "Spectacle Machine" is reminiscent of the "machine-art" of Vladimir Tatlin. Lissitzky's figurines were artificial beings, faceless and machine-like. According to the artist, they are meant to embody a synthesis of art, science, and technology. In his introduction to the portfolio, Lissitzky emphasized that colour should be understood not as a means of defining the image but as a conditional denotation of properties of real materials, such as copper or iron. Deploying the language of abstract art in the service of the new state, Lissitzky introduced Soviet-related imagery into some of his designs. The figure of Neuer (The New) has on its body a red square, the symbol of the Unovis group; instead of eyes, it has two heads with the Soviet red star, a sign of the new society. Another character, the "Radio Announcer," was used earlier by Lissitzky in his designs for Mayakovsky's book of poems Dlia golosa (For the Voice), published in Berlin the previous year.

Lissitzky deliberately wanted to leave these designs only in the forms of lithographs; he wrote that he was leaving the execution of his ideas to others. The influence of Lissitzky's Figurine Portfolio Victory Over the Sun was considerable, particularly on the production of print portfolios at the Bauhaus in Weimar.