El Lissitzky
El Lissitzky in a 1914 self-portrait.
Born	(1890-11-23)November 23, 1890 Pochinok, Russian Empire
Died	December 30, 1941(1941-12-30) (aged 51) Moscow, USSR
Occupation	Artist

 Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (help·info) (Russian: Ла́зарь Ма́ркович Лиси́цкий) (November 23 [O.S. November 11] 1890 – December 30, 1941), better known as El Lissitzky (Russian: Эль Лиси́цкий, Yiddish: על ליסיצקי), was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect. He 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 former Soviet Union. His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus and constructivist movements, and he experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate 20th-century graphic design.^[1]

El Lissitzky's entire career was laced with the belief that the artist could be an agent for change, later summarized with his edict, "das zielbewußte Schaffen" (goal-oriented creation).^[2] Lissitzky, of Jewish faith, began his career illustrating Yiddish children's books in an effort to promote Jewish culture in Russia, a country that was undergoing massive change at the time and that had just repealed its antisemitic laws. When only 15 he started teaching; a duty he would stay with 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 took up a job as the Russian cultural ambassador to Weimar Germany, working with and influencing important figures of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements during his stay. 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[link]

El Lissitzky was born on November 23, 1890 in Pochinok, a small Jewish community 50 kilometres (31 mi) southeast of Smolensk, former Russian Empire. During his childhood, he lived and studied in the city of Vitebsk, now part of Belarus, and later spent 10 years in Smolensk living with his grandparents and attending the Smolensk Grammar School, spending summer vacations in Vitebsk.^[3] Always expressing an interest and talent in drawing, he started to receive instruction at 13 from Yehuda Pen, a local Jewish artist, and by the time he was 15 was teaching students himself. In 1909, he applied to an art academy in Saint Petersburg, but was rejected. While he passed the entrance exam and was qualified, the law under the Tsarist regime only allowed a limited number of Jewish students to attend Russian schools and universities.

Like many other Jews then living in the Russian Empire, El Lissitzky went to study in Germany. He left in 1909 to study architectural engineering at a Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany.^[1] During the summer of 1912, El Lissitzky, in his own words, "wandered through Europe", spending time in Paris and covering 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) on foot in Italy, teaching himself about fine art and sketching architecture and landscapes that interested him.^[4] His interest in ancient Jewish culture has originated during the contacts with Paris-based group of Russian Jews led by sculptor Ossip Zadkine, a lifetime friend of Lissitzky since early childhood, who exposed Lissitzky to conflicts between different groups within the diaspora.^[5] In the same 1912 some of his pieces were included for the first time in an exhibit by the St. Petersburg Artists Union; a notable first step. He remained in Germany until the outbreak of World War I, when he was forced to return home through Switzerland and the Balkans,^[6] along with many of his countrymen, including other expatriate artists born in the former Russian Empire, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall.^[1]

Upon his return to Moscow, Lissitzky attended the Polytechnic Institute of Riga, which had been evacuated to Moscow because of the war,^[7] and worked for the architectural firms of Boris Velikovsky and Roman Klein.^[6] During this work, he took an active and passionate interest in Jewish culture which, after the downfall of the openly antisemitic Tsarist regime, was experiencing a renaissance. The new Provisional Government repealed a decree that prohibited the printing of Hebrew letters and that barred Jews from citizenship. Thus El Lissitzky soon devoted himself to Jewish art, exhibiting works by local Jewish artists, traveling to Mahilyow to study the traditional architecture and ornaments of old synagogues, and illustrating many Yiddish children's books. These books were El Lissitzky's first major foray in book design, a field that he would greatly innovate during his career.

His first designs appeared in the 1917 book, Sihas hulin: Eyne fun di geshikhten (An Everyday Conversation), where he incorporated Hebrew letters with a distinctly art nouveau flair. His next book was a visual retelling of the traditional Jewish Passover song Had gadya (One Goat), in which El Lissitzky showcased a typographic device that he would often return to in later designs. In the book, he integrated letters with images through a system that matched the color of the characters in the story with the word referring to them. In the designs for the final page , El Lissitzky depicts the mighty "hand of God" slaying the angel of death, who wears the tsar's crown. This representation links the redemption of the Jews with the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution.^[8] An alternative view asserts that the artist was wary of Bolshevik internationalization, leading to destruction of traditional Jewish culture.^[9] Visual representations of the hand of God would recur in numerous pieces throughout his entire career, most notably with his 1925 photomontage self-portrait The Constructor, which prominently featured the hand.

Avant garde[link]

Suprematism[link]

In May 1919,^[3] upon receiving an invitation from fellow Jewish artist Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky returned to Vitebsk to teach graphic arts, printing, and architecture at the newly formed People's Art School – a school that Chagall created after being appointed Commissioner of Artistic Affairs for Vitebsk in 1918. Lissitzky was engaged in designing and printing propaganda posters; later, he preferred to keep quiet about this period, probably because one of main subjects of these posters was the exile Leon Trotsky.^[10] The quantity of these posters is sufficient to regard them as a separate genre in the artist's output.^[11]

Chagall also invited other Russian artists, most notably the painter and art theoretician Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky's former teacher, Yehuda Pen. However, it was not until October 1919 when Lissitzky, then on an errand in Moscow, persuaded Malevich to relocate to Vitebsk.^[12] The move coincided with the opening of the first art exhibition in Vitebsk directed by Chagall.^[13] Malevich would bring with him a wealth of new ideas, most of which inspired Lissitzky but clashed with local public and professionals who favored figurative art and with Chagall himself.^[14] After going through impressionism, primitivism, and cubism, Malevich began developing and advocating his ideas on suprematism aggressively. In development since 1915, suprematism rejected the imitation of natural shapes and focused more on the creation of distinct, geometric forms. He replaced the classic teaching program with his own and disseminated his suprematist theories and techniques school-wide. Chagall advocated more classical ideals and El Lissitzky, still loyal to Chagall, became torn between two opposing artistic paths. El Lissitzky ultimately favoured Malevich's suprematism and broke away from traditional Jewish art. Chagall left the school shortly thereafter.

At this point El Lissitzky subscribed fully to suprematism and, under the guidance of Malevich, helped further develop the movement. Lissitzky designed On the New System of Art by Malevich, who responded in December 1919: "Lazar Markovich, I salute you on the publication of this little book".^[15] Perhaps the most famous work by Lissitzky from the same period was the 1919 propaganda poster "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge". Russia was going through a civil war at the time, which was mainly fought between the "Reds" (communists and revolutionaries) and the "Whites" (monarchists, conservatives, liberals and socialists who opposed the Bolshevik Revolution). The image of the red wedge shattering the white form, simple as it was, communicated a powerful message that left no doubt in the viewer's mind of its intention. The piece is often seen as alluding to the similar shapes used on military maps and, along with its political symbolism, was one of El Lissitzky's first major steps away from Malevich's non-objective suprematism into a style his own. He stated: "The artist constructs a new symbol with his brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of anything that is already finished, already made, or already existent in the world – it is a symbol of a new world, which is being built upon and which exists by the way of the people."^[16]

In January 17, 1920,^[17] Malevich and El Lissitzky co-founded the short-lived Molposnovis (Young followers of a new art), a proto-suprematist association of students, professors, and other artists. After a brief and stormy dispute between "old" and "young" generations, and two rounds of renaming, the group reemerged as UNOVIS (Exponents of the new art) in February.^[18][19] Under the leadership of Malevich the group worked on a "suprematist ballet", choreographed by Nina Kogan and on the remake of a 1913 futurist opera Victory Over the Sun by Mikhail Matyushin and Aleksei Kruchenykh.^[18][20] El Lissitzky and the entire group chose to share credit and responsibility for the works produced within the group, signing most pieces with a black square. This was partly a homage to a similar piece by their leader, Malevich, and a symbolic embrace of the Communist ideal. This would become the de facto seal of UNOVIS that took the place of individual names or initials. Black squares worn by members as chest badges and cufflinks also resembled the ritual tefillin and thus were no strange symbol in Vitebsk shtetl.^[21]

The group, which disbanded in 1922, would be pivotal in the dissemination of suprematist ideology in Russia and abroad and launch El Lissitzky's status as one of the leading figures in the avant garde. Incidentally, the earliest appearance of the signature El Lissitzky (Russian: Эль Лисицкий) emerged in the handmade UNOVIS Miscellany, issued in two copies in March–April 1920,^[22] and containing his manifesto on book art: "the book enters the skull through the eye not the ear therefore the pathways the waves move at much greater speed and with more intensity. if i (sic) can only sing through my mouth with a book i (sic) can show myself in various guises."^[23]

Proun[link]

A Proun by El Lissitzky, c.1925. Commenting on Proun in 1921, El Lissitzky stated, "We brought the canvas into circles . . . and while we turn, we raise ourselves into the space."^[8]

During this period El Lissitzky proceeded to develop a suprematist style of his own, a series of abstract, geometric paintings which he called Proun (pronounced "pro-oon"). The exact meaning of "Proun" was never fully revealed, with some suggesting that it is a contraction of proekt unovisa (designed by UNOVIS) or proekt utverzhdenya novogo (Design for the confirmation of the new). Later, El Lissitzky defined them ambiguously as "the station where one changes from painting to architecture."^[4]

Proun was essentially El Lissitzky's exploration of the visual language of suprematism with spatial elements, utilizing shifting axes and multiple perspectives; both uncommon ideas in suprematism. Suprematism at the time was conducted almost exclusively in flat, 2D forms and shapes, and El Lissitzky, with a taste for architecture and other 3D concepts, tried to expand suprematism beyond this. His Proun works (known as Prounen) spanned over a half a decade and evolved from straightforward paintings and lithographs into fully three-dimensional installations. They would also lay the foundation for his later experiments in architecture and exhibition design. While the paintings were artistic in their own right, their use as a staging ground for his early architectonic ideas was significant. In these works, the basic elements of architecture – volume, mass, color, space and rhythm – were subjected to a fresh formulation in relation to the new suprematist ideals. Through his Prouns, utopian models for a new and better world were developed. This approach, in which the artist creates art with socially defined purpose, could aptly be summarized with his edict "das zielbewußte Schaffen" – "task oriented creation."^[2]

Jewish themes and symbols also sometimes made appearances in his Prounen, usually with El Lissitzky using Hebrew letters as part of the typography or visual code. For the cover of the 1922 book Arba'ah Teyashim (Four Billy Goats; cover), he shows an arrangement of Hebrew letters as architectural elements in a dynamic design that mirrors his contemporary Proun typography.^[8] This theme was extended into his illustrations for the Shifs-Karta (Passenger Ticket) book.

Return to Germany[link]

In 1921, roughly concurrent with the demise of UNOVIS, suprematism was beginning to fracture into two ideologically adverse halves, one favoring Utopian, spiritual art and the other a more utilitarian art that served society. El Lissitzky was fully aligned with neither and left Vitebsk in 1921. He took a job as a cultural representative of Russia and moved to Berlin where he was to establish contacts between Russian and German artists. There he also took up work as a writer and designer for international magazines and journals while helping to promote the avant garde through various gallery shows. He started the very short-lived but impressive periodical Veshch-Gegenstand Objekt with Russian-Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg. This was intended to display contemporary Russian art to Western Europe. It was a wide-ranging pan-arts publication, mainly focusing on new suprematist and constructivist works, and was published in German, French, and Russian languages.^[24] In the first issue, El Lissitzky wrote:

We consider the triumph of the constructive method to be essential for our present. We find it not only in the new economy and in the development of the industry, but also in the psychology of our contemporaries of art. Veshch will champion constructive art, whose mission is not, after all, to embellish life, but to organize it.^[2]

During his stay El Lissitzky also developed his career as a graphic designer with some historically important works such as the books Dlia Golossa (For the Voice), a collection of poems from Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Die Kunstismen (The Artisms) together with Jean Arp. In Berlin he also met and befriended many other artists, most notably Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy, and Theo van Doesburg.^[25] Together with Schwitters and van Doesburg, El Lissitzky presented the idea of an international artistic movement under the guidelines of constructivism while also working with Kurt Schwitters on the issue Nasci (Nature) of the periodical Merz, and continuing to illustrate children's books. The year after the publication of his first Proun series in Moscow in 1921, Schwitters introduced El Lissitzky to the Hanover gallery kestnergesellschaft, where he held his first solo exhibition. The second Proun series, printed in Hanover in 1923, was a success, utilizing new printing techniques.^[24] Later on, he met Sophie Kuppers, who was the widow of Paul Kuppers, an art director of the kestnergesellschaft at which El Lissitzky was showing, and whom he would marry in 1927.

Horizontal skyscrapers[link]

In 1923–1925, El Lissitzky proposed and developed the idea of horizontal skyscrapers (Wolkenbügel, "cloud-irons"). A series of eight such structures was intended to mark the major intersections of the Boulevard Ring in Moscow. Each Wolkenbügel was a flat three-story, 180-meter-wide L-shaped slab raised 50 meters above street level. It rested on three pylons (10×16×50 meters each), placed on three different street corners. One pylon extended underground, doubling as the staircase into a proposed subway station; two others provided shelter for ground-level tram stations.^[26][27]

Lissitzky argued that as long as humans cannot fly, moving horizontally is natural and moving vertically is not. Thus, where there is not sufficient land for construction, a new plane created in the air at medium altitude should be preferred to an American-style tower. These buildings, according to Lissitzky, also provided superior insulation and ventilation for their inhabitants.^[28]

The print shop designed by El Lissitzky, showing the least damaged south end of the building

Lissitzky, aware of severe mismatch between his ideas and the existing urban landscape, experimented with different configurations of the horizontal surface and height-to-width ratios so that the structure appeared balanced visually ("spatial balance is in the contrast of vertical and horizontal tensions").^[28] The raised platform was shaped in a way that each of its four facets looked distinctly different. Each tower faced the Kremlin with the same facet, providing a pointing arrow to pedestrians on the streets. All eight buildings were planned identically, so Lissitzky proposed color-coding them for easier orientation.^[29]

An illustration of the concept appeared on the front cover of Adolf Behne's book Der Moderne Zweckbau, and articles on it written by El Lissitzky appeared in the Moscow-based architectural review ASNOVA News (journal of ASNOVA, the Association of New Architects) and in the German art journal Das Kunstblatt.

After some time of creating "paper architecture" projects such as the Wolkenbügels he was hired to design an actual building in Moscow. Located at 55°46′38″N 37°36′39″E / 55.777277°N 37.610828°E / 55.777277; 37.610828 17, 1st Samotechny Lane, it is Lissitzky's sole tangible work of architecture. It was commissioned in 1932 by Ogonyok magazine to be used as a print shop. In June 2007 the independent Russky Avangard foundation filed a request to list the building on the heritage register. In September 2007 the city commission (Moskomnasledie) approved the request and passed it to the city government for a final approval, which did not happen. In October 2008, the abandoned building was badly damaged by fire.^[30]

Exhibitions of the 1920s[link]

After two years of intensive work Lissitzky was taken ill with acute pneumonia in October 1923. A few weeks later he was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis; in February 1924 he relocated to a Swiss sanatorium near Locarno.^[31] He kept very busy during his stay, working on advertisement designs for Pelikan Industries (who in turn paid for his treatment), translating articles written by Malevich into German, and experimenting heavily in typographic design and photography. In 1925, after the Swiss government denied his request to renew his visa, El Lissitzky returned to Moscow and began teaching interior design, metalwork, and architecture at VKhUTEMAS (State Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops), a post he would keep until 1930. He all but stopped his Proun works and became increasingly active in architecture and propaganda designs.

In June 1926, Lissitzky left the country again, this time for a brief stay in Germany and the Netherlands. There he designed an exhibition room for the Internationale Kunstausstellung art show in Dresden and the Raum Konstruktive Kunst (Room for constructivist art) and Abstraktes Kabinett shows in Hanover, and perfected the 1925 Wolkenbügel concept in collaboration with Mart Stam.^[31] In his autobiography (written in June 1941, and later edited and released by his wife), El Lissitzky wrote, "1926. My most important work as an artist begins: the creation of exhibitions."^[4]

Back in the USSR, Lissitzky designed displays for the official Soviet pavilions at the international exhibitions of the period, up to the 1939 New York World's Fair. One of his most notable exhibits was the All-Union Polygraphic Exhibit in Moscow in August–October 1927, where Lissitzky headed the design team for "photography and photomechanics" (i.e. photomontage) artists and the installation crew.^[32] His work was perceived as radically new, especially when juxtaposed with the classicist designs of Vladimir Favorsky (head of the book art section of the same exhibition) and of the foreign exhibits.

In the beginning of 1928, Lissitzky visited Cologne in preparation for the 1928 Press Show scheduled for April–May 1928. The state delegated Lissitzky to supervise the Soviet program; instead of building their own pavilion, the Soviets rented the existing central pavilion, the largest building on the fairground. To make full use of it, the Soviet program designed by Lissitsky revolved around the theme of a film show, with nearly continuous presentation of the new feature films, propagandist newsreels and early animation, on multiple screens inside the pavilion and on the open-air screens.^[33] His work was praised for near absence of paper exhibits; "everything moves, rotates, everything is energized" (Russian: всё движется, заводится, электрифицируется).^[34] Lissitzky also designed and managed on site less demanding exhibitions like the 1930 Hygiene show in Dresden.^[35]

Along with pavilion design, Lissitzky began experimenting with print media again. His work with book and periodical design was perhaps some of his most accomplished and influential. He launched radical innovations in typography and photomontage, two fields in which he was particularly adept. He even designed a photomontage birth announcement in 1930 for his recently born son, Jen. The image itself is seen as being another personal endorsement of the Soviet Union,^[8] as it superimposed an image of the infant Jen over a factory chimney, linking Jen's future with his country's industrial progress. Around this time, El Lissitzky's interest in book design escalated. In his remaining years, some of his most challenging and innovative works in this field would develop. In discussing his vision of the book, he wrote:

In contrast to the old monumental art [the book] itself goes to the people, and does not stand like a cathedral in one place waiting for someone to approach . . . [The book is the] monument of the future.^[2]

He perceived books as permanent objects that were invested with power. This power was unique in that it could transmit ideas to people of different times, cultures, and interests, and do so in ways other art forms could not. This ambition laced all of his work, particularly in his later years. El Lissitzky was devoted to the idea of creating art with power and purpose, art that could invoke change.

Later years[link]

In 1932, Stalin closed down independent artists' unions; former avant-garde artists had to adapt to the new climate or risk being officially criticised or even blacklisted. El Lissitzky retained his reputation as the master of exhibition art and management into late thirties. The terminal disease gradually reduced his physical abilities, and he was becoming more and more dependent on his wife in actual completion of his work.^[36]

In 1937, 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. The project was plagued by delays and political interventions. By the end of 1937 the "apparent simplicity" of Lissitzky's artwork aroused the concerns of the political supervisors, and Lissitzky responded: "The simpler the shape, the finer precision and quality of execution required... yet until now [the working crews] are instructed by the foremen (Oltarzhevsky and Korostashevsky), not the authors" (i.e. Vladimir Shchuko, author of the Central Pavillion, and Lissitzky himself).^[37] His artwork, as described in 1937 proposals, completely departed from the modernist art of 1920s in favor of socialist realism. The iconic statue of Stalin in front of the central pavillion was proposed by Lissitzky personally: "this will give the square its head and its face" (Russian: Это должно дать площади и голову и лицо).^[37]

In June 1938, he was only one of seventeen professionals and managers responsible for the Central Pavilion;^[38] in October 1938, he shared the responsibility for its Main Hall decoration with Vladimir Akhmetyev.^[39] He simultaneously worked on the decoration of the Soviet pavilion for the 1939 New York World's Fair; the June 1938 commission considered Lissitzky's work along with nineteen other proposals and eventually rejected it.^[40]

Lissitzky's work on the USSR im Bau (USSR in construction) magazine took his experimentation and innovation with book design to an extreme. In issue #2 he included multiple fold-out pages, presented in concert with other folded pages that together produced design combinations and a narrative structure that was completely original. Each issue focused on a particular issue of the time – a new dam being built, constitutional reforms, Red Army progress and so on. In 1941, his tuberculosis worsened, but he continued to produce works, one of his last being a propaganda poster for Russia's efforts in World War II, titled "Davaite pobolshe tankov!" (Give us more tanks!) He died on December 30, 1941, in Moscow.

Legacy[link]

- On 1978, the cover of Kraftwerk's album The Man Machine was inspired by El Lissitzky's work. Credits were included in the inner cover of the vinyl edition.
- On April 21, 2005 Swann Galleries sold a copy of Lissitzky's 1929 photomontage image for USSR Russische Ausstellung for an auction record price of $64,400.

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Albrecht, Wilma Ruth: (1993). EL - wie Lissitzky. Das Künstlerporträt. Liberal, 35 (1993) 4, pp. 50-60. ISSN 0459-1992. 
• Balandin, S. N. (1968). "Arkhitekturnaya teoriya El Lisitskogo (Архитектурная теория Эль Лисицкого)" (in Russian). Archived from the original on May 10, 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080510054907/http://novosibdom.ru/content/view/607/32/. Retrieved 2008-10-01. 
• Burgos, Francisco; Garrido, Gines (2004). El Lissitzky. Wolkenbugel 1924-1925. Absent Architecture (Rueda, Spain). ISBN 978-84-7207-158-2. 
• Curl, James Stevens (2006) (Paperback). A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (Second ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 880 pages. ISBN 0-19-860678-8. 
• Ilyicheva, Anna (2008). "Avangard na samoteke (Авангард "на cамотеке")" (in Russian). lenta.ru. http://realty.lenta.ru/articles/2008/10/21/print/. 
• Glazova, Anna (2003). "El Lissitzky in Weimar Germany". Speaking in Tongues. The Magazine of Literary Tran slation. http://spintongues.msk.ru/glazova27eng.htm. Retrieved 2008-10-01. 
• Khan-Magomedov, S. O. (2005) (in Russian and Spanish (bilingual edition)). Sto shedevrov sovetskogo arkhitekturnogo avangarda (Сто шедевров советского архитектурного авангарда). URSS, Moscow. ISBN 5-354-00892-1. 
• Lissizky, El; Schwitters, Kurt (1924). "Merz (magazine) no. 8-9". http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/merz/8/pages/00cover.htm. Retrieved 2008-10-01. 
• Lissitzky-Kuppers, Sophie (1980). El Lissitzky, life, letters, texts. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-23090-0. 
• Mallgrave, Harry Francis (2005). Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673-1968. Cambridge. ISBN 0-521-79306-8. 
• Margolin, Victor (1997). The struggle for utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy : 1917–1946. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-50516-2. 
• Margolin, Victor (2000). "El Lissitzky's Had Gadya, 1919". Yeshiva University, New York. http://tigger.uic.edu/~victor/articles/lissitzkygadya.pdf. Retrieved 2008-10-02. 
• Mayakovsky, Vladimir; El Lissitzky (2000). For the Voice (Dlia golosa). The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-13377-6. 
• Perloff, Nancy et al. (2005). "Design by El Lissitzky". Getty Research Institute. http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/digitized_collections/lissitzky/index2.html. Retrieved 2008-10-01. 
• Perloff, Nancy; Reed, Brian (2003). Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow. Getty Research Institute. ISBN 0-89236-677-X. 
• Spencer, Herbert; Poynor, Rick (2004). Pioneers of modern typography. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-69303-5. 
• Shatskikh, Alexandra (2007). Vitebsk: The Life of Art. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10108-9. 
• Shishanov V.A. Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art: a history of creation and a collection. 1918-1941. - Minsk: Medisont, 2007. - 144 p.[1] [2]
• Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum and El Lissitzy (1990). El Lissitzky, 1890–1941: Architect Painter Photographer Typographer. Municipal Van Abbemuseum. ISBN 90-70149-28-1. 
• Tolstoy, V. P. (editor) (2006) (in Russian). Vystavochnye ansambli SSSR 1920-1930-e gody (Выставочные ансамбли СССР в 1920-1930 годы, Exhibition ensembles of the USSR in 1920s-1930s). Galart, Moscow. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/97852690101502|97852690101502]]. 
• Tupitsyn, Margarita (1999). El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-08170-1. 
• El Lissitzky. Wolkenbügel 1924-1925. Publisher= Editorial Rueda, Madrid, 2005 ISBN 84-7207-158-8

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: El Lissitzky

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: El Lissitzky

• Ibiblio.org - Image collection of some of his most famous works
• MoMA - Flash-navigable exploration of USSR im bau and Dlia Golossa (click on "Reading Room" link)
• The Roland Collection of Films & Videos on Art - Free streaming download of an entire 88-minute documentary, El Lissitzky, by Leo Lorez
• A Factory Discography - Factory Records catalog by Dennis Remmer.
• Factory Benelux Discography - Factory Benelux section of the above website (scroll to FBN 24 to see The Wake).
• FAC 101 to FAC 150 - Portion of Remmer's Factory catalog that contains FACT 130.
• The full text of NASCI (Merz No. 8/9, Hanover, April-July 1924).
• El Lissitzky letters and photographs, 1911-1941. Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California. The El Lissitzky archive consists of 106 letters (1911–1941), most sent by Lissitzky to his wife, the art historian Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers; his personal notes on art and aesthetics, a few official documents; and ca. 170 documentary photographs and printed reproductions of his designs, especially exhibition designs.
• Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven image collection of El Lissizky
• Valeri Shishanov. VITEBSK’ BUDETLANE
• Catalogue listing for Swann Galleries auction of record-setting poster by Lissitzky.

Vladimir Mayakovsky
Mayakovsky in 1910
Born	(1893-07-19)July 19, 1893 Baghdati, Russian Empire
Died	April 14, 1930(1930-04-14) (aged 36) Moscow, USSR
Nationality	Russian
Citizenship	Russian Empire, Soviet
Alma mater	Stroganov Moscow State University of Arts and Industry, Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture
Period	1912—1930
Literary movement	Russian Futurism, Cubo-Futurism
Influenced Hamid Olimjon,Nazım Hikmet

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (Влади́мир Влади́мирович Маяко́вский) (July 19 [O.S. July 7] 1893 – April 14, 1930) was a Russian and Soviet poet and playwright. He is among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.

Early life[link]

Photo, 1917 (sign: "Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky")

He was born the last of three children in Baghdati, Russian Empire (now in Georgia) where his father worked as a forest ranger. His father was of Ukrainian Cossack descent^[1] and his mother was of Ukrainian descent. Although Mayakovsky spoke Georgian at school and with friends, his family spoke primarily Russian at home. At the age of 14 Mayakovsky took part in socialist demonstrations at the town of Kutaisi, where he attended the local grammar school. After the sudden and premature death of his father in 1906, the family — Mayakovsky, his mother, and his two sisters — moved to Moscow, where he attended School No. 5.

In Moscow, Mayakovsky developed a passion for Marxist literature and took part in numerous activities of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party; he was to later become an RSDLP (Bolshevik) member. In 1908, he was dismissed from the grammar school because his mother was no longer able to afford the tuition fees.

Around this time, Mayakovsky was imprisoned on three occasions for subversive political activities but, being underage, he avoided transportation. During a period of solitary confinement in Butyrka prison in 1909, he began to write poetry, but his poems were confiscated. On his release from prison, he continued working within the socialist movement, and in 1911 he joined the Moscow Art School where he became acquainted with members of the Russian Futurist movement. He became a leading spokesman for the group Gileas (Гилея), and a close friend of David Burlyuk, whom he saw as his mentor.

Literary life[link]

The 1912 Futurist publication A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Пощёчина общественному вкусу)^[2] contained Mayakovsky's first published poems: Night (Ночь) and Morning (Утро). Because of their political activities, Burlyuk and Mayakovsky were expelled from the Moscow Art School in 1914.

Image from Mayakovsky's Как делать стихи ("How to Make Poems").

His work continued in the Futurist vein until 1914. His artistic development then shifted increasingly in the direction of narrative and it was this work, published during the period immediately preceding the Russian Revolution, which was to establish his reputation as a poet in Russia and abroad.

A Cloud in Trousers (1915)^[3] was Mayakovsky's first major poem of appreciable length and it depicted the heated subjects of love, revolution, religion and art, written from the vantage point of a spurned lover. The language of the work was the language of the streets, and Mayakovsky went to considerable lengths to debunk idealistic and romanticised notions of poetry and poets.

(From the prologue of A Cloud in Trousers.)

In the summer of 1915, Mayakovsky fell in love with a married woman, Lilya Brik, and it is to her that the poem "The Backbone Flute" (1916) was dedicated; she was the wife of his publisher, Osip Brik. The love affair, as well as his impressions of war and socialism, strongly influenced his works of these years. The poem "War and the World" (1916) addressed the horrors of World War I and "Man" (1917) is a poem dealing with the anguish of love.

Mayakovsky was rejected as a volunteer at the beginning of World War I, and during 1915-1917 worked at the Petrograd Military Automobile School as a draftsman. At the onset of the Russian Revolution, Mayakovsky was in Smolny, Petrograd. There he witnessed the October Revolution. He started reciting poems such as "Left March! For the Red Marines: 1918" (Левый марш (Матросам), 1918) at naval theatres, with sailors as an audience.

Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lilya Brik.

His satirical play Mystery-Bouffe was staged in 1918, and again, more successfully, in 1921.

Agitprop poster by Mayakovsky

After moving back to Moscow, Mayakovsky worked for the Russian State Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) creating — both graphic and text — satirical Agitprop posters. In 1919, he published his first collection of poems Collected Works 1909-1919 (Все сочиненное Владимиром Маяковским). In the cultural climate of the early Soviet Union, his popularity grew rapidly. From 1922 to 1928, Mayakovsky was a prominent member of the Left Art Front and went on to define his work as 'Communist futurism' (комфут). He edited, along with Sergei Tretyakov and Osip Brik, the journal LEF.

As one of the few Soviet writers who were allowed to travel freely, his voyages to Latvia, Britain, Germany, the United States, Mexico and Cuba influenced works like My Discovery of America (Мое открытие Америки, 1925). He also travelled extensively throughout the Soviet Union.

On a lecture tour in the United States, Mayakovsky met Elli Jones, who later gave birth to his daughter, an event which Mayakovsky only came to know in 1929, when the couple met clandestinely in the south of France, as the relationship was kept secret. In the late 1920s, Mayakovsky fell in love with Tatiana Yakovleva and to her he dedicated the poem "A Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva" (Письмо Татьяне Яковлевой, 1928).

The relevance of Mayakovsky's influence cannot be limited to Soviet poetry. While for years he was considered the Soviet poet par excellence, he also changed the perceptions of poetry in wider 20th century culture. His political activism as a propagandistic agitator was rarely understood and often looked upon unfavourably by contemporaries, even close friends like Boris Pasternak. Near the end of the 1920s, Mayakovsky became increasingly disillusioned with the course the Soviet Union was taking under Joseph Stalin: his satirical plays The Bedbug (Клоп, 1929) and The Bathhouse (Баня, 1930), which deal with the Soviet philistinism and bureaucracy, illustrate this development.

On the evening of April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky shot himself. The unfinished poem^[4] in his suicide note read, in part:

Mayakovsky was interred at the Moscow Novodevichy Cemetery.

Legacy[link]

In 1930, his birthplace of Bagdadi in Georgia was renamed Mayakovsky in his honour. After his death, Mayakovsky was attacked in the Soviet press as a "formalist" and a "fellow traveller" (попутчик) (as opposed to officially recognised "proletarian poets", such as Demyan Bedny). When, in 1935, Lilya Brik wrote to Stalin to complain about the attacks, Stalin wrote a comment on Brik's letter:

"Comrade Yezhov, please take charge of Brik's letter. Mayakovsky is still the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his cultural heritage is a crime. Brik's complaints are, in my opinion, justified..."^[5]

These words became a cliché and officially canonized Mayakovsky but, as Boris Pasternak noted,^[6] they "dealt him the second death" in some circles.

Mayakovsky's grave at Novodevichy

Yevgeny Yevtushenko once said, "As a poet, I wanted to mix something from Mayakovsky and Yesenin."^[7] Mayakovsky was the most influential futurist in Lithuania and his poetry helped to form the Four Winds movement there.^[8] He was also an influence on the writer Valentin Kataev. Andrey Voznesensky called Mayakovsky a teacher and favorite poet^[9] and dedicated a poem to him entitled Маяковский в Париже (Mayakovsky in Paris).^[10] In 1967 the Taganka Theater staged the poetical performance Послушайте!, based on Mayakovsky's works. The role of the poet was played by Vladimir Vysotsky, who also was inspired by Mayakovsky's poetry.^[11]

In 1938 the Mayakovskaya Metro Station was opened to the public. In 1974 the Russian State Museum of Mayakovsky was opened in the center of Moscow in the building where Mayakovsky resided from 1919 to 1930.^[12]

Frank O'Hara wrote a poem named after him, "Mayakovsky" in which the speaker is standing in a bathtub, a probable reference to his play "The Bathhouse".

In 1986 English singer and songwriter Billy Bragg recorded the album Talking with the Taxman about Poetry, named after a namesake Mayakovsky's poem.

In 2007 Craig Volk's stage bio-drama "Mayakovsky Takes The Stage" (based on his screenplay "At The Top Of My Voice") won the PEN-USA Literary Award for Best Stage Drama^[13].

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Aizlewood, Robin. Verse form and meaning in the poetry of Vladimir Maiakovsky: Tragediia, Oblako v shtanakh, Fleita-pozvonochnik, Chelovek, Liubliu, Pro eto (Modern Humanities Research Association, London, 1989).
• Brown, E. J. Mayakovsky: a poet in the revolution (Princeton Univ. Press, 1973).
• Charters, Ann & Samuel. I love : the story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik (Farrar Straus Giroux, NY, 1979).
• Humesky, Assya. Majakovskiy and his neologisms (Rausen Publishers, NY, 1964).
• Jangfeldt, Bengt. Majakovsky and futurism 1917-1921 (Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1976).
• Lavrin, Janko. From Pushkin to Mayakovsky, a study in the evolution of a literature. (Sylvan Press, London, 1948).
• Mayakovsky, Vladimir (Patricia Blake ed., trans. Max Hayward and George Reavey). The bedbug and selected poetry. (Meridian Books, Cleveland, 1960).
• Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Mayakovsky: Plays. Trans. Guy Daniels. (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Il, 1995). ISBN 0-8101-1339-2.
• Mayakovsky, Vladimir. For the voice (The British Library, London, 2000).
• Mayakovsky, Vladimir (ed. Bengt Jangfeldt, trans. Julian Graffy). Love is the heart of everything : correspondence between Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik 1915-1930 (Polygon Books, Edinburgh, 1986).
• Mayakovsky, Vladimir (comp. and trans. Herbert Marshall). Mayakovsky and his poetry (Current Book House, Bombay, 1955).
• Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Selected works in three volumes (Raduga, Moscow, 1985).
• Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Selected poetry. (Foreign Languages, Moscow, 1975).
• Mayakovsky, Vladimir (ed. Bengt Jangfeldt and Nils Ake Nilsson). Vladimir Majakovsky: Memoirs and essays (Almqvist & Wiksell Int., Stockholm 1975).
• Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Satira ('Khudozh. lit.,' Moscow, 1969).
• Mikhailov, Aleksandr Alekseevich. Maiakovskii (Mol. gvardiia, Moscow, 1988).
• Novatorskoe iskusstvo Vladimira Maiakovskogo (trans. Alex Miller). Vladimir Mayakovsky: Innovator (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976).
• Noyes, George R. Masterpieces of the Russian drama (Dover Pub., NY, 1960).
• Nyka-Niliūnas, Alfonsas. Keturi vėjai ir keturvėjinikai (The Four Winds literary movement and its members), Aidai, 1949, No. 24. (Lithuanian)
• Rougle, Charles. Three Russians consider America : America in the works of Maksim Gorkij, Aleksandr Blok, and Vladimir Majakovsky (Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1976).
• Shklovskii, Viktor Borisovich. (ed. and trans. Lily Feiler). Mayakovsky and his circle (Dodd, Mead, NY, 1972).
• Stapanian, Juliette. Mayakovsky's cubo-futurist vision (Rice University Press, 1986).
• Terras, Victor. Vladimir Mayakovsky (Twayne, Boston, 1983).
• Vallejo, César (trans. Richard Schaaf) The Mayakovsky case (Curbstone Press, Willimantic, CT, 1982).
• Volk, Craig, "Mayakovsky Takes The Stage" (full-length stage drama), 2006 and "At The Top Of My Voice" (feature-length screeplay), 2002.
• Wachtel, Michael. The development of Russian verse : meter and its meanings (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Vladimir Mayakovsky

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Vladimir Mayakovsky

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Vladimir Mayakovsky

• Biography
• The 'raging bull' of Russian poetry article by Dalia Karpel at Haaretz.com, published on-line July 5, 2007
• Chapter on Russian Futurists incl Mayakovsky in Trotsky's Literature and Revolution
• English translations of two early poems, "So this is how I turned into a dog" and "Hey!"
• English translation of early poem, "I"
• English translations of 3 Film Treatments

Frank Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an Italian American painter and printmaker, significant in the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.

Biography[link]

Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, to parents of Italian descent.^[1] After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he attended Princeton University, where he majored in history and met Darby Bannard and Michael Fried. Early visits to New York art galleries influenced his artist development, and his work was influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Stella moved to New York in 1958, after his graduation. He is one of the most well-regarded postwar American painters still working today. Frank Stella has reinvented himself in consecutive bodies of work over the course of his five-decade career.^[2] Notably, he is heralded for creating abstract paintings that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting.^[3]

Late 1950s and early 1960s[link]

Upon moving to New York City, he reacted against the expressive use of paint by most painters of the abstract expressionist movement, instead finding himself drawn towards the "flatter" surfaces of Barnett Newman's work and the "target" paintings of Jasper Johns. He began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of something, be it something in the physical world, or something in the artist's emotional world. Stella married Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic, in 1961. Around this time he said that a picture was "a flat surface with paint on it - nothing more". This was a departure from the technique of creating a painting by first making a sketch. Many of the works are created by simply using the path of the brush stroke, very often using common house paint.

This new aesthetic found expression in a series of paintings, the Black Paintings (60) in which regular bands of black paint were separated by very thin pinstripes of unpainted canvas. Die Fahne Hoch! (1959) is one such painting. It takes its name ("The Raised Banner" in English) from the first line of the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the anthem of the National Socialist German Workers Party, and Stella pointed out that it is in the same proportions as banners used by that organization. It has been suggested that the title has a double meaning, referring also to Jasper Johns' paintings of flags. In any case, its emotional coolness belies the contentiousness its title might suggest, reflecting this new direction in Stella's work. Stella’s art was recognized for its innovations before he was twenty-five. In 1959, several of his paintings were included in "Three Young Americans" at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, as well as in "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (60). Stella joined dealer Leo Castelli’s stable of artists in 1959. From 1960 he began to produce paintings in aluminum and copper paint which, in their presentation of regular lines of color separated by pinstripes, are similar to his black paintings. However they use a wider range of colors, and are his first works using shaped canvases (canvases in a shape other than the traditional rectangle or square), often being in L, N, U or T-shapes. These later developed into more elaborate designs, in the Irregular Polygon series (67), for example.

Also in the 1960s, Stella began to use a wider range of colors, typically arranged in straight or curved lines. Later he began his Protractor Series (71) of paintings, in which arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders are arranged side-by-side to produce full and half circles painted in rings of concentric color. These paintings are named after circular cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s. The Irregular Polygon canvases and Protractor series further extended the concept of the shaped canvas.

Late 1960s and early 1970s[link]