Lissitzky, El

Lissitzky, El ( Eliezer Markowich) (1890–1941). Russian painter, designer, graphic artist, and architect. He studied engineering in Darmstadt and architecture in Moscow. In 1919 he became professor of architecture and graphic art at the art school in Vitebsk run by Chagall. One of his other colleagues there was Malevich, whose advocacy of the use of pure geometric form greatly influenced Lissitzky, notably in his series of abstract paintings to which he gave the collective name ‘Proun’ and which he referred to as ‘the interchange station between painting and architecture’. They do indeed look like plans for three-dimensional constructions, and at the same time Lissitzky made ambitious architectonic designs that were never realized. In 1921 he was sent to Berlin to arrange and design a major exhibition of abstract art at the Van Diemen Gallery—the show that first comprehensively presented the modern movement in Russia to the West (it was later shown also in Amsterdam). While in Berlin he made contact with van Doesburg and members of De Stijl and with Moholy-Nagy, who spread Lissitzky's ideas through his teaching at the Bauhaus. In 1923 he went with Gabo to a Bauhaus exhibition at Weimar and there met Gropius. From 1923 to 1925 he lived in Switzerland, and (after a short visit to Russia) from 1925 to 1928 in Hanover. He returned to Russia in 1928 and settled in Moscow. By this time he had abandoned painting and devoted himself mainly to typography and industrial design. His work included several propaganda and trade exhibitions, notably the Soviet Pavilion of the 1939 World's Fair in New York, and his dynamic techniques of photomontage, printing, and lighting had wide influence. For a considerable time Lissitzky was the best known of the Russian abstract artists in the West. In his mature work he achieved a fusion between the Suprematism of Malevich (often using his diagonal axis), the Constructivism of Tatlin and Rodchenko, and features of the Neo-Plasticism of Mondrian.