Lissitzky, El

Lissitzky, El ( Lazar Lissitzky) (1890–1941). Russian painter, designer, graphic artist, and architect. He was born at Pochinok near Smolensk and from 1909 to 1914 studied engineering at Darmstadt, returning to Russia on the outbreak of the First World War. Exempt from military service because of poor health, he worked in an architect's office in Moscow and collaborated with Chagall on the illustration of Jewish books (he was an expert lithographer). In 1918 Chagall became head of the art school at Vitebsk and in the following year he appointed Lissitzky professor of architecture and graphic art. One of his colleagues at Vitebsk was Malevich, whose advocacy of the use of pure geometric form influenced Lissitzky, notably in the 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, after a brief period as professor at Vkhutemas in Moscow, he was sent to Berlin, where he arranged and designed the major exhibition of abstract art at the Van Diemen Gallery that first comprehensively presented the modern movement in Russia to the West (it was later shown in Amsterdam). While in Berlin he worked on Constructivist magazines; he also 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, then (after a short visit to Russia) from 1925 to 1928 in Hanover. He returned to Russia permanently 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 many years Lissitzky was the best known of the Russian abstract artists in the West. In his mature work he achieved a fusion of the Suprematism of Malevich, the Constructivism of Tatlin and Rodchenko, and features of the Neo-Plasticism of Mondrian.