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El Lissitzky: Architect of the Russian Avant-Garde
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19660 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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9 / 1991 |
1,058 Words |
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Jeannine Fielder and Louis Kaplan
Jeannine Fielder and Louis Kaplan write on the arts from
Berlin. |
Recognition of the Russian avant-garde as an integral and vital part of western European artistic and architectural innovation has grown exponentially with the onset of glasnost. El Lissitzky (1890-1941): Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer, the current centennial exhibition celebrating the career of Russian-born architect Eliezar Lissitzky, was organized and first shown by the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. A quick leap back over decades of sterile Socialist Realism lets us rediscover the vibrant, abstract universe of a non-Euclidean master geometrician of form.
Lissitzky acted as a cultural liaison between the artists of the Soviet revolution and the avant-garde of central Europe in the 1920s. He worked on various projects, for a time in Germany, Switzerland, Holland, and France. He is noted for having edited (together with Hans Arp) the most important guidebook to the entire European avant-garde scene from 1914 to 1924, The Isms of Art.
Lissitzky's life is a casebook study of the powerful impact of the Russian Revolution on artistic life in the Soviet Union. Although trained as an architect in Darmstadt, Germany, he began his artistic career as a book designer as part of the Russian Jewish renaissance of the mid-1910s. His work soon attracted the attention of Marc Chagall, who invited him to the Vitebsk art school to teach architecture and the graphic arts. With the arrival of Kasimir Malevich at the school, he soon broke away from traditional art and conventional perspective. Together they formed, in 1920, the collective UNOVIS, which called for a "Supremacist" revolution and a new concept of spatial relations. Lissitzky's particular contribution was a series of abstract paintings to which he gave the name PROUN, an acronym for "projects for the affirmation of the new."
In 1921, he began teaching at Vkhutemas--the Russian Bauhaus--in Moscow as head of the faculty of architecture. Two years later, he joined a group of new architects (ASNOVA) who wanted to raise their discipline to a level where its formal and artistic demands could accommodate modern science and technology. But at the end of the year, he left his country when the Soviet government turned against modern art. He went to Germany, where he met the artist-designer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who translated Lissitzky's ideas on painting and mass communication to much of western Europe and the United States through his teaching at the Bauhaus.
In what Lissitzky considered his most important work, he constructed pangeometric architectural spaces and created as
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