El Lissitzky Editorial

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EL LISSITZKY Revolution in Design

An Excerpt from Graphic Design: A New History By Stephen J. Eskilson

Revolution in Design

El Lissitzy, Of Two Squares, 1922

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El Lissitzky – real name Lazar’ Markovich Lisiitskii – joined the art school at Vitebsk in 1919. There he worked in the Suprematist idiom, enchanted by the intuitive aesthetic style championed by Malevich. Lissitzky soon devised his own manner of abstraction based on Suprematist principles, adding elements of threedimensionality, rotation, texture and even realistic rendering to his repertoire, in contrast to Malevich’s more reductive approach. Lissitzky called this work Proun, or “Project for the Affirmation of the New Art,” a name that resonates alongside UNOVIS in suggesting a role for Suprematism in building a new society.

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Examples of Proun graphics include the poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge and the children’s book Of Two Squares that Lissitzky published in the Dutch journal De Stijl.

The original title for the children’s book in its Russian edition was Suprematist Story of Two Squares in Six Constructions, and it featured a red square and a black square, which unite to join the revolutionary cause.

Stephen J. Eskilson

El Lissitzky, The Constructor, 1924.

K Despite his early commitment to Suprematism, Lissitzky also collaborated with the Constructivists, so that his works after 1921 represents an amalgam of the Suprematist exaltation of intuition and abstract ideals with the Constructivists’ belief that the utilitarian work was morally superior to fine art. A photomontage from 1924 called The Constructor demonstrates how Lissitzky adopted the Constructivist theme of “artist as engineer,” superimposing a hand holding a compass across a selfportrait. The combination of eye and hand, uniting intellectual and manual work, was an important part of the new identity sought by Russian artists in the 1920s.

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Revolution in Design

P E L LI SS I T Z G E R MAN KY I N Y

El Lissitzky, Neuer, 1924.

Despite his strong desire to support the Soviet state, Lissitzky differed from his colleagues in that throughout the 1920s, he traveled widely outside the USSR. Fluent in German, he was largely responsible through his lectures, publications, and participation in conferences, for fueling the interest in Russian avant-grade art among Europeans. He spent most of the years 1922-5 in Germany, where he had numerous contacts with member of De stijl, Dada, and Bauhaus. Lissizky continually networked with other artists, attending events such as the Constructivist Conference organized in Weimar by Theo van Doesburg in 1922. The German state was a natural fit for Lissizky, because it had longstanding trade ties with Russia, was considered a pariah state after the First World War (like the USSR), and hosted a diverse community of artists interested in pursuing new abstract styles.

Lissitzky’s belief that Constructivist

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El Lissitzky, cover for Bauhaus Asymetric Style, 1924.

aesthetics could be separated from their political origins in Communism was in staunch opposition to the view of many other artists, such as Klutsis or Rodchenko, who felt the ideology, not art, was at the heart of the project. Scholars now generally separate Russian Constructivism, with its strong ideological bent, from “International Constructivism,” as practiced in a diverse ways by European artists devoted to geometric abstraction.

El Lissizky and Kurt Schwitters, Merz 8/9, 1924.W

Schwitters helped Lissitzky, who was suffering from tuberculosis, find work designing graphics for the Pelkin Ink Company based in Hanover. One of the resulting advertisements shows Lissitzky borrowed a motif from Constructivism, draining it of revolutionary ideology in the process. The ad employs the compass-wielding hand from his photomontage The constructor, now transformed from the hand of a revolutionary artist into the hand of a Western consumer. The original had featured the artist’s commanding eye, which has here been replaced by a bottle of ink. The cuff on the arm in the advertisement has also been changed from something plain to the French cuffs, complete with cuff links, of a well-manicured member of the Bourgeoisie.

Stephen J. Eskilson

In 1924, Lissitzky collaborated in Hanover with Kurt Schwitters on a copy of the latter’s Merz Journal. The resulting issue #8/9, nicknamed “Nature,” encouraged artist to incorporate natural forms in their work.

The cover illustrated here displays a startlingly asymmetrical design, the horizontal lines of red text resting on a blue grid that appears to be cantilevered from the left margin. This dynamic asymmetry is balanced by the centered banner at the top of the cover. Later installments of Merz, such as issue #11, show Schwitters integrating Constructivist principles with his Dadaist inclinations.

El Lissizky, Pelican Drawing Ink, 1925.

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Revolution in Design

One Important advantage of Lissitzky during his German sojourn was the ready availability of up-to-date printing equipment, so that he has never forced to “fake� his typographic experiments by using hand-drawn lettering that pretended to be mechanical type, something Rodchenko had to do on several occasions. In 1923, in Berlin, Lissitzky actually published one his most important works for a Russian audience, of collection of poems by Mayakovsky called For the Voice.

El Lissizky, For the Voice 1923.

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El Lissizky, Beat the Whites with the red Wedge, 1919.

Stephen J. Eskilson

Using only the standard elements of letterpress available in any printer’s typecase –letters, rules, symbols – Lissitzky created one the most inventive series of layouts ever seen. The book was indexed with tabs so that each individual poem could be readily found by someone reciting the poems for an audience, as indicated by the Russian title, which can also be translated as “Poems for Reading Out Loud.” Lissitzky’s designs to illustrate the poems bear a closer relationship to the text than the series of photomontages that Rodchenko made for another of Maykovsky’s books. For example the poem entitled “Our March” features letters that seem literally to march across the page. Most of the elements in For the Voice–the mixing of differently scaled type, the diagonal axes, even the overall sense of kineticism– had already appeared in Dada and Futurist publications. But, like Klutsis in his photomontage spartakiada Moscow, here Lissitzky manages to assert some sort of control over the Dadaist chaos, creating a hybrid work that combines the frenetic energy of Dada with the discipline of Constructivism.

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Revolution in Design

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El Lissitzky, Runner in the City, 1926.

Lissitzky returned to Russia in 1925, although he continued to travel and maintain his contacts among the European avant-garde. In a photomontage of 1926, he took up the theme of the athlete as hero in a dynamic work that combines a hurdler with a double exposure of Times Square in New York City. That American city, a continual source of inspiration for the avant-grade who romanticized its brilliant displays of night-time illumination and its iconic status, was at the heart of the most technologically sophisticated nation the world. Lissitzky has stretched the image on the horizontal axis by cutting the montage into stripes and pasting them down the slight spaces in between each column. Showing a concern with the speed of the modern city that mathes Vertov’s, Lissitzky created an image that captures the simultaneity favored

by Futurism.

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Stephen J. Eskilson

El Lissitzky, Russian Exhibition, 1929.

On his return to the USSR, Lissitzky was instrumental in the production of Russian exhibitions in Europe. In 1929, he designed a poster advertising an exhibition of Russian applied arts to be held at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Zurich, Switzerland. The image displays Lissitzky’s continuing commitment to the Soviet cause, despite his international interests. It shows two robust young Russians, male and female, merged to symbolize the state’s gender equality, staring out into a hopeful future. Below them, the words “Russian Exhibition” have been neatly intergraded with a photograph of the exhibition building (also designed by Lissitzky) so that the letters form a banner that recedes into space in the same perspective.

These words and the building itself appear to the cantilevered off the red band that runs vertically up the left margin.

El Lissitzky, USSR in Construction No. 9, 1936

El Lissitzky, USSR in Construction No. 4-5, 1933

In Russia itself, the Constructivist artists faced increasing political pressure throughout the 1930s to conform to Stalin’s call for greater realism in the arts. It is obvious in the photomontages Constructivist aesthetic with heroic images in the style of “Socialist Realism.”

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Revolution in Design

El Lissitzky, Broom, June 1922

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n This project was produced as partial fulfillment of the requirements of GDES 311, Typographic Systems, in the Graphic Design Department at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, Fall 2011. Ray Eastburn, designer. Rachele Riley, faculty advisor.

The main text is set in the typeface, Akzidenz-Grotesk, created by G端nter Gerhard Lange in 1896 at 11/14.5 points with runner and folio text set the same. The layout was created using Adobe InDesign CS5.

This passage an excerpt from Graphic Design: A New History written by Stephen J. Eskilson and published by Yale University Press in New Haven, CT.

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