VISUAL CULTURE

Lissitzky and the West: Internationalism and Proun

in Lutz Becker (ed.), Construction: Tatlin and After, Exhibition Catalogue, State Museum of Contemporary Art: Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki, pp.276-295

by Paul Overy

What sets El (Lazar) Lissitzky apart from his Soviet constructivist contemporaries is that the majority of his most important works were made in western Europe, or for western European audiences. His reputation was largely produced in the West, and this contributed to the validation of his work in the Soviet Union, although it also brought a considerable amount of criticism from his Soviet contemporaries. Lissitzky lived and worked in western Europe from late 1921 to mid-1925. The vocabulary and syntax of his work had been formed in the Soviet Union in the years immediately following the Revolution. But this was modified by his contact with European art and design and by his awareness of the cultural and political changes that were taking place in the Soviet Union during the period he was in the West.

The concept of Proun, which Lissitzky vigorously promoted during his the first years in the West, was crucial to the way in which he presented himself to his western European colleagues and western audiences as an artist, designer and propagandist for modernism. It undoubtedly played a critical role in the establishment of his reputation. Lissitzky seems to have first used the term shortly before leaving the Soviet Union, although he applied it retrospectively to the first abstract geometric paintings he had produced while working with Malevich and the UNOVIS group in Vitebsk from 1919. In western Europe, however, he defined Proun as a separate project, the origins of which lay in Suprematism, but which had developed independently in a rather different direction. During his first years in Germany, he projected Proun as his own particular contribution to the internationalist modernism which he was active in promoting in the West.

From the end of 1923, and in particular between 1924 and 1925 when he was living and working Switzerland while receiving treatment for tuberculosis, Lissitzky renewed his contacts with his contemporaries in the Soviet Union. He became closely linked with the ASNOVA group (the New Association of Architects) who were opposed to the hard-line Working Group of Constructivists and who emphasised the symbolic and pyschological elements in design. He promoted the work of ASNOVA designers through the Swiss avant-garde architectural magazine ABC. Spurred by his contacts with his colleagues in Russia, Lissitzky — who had trained as an architectural engineer in Darstamdt and Moscow — turned increasingly to architectural design at this time, although none of these projects were realized. While his promotion of Proun was now largely subsumed into his allegiance to ASNOVA, the derivation of his architectural forms from those elaborated in his earlier Proun paintings can be seen in the best-known of these, the skyscrapers he designed for Moscow ( Wolkenbügel in German: literally Cloud-Irons or Cloud-Stirrups) while working in Switzerland.

Lissitzky returned to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1925 where, during the second part of the decade, he continued to design — although not exclusively — for western audiences. Between 1926 and 1930, he received a number of commissions to design spaces for showing art works in German museums and for Soviet displays at international trade fairs. The Soviet propaganda publications which he designed in the 1930s were specifically aimed at readers in the West. In the museum displays (1926-1927), Lissitzky extended his notion of Proun into three-dimensional form. In his trade fair designs (1928-1930), he worked with photocollage and juxtapositions of photographs and text — a medium which the Soviet writer Tretyakov dubbed ‘factography’ — although elements of Proun construction are still apparent. Lissitzky’s last works, from 1932 to his death in 1941 — mostly layout designs for Soviet propaganda magazines — were an extension of factography, largely purged of constructivist or Proun elements.

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