30 Dec 1941
A 51-year-old architect and designer died of tuberculosis in Moscow. El Lissitzky. Avant-garde artist. Author of the "horizontal skyscrapers" and "city of the future" projects. Creator of the propaganda posters "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge" and "All for the Front, All for Victory."
A room is meant for a person, not for a room
The city will become a single whole, and not a sum of individual apartments, houses, shops and taverns.
Real name - Lazarus. Was born in Smolensk province in 1890. Father is a craftsman, mother is a housewife.
During his childhood he lived with his parents in Vitebsk, where they opened a china shop. He also attended a private drawing school there.
In 1909 he graduated from the Aleksandrovsk real school in Smolensk. Studied at the Faculty of Architecture of the Higher Polytechnic School in Darmstadt. He worked part-time as a mason and traveled around Europe.
In 1914, having defended his diploma with honors, he returned to his homeland due to the outbreak of World War I. In 1918, he graduated Riga Polytechnic Institute (evacuated to Moscow) with the title of engineer-architect. He worked in an architectural bureau, participated in exhibitions, and illustrated children's books in Yiddish. He was one of the founders of the Cultural League of Jewish National Art in Kiev.
In 1919, by invitation Marc Chagall moved to Vitebsk. He taught at the People's Art School. Under the influence of Malevich He turned to Suprematism (the art of "non-objective reality" in the spirit of the Black Square). He was an active member of its society, UNOVIS ("Affirmers of New Art"), and performed under the artistic name "El Lissitzky."
At the same time, he created his famous propaganda poster in the spirit of Suprematism: “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge!”
Red is like a beating pulse. White is the color of hygiene and space. Black is the color of annihilating volume.
Lived in Germany and Switzerland. Published together with Ilya Ehrenburg He designed exhibitions for the magazine "Vesh" (Thing), which covered avant-garde artists. His studio produced the "Lenin Tribune" project, which caused a sensation at the Vienna International Exhibition as an example of Soviet art.
He developed the concept of Prouns (“projects for the affirmation of the new”), with the emergence of flat Suprematism into volume.
[This is] a transfer station on the way from painting to architecture
In 1925 he returned to the Soviet Union and taught at the Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops.
He attempted to address the vertical zoning issues of new Moscow development. He proposed a project for "horizontal skyscrapers," or, as they were jokingly called, "sky-high irons." They would have helped preserve Moscow's historic buildings, avoiding the demolition of old buildings, and provided maximum usable space with minimal support. The project was never realized.
The purpose of architecture is to transform emptiness into space, that is, into something that our minds can comprehend as an organized unity.
In 1932, a printing house for the Ogonyok magazine was built according to his design, with large square and small round windows.
Developed projects for small functional apartments with transformable and built-in furniture.
He was interested in photography and photomontage.
Art can no longer simply be a mirror; it must act as an organizer of people's consciousness. No form of representation can be as easily understood by the masses as photography.
In 1937, his photomontage on the "Stalinist" Constitution was published—a thematic series spanning four issues of the magazine "USSR in Construction." That same year, his photomontage "Young People Compare the Old Constitution with the New" was released.
During the Great Patriotic War, he created the propaganda poster "Everything for the Front, Everything for Victory." His final work was the poster "Let's Have More Tanks."
His family was subjected to repression: one stepson survived the Nazi camps, the other died in Stalin's. His wife was German. Sophie Küppers — together with their common son Boris, they were sent to Novosibirsk. She managed to take Lissitzky's works with her; in the 1960s, she donated the archive to the Tretyakov Gallery and published a book about her husband.
