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Lissitzky+

This research project was made possible by an invitation to redisplay works by the twentieth century Russian artist and designer Lazar Lissitzky. The Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven has a major archive of his work, which it asked me to display. They also commissioned three-dimensional models designed but never completed by Lissitzky, including dynamic new designs for the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, on which Malevich had worked ten years earlier.

Lissitzky studied both the Constructivism of Vladimir Tatlin and the geometry of Suprematism led by Kazimir Malevich. He saw construction a method of creative beyond art altogether, while Malevich described his new geometric technique as the death and rebirth of art. Bolshevik communists after 1917 used both to attack art as luxury goods, promoting instead a collective culture. As an expert lithographer, photographer, and designer of posters, books and exhibitions, Lissitzky repeatedly travelled West on a Soviet passport, to collaborate with Dadaists, De Stijl and the Bauhaus. The new display considers each stage of his career.

Lissitzky wanted to collaborate with artists including Schwitters, Arp, and Gabo, as well as architects including Van Doesburg and Mart Stam, and poets including Vladimir Mayakovsky. This was his creative and ideological aim.

My research focused on many Lissitzky documents and drawings at Eindhoven. Lissitzky+: Victory over the Sun, the new presentation commissioned by Director Charles Esche, filled five rooms of the museum, making the research publically accessible. Study models subsequently travelled to Łódź, Beijing, St Petersburg and Moscow.

I also published a book introducing Lissitzky, and contributed to the latest incarnation of the material in the catalogue El Lissitzky / Ilya Kabakov [2012].