Constructivism, De Stijl, Suprematism Lissitzky [Lissitsky], El [Lisitsky, El’; Lisitsky, Lazar’ (Markovich)]
(b Pochinok, Smolensk province, 23 Nov 1890; d Moscow, 30 Dec 1941). Russian draughtsman, architect, printmaker, painter, illustrator, designer, photographer, teacher and theorist.He had a great influence on the design work from the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements, and on modern commercial art and design.

After attending school in Smolensk, he enrolled in 1909 at the Technische Highschool Darmstadt, to study architecture and engineering. He also travelled extensively in Europe, however, and he made a tour of Italy to study art and architecture. He frequently made drawings of the architectural monuments he encountered on his travels. These early graphic works were executed in a restrained, decorative style reminiscent of Russian Art Nouveau book illustration. His drawings of Vitebsk and Smolensk (1910; Eindhoven, Stedel. Van Abbemus.), for example, show a professional interest in recording specific architectural structures and motifs, but they are simultaneously decorative graphic works in their own right and highly suitable for publication. This innate awareness of the importance of controlling the design of the page was to remain a feature of Lissitzky’s work throughout radical stylistic transformations. He also recorded buildings in Ravenna, Venice and elsewhere in Italy in 1913. These works, using line and colour wash, retain an informative structural description while also allowing a more atmospheric evocation of place. The early architectural drawings as a whole show him using his talents as a graphic artist from the beginning of his career to analyse architecture in particular and show the synthesis of artistic and architectural interests that were to define much of his mature work. He graduated in architecture from the Technological Institute of Riga (evacuated to Moscow) in 1915 and to a substantial degree remained an architect throughout his career.
In 1919 Lissitzky began to work on a series of abstract geometric paintings that he named “Proun,” an acronym for the Russian words translated as “Projects for the Affirmation of the New.” These paintings were a major contribution to the Constructivist art movement. In 1921 he became professor at the state art school in Moscow, but he left his country at year's end, when the Soviet government turned against modern art. He went to Germany, where he met the artist-designer László Moholy-Nagy, who transmitted Lissitzky's ideas on art to western Europe and the United States through his teaching at the Bauhaus.

Between 1925 and 1928 Lissitzky lived in Hannover, where he cofounded a number of periodicals propagating the most progressive artistic tendencies of the 1920s. In the winter of 1928–29 he returned to Moscow, where he continued to be an innovative force. His experiments in spatial construction led him to devise new techniques in exhibiting, printing, photomontage, and architecture, which have had much influence in western Europe. ...

(PLease Login to see the complete biography.)