El Lissitzky: The Experience of Totality

The epitome of the modernist engineer-architect-artist, El Lissitzky is one of the most influential and genuinely experimental artists of the early twentieth century. Equally prolific as a painter, designer, architect and photographer, he connected countries and cultures as a leading ambassador between the Soviet and European avant-gardes of the 1920s, promoting Suprematist and Constructivist art in the West and European abstract movements in Russia. For El Lissitzky, art was conceived not as a personal expression and production of objects, but rather as a collective and social activity. Working with Malevich, he developed the new visual language of Suprematism, which he applied not only to painting, but also to print and book works, architectural and theater projects, ceramics, educational theory and propaganda. Fusing this array of media, his three-dimensional work "Proun Room" used the actual space of a room to merge painting, sculptural installation and architecture; similarly, with his students he ....