Ideology and Identity: in

Christina Lodder

El Lissitzky is an enigmatic and fascinating creative figure with a multi-faceted identity and a complex set of allegiances.1 He straddled the worlds of the shtetl and the technologically advanced West. Having grown up in provincial Belorussia (today Belarus), he studied archi- tectural engineering in . Back in his homeland during the First World War and the Russian Revolutions of 1917, he moved from participating in the Jewish artistic renaissance of the late 1910s to embracing the art and principles of the machine-age avant-garde. Subsequently, his work has been seen as comprising two distinct and mutually exclusive entities: on the one hand the Jewish illustrations of around 1915–1919, and, on the other, the abstract paintings and designs that he made from 1919 onwards under the influence of Suprematism.2 In Berlin in the early 1920s, his intense activity as a promoter of avant-garde creative approaches has served to reinforce the impression that he had completely turned his back on his Jew- ish identity in favour of the rigorously abstract pictorial vocabulary of Suprematism. To many art historians, such as Peter Nisbet, the stylistic change seems ‘abrupt and total’.3 Even to a specialist like Chimen Abramsky, the period of Lissitzky’s Jewish work appears ‘iso- lated from the rest of his artistic achievements.’4 Likewise, the major works that he produced in Berlin appear to have ‘no connection with anything Jewish’.5 From this perspective, Lissitzky’s artistic trajectory seems to move from the production of explicitly Jewish works like his

1 See Nancy Perloff, ‘The Puzzle of El Lissitzky’s Artistic Identity’, in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, eds. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2003), 1–26. 2 See, for instance, Peter Nisbet, ‘An Introduction to El Lissitzky’, in El Lissitzky 1890–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums, 1987), 13. 3 Nisbet, ‘An Introduction to El Lissitzky’, 17. 4 Chimen Abramsky, ‘El Lissitzky as Jewish Illustrator and Typographer’, Studio International, vol. 172, no. 882 (October 1966), 182. 5 Ruth Apter-Gabriel, ‘El Lissitzky’s Jewish Works’, in Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art 1912–1928, ed. Ruth Apter-Gabriel ( Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1987), 121. 340 christina lodder illustrations for A Mischievous Boy of 1919 (Fig. 1) to painting abstract canvases that he called Prouns (Proekt utverzhdeniya novogo—Project for the Affirmation of the New, Fig. 2), and ultimately in the late 1920s, to exploiting avant-garde devices to create persuasive propaganda dis- plays on behalf of the Soviet government, as epitomized by his work for the Pressa exhibition of 1928 in (Fig. 3). In other words, Lissitzky was successively the Jewish artist, the Suprematist, and the Stalinist propagandist.6 Yet this interpretation of Lissitzky’s development is perhaps unduly schematic. Did Lissitzky’s adoption of an abstract vocabulary in 1919, and his commitment to communism completely override his Jewish allegiances? Lissitzky himself indicated that there was a certain over- lap, giving the period of his Jewish books as ‘1917–1920’.7 Despite the artist’s assertions to the contrary, several art historians have con- tested the permanence of his split from Jewish culture. Igor Dukhan, for instance, has argued that although Lissitzky was predominantly a Jewish artist 1916–1919 and ‘universal’, i.e. concerned with abstrac- tion 1919–1921, in Berlin he embraced both identities and sought to synthesize the approaches of the Jewish, Russian and international avant-gardes.8 For Dukhan, Jewish messianism informed Lissitzky’s seminal theoretical text, ‘A and Pangeometry’, published in Berlin, and the artist’s concept of the proun as a visualization of ‘infinity’.9 More radically, Alan Birnholz suggested a more enduring link between Lis- sitzky’s abstraction and Jewish culture. Birnholz argued that Lissitzky transcended his Jewish identity with the Prouns,10 while his concept of his role as an avant-garde artist recalled the notion of the Hassidic zad- dik who was the prophet who enabled his fellow men to achieve a bet- ter society.11 For Birnholz, the concept of the Proun reflected aspects of the Kabbala, and the Proun Room of 1923 possessed affinities with the synagogue.12 Similarly, Andrzej Turowski has suggested that the

6 Perloff, ‘The Puzzle of El Lissitzky’s Artistic Identity’, 1–23; and Nisbet, ‘An Introduction to El Lissitzky’, 13–52. 7 ‘Autobiography by El Lissitzky’, in El Lissitzky (Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1976), 88. 8 Igor Dukhan, ‘El Lissitzky—Jewish as Universal: From Jewish Style to Pangeometry’, in Ars Judaica 3 (2007), 9. 9 Dukhan, ‘El Lissitzky—Jewish as Universal’, 1–20. 10 Alan C. Birnholz, ‘El Lissitzky and the Jewish Tradition’, Studio International, vol. 186, no. 959 (October 1973), 132. 11 Birnholz, ‘El Lissitzky and the Jewish Tradition’, 135. 12 Birnholz, ‘El Lissitzky and the Jewish Tradition’, 132–135.