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Home , El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich

Experiment/3KcrrepHMeHT, 1 (1995), 257-63.

PETER NISBET

EL LISSITZKY AND THE NEW CULTURE

The article below, translated into English for the first time, is significant for the study of (lazar Markovich lissitzky, 1890-1941) (Fig. 86) in at least three ways. 1 The first published statement by this influential figure of the Soviet and European avant-gardes in the early decades of our century, "The New Culture" .presents, in nuce, several important features of lissitzky's thinking. It was written at a crucial moment in his art and life, when he was emerging as one of the most productive and versa• tile modernists of his generation/ By the time he was twenty-eight in mid-1919, when this statement was published, Lissitzky seemed to have found his vocation as a book il• lustrator, working in a sophisticated, mildly Cubist style. After training as an architect and engineer in and Rl,!ssia, he was becoming in• creasingly involved in the revival of Jewish culture which had absorbed many of his contemporaries since early in the century. 3 In and around 1916, lissitzky travelled to old to record their traditional decoration, and even during the time of Revolution and Civil War, he continued to concentrate his efforts in this field (designing and illustrating, for example, numerous children's books) (Fig. 87). On this level, lissitzky was following his mentor and fellow supporter of the so-called

1. Lazar Lisitsky, 'Novaia kul tura,' Shkola i revoliutsiia (), Nos. 24-25, Aug. 16, 1919, p. 11. I should like to thank Musya Giants of the Russian Research Center, Harvard University, for advice on the translation; and the Institute of Modern , Los Angeles, for supplying me with a copy of the original text. Illustrations have been added by the editor. 2. This commentary, prepared in 1988, draws on materi.al published by the present author in El Ussitzkv, 1890-1941. Exhibition catalog by Peter Nisbet. Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, 1987. Documentation and elaboration of many of the · points made here may be found in 'An Introduction to El Lissitzky, • pp. 13~52. References to the summary catalog of Lissitzky's on pp. 177-202 are hereafter abbreviated as Nisbet Typ. Cat. followed by the respective number. A revised and expanded version of the present discussion may now be found in Peter Nisbet, "EI Lissitzky in the Proun Years: A Study of His Work and Thought, 1919-1927," unpublished Pd.D. dissertation, Yale Univ., 1995. 3. The fullest account of this movement, with an extensive bibliography, is available in Tradition af!d Revolution. The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912-1928. Catalog of exhibition at The Israel Museum. Jerusalem, 1987. 258 Experiment,/3KcnepHMeHT

jewish renaissance, .4 Indeed, it was Chagall who was largely responsible for summoning Lissitzky from Kiev-where he was active in Jewish educational organisations-to Vitebsk, where he joined the teaching staff of the local Svomas (Free State Art Studios), founded and directed by Chagall on the basis of the Vitebsk Popular Art Studio. "The New Culture" is Lissitzky's programmatic statement of intent for the new department of architecture and graphic art there (Fig. 88). By the end of 1919, however, Lissitzky had undergone a radical shift and a virtual conversion to the power and authority of geometric ab• stract art, convinced t~at it could transform both the everyday world and human consciousness. This volte face is represented .by Lissitzky's transfer of allegiance from Chagall to Kazimir. Malevich, the founder and leading exponent of (an art made up almost exclusively of recti• linear planes of pure color disposed intuitively over. an undifferentiated white background). Malevich arrived to teach in Vitebsk in the fall of 1919 and his art and thought catalysed the production of lissitzky's so called Prouns-those "Constructivist" , prints, and of the following seven years which, as Lissitzky's neologistic acronym tells us, were "Projects for the Affirmation of the New.• "The New Culture" testifies· to Lissitzky's frame of mind on the eve of this momentous change. Understandably, the ~ssay deals with issues of art education, stressing the need for a new universality which dispenses with 'old-fashioned specialisation Oust as , as lissitzky alleges in his somewhat p~rfunctory opening reference, to the new social order, overcomes the division of labor). Typical of all Lissitzky's future writings is the use of a mechanical metaphor for the bad (specialists as trains on fixed tracks) in contrast to an organic one for the good (where vital cre• ativity is "cultivated" and "fertilized"). This focus on universality and the concomitant need for versatility and flexibility has a personal dimension. By 1919 lissitzky himself had contributed to almost all the fields that would later characterize his cre• ative career, i.e., , printmaking, architecture, illustration, and book design. Indeed, a major stimulus to lissitzky's "conversion" to non-objec• tive art was, surely, Malevich's promise of a potential and creative "style," method, and philosophy that would integrate these disparate fields. Significantly, Lissitzky not only highlights the universalitY of unfettered

4. For a s.urv~y of Ussitzky's work in,this. period, see Ruth Apter-Gabriel, 'Eilissitzky's Jewish Works,' in Tradition and Revolution., pp.101-25. A translation of Ussitzky's subse• quent reminisence of his 1916 trip, published in, Yiddish and Hebrew in early 1923, is available in El Lissitzky ., pp. 55-58. For lissitzky's Jewish illustrations, also see Nisbet Typ. Cat. 1917/1-6, 1918/1-3.''1919/1-10, 1922/17, 1923/1.