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| BIOGRAPHY OF THE
ARTIST |
El Lissitzky was born Eleazar Markovich Lisitskii in Vitebsk in
1890. From 1909 until 1914 Lissitzky studied architecture in
Darmstadt. In 1919 Lissitzky became a professor at the art
school in Vitebsk, where he met Marc Chagall and Kasimir
Malevich. At that time Lissitzky turned to the Suprematist
theory of art and the UNOWIS group, beginning to work on a
series of abstract paintings he called 'Proun' ['For the New
Art']. Between 1921 and 1925 Lissitzky worked in Germany, the
Netherlands and Switzerland but became a professor at the Moscow
Art Academy in 1921. He founded the international journal 'Vesc'
in 1922 and devoted himself increasingly to typography and
exhibition design. Between 1923 and 1925 Lissitzky designed the
'Wolkenbügel' project [office blocks for Moscow, some with
splayed legs straddling streets]. In 1925 Lissitzky returned to
Moscow and taught at the post-Revolutionary art school Vkhutemas.
Between 1926 and 1934 Lissitzky designed several exhibitions.
Lissitzky worked on the journal 'The USSR in Architecture', for
which Lissitzky and his wife, Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, designed
a great many issues. Lissitzky was a Russian avant-garde artist
who did not limit himself to developing a form of abstract
painting but rather extended the new functionalism to
photography, book design, architecture and urban planning. His
enormous versatility enabled El Lissitzky to forge links between
the Russian Constructivists and Neo-Plasticism (De Stijl), the
Bauhaus and Dada. As a painter and architect, Lissitzky was both
personally and artistically close to the painter and
architectural model-maker Kasimir Malevich. El Lissitzky died in
Moscow in 1941. |
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