Situating
El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow
Edited by
Nancy Perloff and Brain Reed. Los Angeles
CA: Getty Research Institute, 2003. 288
pp., 15 color and 69 b/w illustrations.
Softbound, $39.95. ISBN 0-89236-677-X.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, Department
of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar
Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A. E-mail: ballast@netins.net.
Of all the episodes
in art and design history, there are few
that I find more intriguing than Russian
Constructivism. Within that movement, among
its most gifted participants was a Russian-Jewish
artist named Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (1890-1941),
invariably referred to now as El Lissitsky.
While it is not inaccurate to categorize
him as an "artist," one goal of this volume
of essays is to show that he was far, far
more than simply that. At the very least,
he was an architect, an engineer, a painter
of Jewish folk tales, an abstract painter,
an author and illustrator of children's
books, a typographer, a book designer, an
exhibition designer, a photographer, an
avant-garde practitioner of installation
art, an advertising designer, and a Marxist
propagandist in the Stalinist era. The eight
main essays in this book initially came
from a conference at the Getty Institute
in Los Angeles in December 1998, an event
that was held in conjunction with that center's
exhibition of a series of new acquisitions
having to do with Lissitzky. Conveniently,
dozens of full-color images, a chronology
and background texts can still be easily
accessed on the internet at http://getty.edu/research/tools/digital/lissitzky/index2.html.
The website is well worth the visit, as
is this beautifully printed account of Lissitzky's
short, productive life (he died of tuberculosis
at age 51). The book's eight essays are
divided into three sections, each representing
a topical theme. The first, titled "East-West,"
discusses his early activities as a Suprematist
painter and his close affiliations with
De Stijl, Dada and other branches of the
European avant-garde; the second, titled
"Hand-Eye," deals with his belief that art
should not just represent what is, but,
in a kind of hybrid blending of art and
engineering, it should instead be constructive
(hence the term "constructivism"), meaning
that it should result in unique components
or experiences that were not pre-existing
(in this regard, his so-called "demonstration
rooms" are especially interesting); and
the third, titled "Propaganda," addresses
some difficult questions about the willingness
with which Lissitzky contributed to agitprop,
and the "grim political evil" that we now
associate with the Stalinist period in Russian
history. If we condemn Ludwig Hohlwein (an
extraordinary German graphic designer) for
the propagandistic effectiveness of his
posters for the Nazis, should we not raise
similar questions about the work of El Lissitzky?
It is not the purpose of books of this kind
to arrive at definitive answers. The challenge
of such studies, as Nancy Perloff tells
us in her introduction, "is not to shift
the focus in one direction but to continually
address the inescapable pull of both."
(Reprinted by permission
from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol.
19, No. 2, Winter 2003-2004.)