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.)