About Two Squares

About Two Squares PDF

Author: El Lissitzky

Publisher: MIT Press (MA)

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 62

ISBN-13:

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El Lissitzky's About 2 Squares is a story about how two squares, one red, one black, transform a world. The commentary, More About 2 Squares, boxed in the same slipcase, provides a detailed analysis of this seminal work.

El Lissitzky on Paper

El Lissitzky on Paper PDF

Author: Samuel Johnson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2024-06-12

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 022652437X

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An examination of the importance of paper in the work of Soviet artist, designer, and architect El Lissitzky. Russian artist El Lissitzky’s work spans painting, photography, theatrical and exhibition design, architecture, graphic design, typography, and literature. He was active in the Jewish cultural renaissance, formed an artists’ collective with Kazimir Malevich, was a key figure in the dissemination of early Soviet art in Western Europe, and designed propaganda for the Stalin regime. With such a varied history and body of work, scholars have often struggled to identify the core principles that tied his diverse oeuvre together. In El Lissitzky on Paper, Samuel Johnson argues that Lissitzky’s commitment to creating works on paper is a constant that unites his endeavors. Paper played a key role in the utopian projects that informed Lissitzky’s work, and the artist held a commitment to print as the premier medium of immediate public exchange. Johnson analyzes and contextualizes this idea against the USSR’s strict management of this essential resource and the growth of new media communications, including the telephone, telegraph, and film. With this book, Johnson presents a significant contribution to scholarship on this major artist, revealing new connections between Lissitzky’s work in architecture and visual art and bringing to light sources from largely unstudied Russian archives.

Design: El Lissitzky

Design: El Lissitzky PDF

Author: John Milner

Publisher: Antique Collectors Club Dist

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13:

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El (Eleazar) Lissitzky (1890-1941) was a vital force in the revolutionary period in Russia. Having first trained in engineering and architecture and later becoming a painter and illustrator, his creative activity ranged across disciplines. This he called 'the interchange station between painting and architecture', and it made him enormously influential - as a painter, graphic designer, teacher, propagandist, exhibition designer, and also as an architectural theorist. Lissitzky had studied in Germany before the Russian Revolution, and after it he became a vital link between Soviet culture and Western art groups, travelling officially to present Soviet art in the West, but at the same time contacting many leading figures in Western art, including the De Stilj group in Holland, Dadaists in Switzerland and Germany, and artists and designers at the Bauhaus, as well as architects with international aims. He was a tireless creative force, and a determined traveller who brought many collaborative projects to a fruitful conclusion that involved connections across the political East-West division of Europe. Yet this determined and dynamic man suffered grievously from tuberculosis. From the sanatorium he still sent witty letters and drawings to his wife Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers in Russia. In his last year he turned his abilities to designing Soviet trade fairs and, briefly, to propagandist war posters. AUTHOR: John Milner is Visiting Professor at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Tutor, painter, writer, and exhibition organiser, John Milner specialises in nineteenth and twentieth century art in France and in Russia. He has lectured at the National Gallery, Tate, and Royal Academy of Arts in London, at the Henry Moore Institute, and at many other universities and museums. 80 colour and 6 b/w illustrations

Object:photo

Object:photo PDF

Author: Mitra Abbaspour

Publisher: Museum of Modern Art, New York

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9780870709418

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OBJECT:PHOTO shifts the dialogue about modernist photography from an emphasis on the subject and the image to the actual photographic object, created by a certain artist at a particular time and present today in its unique physicality. This shift is especially significant for a study of the period during which photography developed a distinctive formal language. A growing awareness of the rarity of images made between the two world wars has altered historians' considerations, encouraging new approaches privileging the originality of each work and the density of references each contains. This richly illustrated publication culminates a four-year collaborative research endeavor between The Museum of Modern Art's Departments of Photography and Conservation, and nearly 30 visiting scholars, on the material and aesthetic evolution of avant-garde photography in the early twentieth century. The 341 modernist photographs known as The Thomas Walther Collection, a major museum acquisition made in 2001, is presented in its entirety, establishing a new standard of depth for the medium. Essays by curators, researchers, and conservators consider the history of collecting from this era to the present and how deepening knowledge has shifted the perspective on the medium; the material facts of the Walther pictures as a baseline for understanding the development of photographic materials in this era; and how the intellectual formation of the writers of critical photographic publications of the era and the societal and cultural pressures of that historical moment inflected the photography's sense of its own history. Together with thematic, object-based case studies of groups of pictures that demonstrate new approaches in specific, divergent examples, these contributions reanimate the dialogue on this formative era in photography.

El Lissitzky

El Lissitzky PDF

Author: El Lissitzky

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9788415691532

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This is a fascinating and sumptuously illustrated overview of the work of El Lissitzk, one of the 20th-century's most influential and experimental artists. Eliezer (Lazar) Markovich Lissitzky, El Lissitzky (1890-1941) was one of the most experimental and controversial artists to work with the Russian and European avant-garde during the early twentieth century. Equally prolific as a painter, designer, architect and photographer, he connected countries and cultures as a leading ambassador between the Soviet and European avant-gardes of the 1920s, promoting Suprematist and Constructivist art in the West and European abstract movements in Russia. For El Lissitzky, art was conceived not as a personal expression and production of objects, but rather as a collective and social activity. Working with the Russian painter and theoretician Kazimir Malevich, he developed the new visual language of Suprematism (an abstract art based upon "the supremacy of pure artistic feeling" rather than on visual depiction of objects), which he applied not only to painting, but also to print and book works, architectural and theatre projects, ceramics, educational theory and propaganda. Fusing this array of media, his three-dimensional work "Proun Room" used the actual space of a room to merge painting, sculptural installation and architecture; similarly, with his students he adorned the trams and buildings of Vitebsk with Suprematist triangles and squares, and used his "Proun" motifs to design costumes and machinery for the stage (most famously for the 1920 Futurist opera, Victory over the Sun). This volume provides a comprehensive and superbly illustrated view of Lissitzky's influential career.

The Struggle for Utopia

The Struggle for Utopia PDF

Author: Victor Margolin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780226505169

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. Focusing on the difficult relationship between art and social change, Margolin brings important new insights to our understanding of the avant-garde's role in a period of great political complexity.

On Line

On Line PDF

Author: Cornelia H. Butler

Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0870707825

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On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century explores the radical transformation of drawing that began during the last century as numerous artists critically re-examined the traditional concepts of the medium. In a revolutionary departure from the institutional definition of drawing and from reliance on paper as the fundamental support material, artists instead pushed the line into real space, expanding the medium's relationship to gesture and form and connecting it with painting, sculpture, photography, film and dance. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, On Line presents a discursive history of mark-making through nearly 250 works by 100 artists, including Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alexander Calder, Karel Malich, Eva Hesse, Anna Maria Maiolino, Richard Tuttle, Mona Hatoum and Monika Grzymala, among many others. Essays by the curators illuminate individual practices and examine broader themes, such as the exploration of the line by the avant-garde and the relationship between drawing and dance.

Had Gadya (חד גידא)

Had Gadya (חד גידא) PDF

Author: El Lissitzky

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 42

ISBN-13: 9780892367443

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This illustrated version of the popular Passover song "Had gadya" (חד גידא) was the wonderfully playful offspring of the avant-garde artist El Lissitzky (1890-1941). It dates to a little-known period early in his career when he immersed himself in the Jewish cultural renaissance that flourished in Russia from roughly 1912 to the early 1920s. Signed with his Hebrew given name, this volume-with its wraparound cover, colorful lithographic montages, and stylized use of Yiddish and Aramaic words-celebrates Lissitzky's interest in Jewish folk traditions while looking forward to the dynamic graphic and typographic designs for which he is best remembered. This near-scale facsimile-including the rarely seen cover-allows readers to experience Lissitzky's Had gadya as originally envisioned. It is accompanied here by Nancy Perloff's discussion of the work's cultural and artistic contexts, Arnold J. Band's English translation of Lissitzky's Yiddish version of the song, sections on Lissitzky's iconography and vocabulary, and lyrics set to music.