Description:
A lithograph in black ink printed onto an illustration board consisting of a smooth, machine made wove paper laminated to a ground wood paper core. The one collage element is a laid paper which appears to have been colored with a very matte opaque tan colorant which is hughly water soluble.
Label Text:
El Lissitzky studied as an architect and engineer in Germany and Russia. After the October Revolution, he became one of the founders of the “Kultur Lige” (“Culture League”), a Kyiv-based association aiming to create a new Jewish national art and promote Yiddish language literature, theater and culture. In 1919 Marc Chagall offered Lissitzky the position of head of the Architecture Department at the Vitebsk People’s Art School. Under the influence of another arrival in Vitebsk, Kazimir Malevich, Lissitzky soon turned to geometric abstraction and helped further develop the Suprematist movement Malevich had founded. Lissitzky’s main innovation inspired by Suprematism was encapsulated by “Proun” (/pra-un/, an acronym for “project for the affirmation of the new”), a series of abstract artworks that combined the Suprematist language of strict geometric forms with architectural rendering. Described by Lissitzky as an “interchange station between painting and architecture,” these were prospective designs for spatial constructions, and marked the transition from planar to volumetric Suprematism.
Already a VKhUTEMAS professor, Lissitzky left for Berlin in 1922 to travel with the First Russian Art Exhibition and establish contacts with German artists. There, he became friends with Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and Hans Richter. Later in Hannover, Kurt Schwitters introduced Lissitzky to his future wife Sophie Küppers of the Kestner Society. The success of Lissitzky's lecture on the “New Russian Art” prompted the society to commission the “Kestnermappe” portfolio of lithographs as a New Year’s gift to its members.
This print comes from the collection of Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, an artist who took over Lissitzky’s temporary studio in Hannover in 1924. In the combination of various geometric shapes, one can perceive something resembling a human figure. Frequently exhibited under the title “New Man,” this work is believed to have been inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man.” A result of a fragile balance between diagonal lines and geometric forms, the figure is floating in a blank space that the Suprematists associated with the infinite cosmos. The sense of incompleteness, dynamism, and tension between forms provokes one to continue constructing the “New Man” on one’s own, following Lissitzky’s idea of his art as a “cause for action.”
Maria Timina, 2023
Tags:
abstract; nonrepresentational art Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+2001.292 |
