El Lissitzky on Paper: Print Culture, Architecture, Politics, 1919–1933 022652423X, 9780226524238

Citation preview

E l L i s s it zk y o n P a pe r

El Lissitzky on Paper Pr i n t C ult ur e , Arc h it ect ur e , P o l iti c s, 1919–­1 9 33

Samuel Johnson The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2024 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2024 Printed in Canada 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24    1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­52423-­8 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­52437-­5 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226524375.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Johnson, Samuel, 1982– author. Title: El Lissitzky on paper : print culture, architecture, politics, 1919–1933 / Samuel Johnson. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023057785 | ISBN 9780226524238 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226524375 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Lissitzky, El, 1890–1941. | Design—Soviet Union— History. | Art, Soviet. | Architecture—Soviet Union—History. | Graphic arts—Soviet Union—History. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Soviet Union—History. | BISAC: ART / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945) | ARCHITECTURE / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945) Classification: LCC N6999.L5 J65 2024 | DDC 709.4709/04— dc23/eng/20240126 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023057785  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

I am a page for your pen. I will accept all. I am the white page. I am the keeper of your wealth: I will return and return a hundredfold.

I am the country, black earth. You are my light and the rain’s moisture. You are Lord and Master, but I am Rich black earth, and white paper. M ar i n a Tsve taeva , 1918

The Earth is a book with the shrieking title “Man.” Ve l i m i r K h l e bni kov, 1922

(trans. Paul Schmidt)

Contents

Note on Transliteration viii Introduction 1

1 2 3

UNOVIS: Utopian or Scientific? 13

Of 2 Squares: An UNOVIS Primer, 15 Contest of the Faculties: The Proletkult Purge and the Founding of VKhUTEMAS, 24 Proun: Toward a New Body, 29

The International Set 41

Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand and the Economic Question, 42 From Destruction to Demonstration: Prouns Space in Circulation, 49 Set/Reset: Orientation and the Everyday, 59 Installation: The Room of Typo-­Lithography, 64

Still Movements 71

Ghosts of Production: Old Novelties Reviewed, 72 Imaginary Constructions: Film and the Unity to Come, 80 Irrational Desires: Reckoning with Advertising, 88

4 5 6

Typographical Architecture 103

Playing Against Type: The Wolkenbügel as Historical Monument, 104 A Visiting Card for Moscow: Transit, Communication, and the Production of Space, 114 Orientation and the Mobile Viewer, 122

Toward an Agitation-­Environment 133

Compromise Formations: The All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition, 134 Archaism as Renewal: Photo-­Painting, 139 International Review: Pressa, Politics, and the End of NEP, 144

The Image Complex 157

The Ogonek Printing Works: A Structure in Flux, 158 The Printer’s View, 166 Converting Currents: Dneprostroi in Pictures, 174

Afterword 185 Acknowledgments, 188  Notes, 191  Illustration Credits, 231 Index, 233

Note on Transliteration This book uses the Library of Congress system to romanize the Cyrillic spellings of Russian words. For ease of reading, the main text uses a modified version of this system for proper names, many of which entered American English through French, German, or British transliterations. In keeping with popular usage, the soft signs have been omitted from all names and in most cases the letter Y has been substituted for I when it appears in the initial or terminal position (e.g., Yakov Tugendkhold, rather than Iakov Tugendkhol’d). In endnote citations, the exact Library of Congress transliteration has been maintained for the names of authors who are typically catalogued using this system (e.g., Ladovskii, but not Lisitskii). All translations in the text are mine, unless otherwise noted.

viii

n o t e o n t r a n s l i t e r at i o n

Introduction Of all the artists who contributed to the revolutionary transformation of the arts in Soviet Russia, El Lissitzky remains the biggest puzzle. In the decades after 1917, Lissitzky was by turns a dynamic contributor to the Jewish cultural renaissance, a charismatic advocate for the Soviet avant-­garde in Europe, and a willing propagandist for the Stalin regime. Today, he is seen not only as a key figure in modern painting, graphic design, and architecture but as the creator of dazzling exhibition designs, photographic experiments, and children’s books. Since his death in 1941, numerous essays and exhibitions have illuminated aspects of his prismatic career, but attempts to put all the pieces together have met with limited success.1 Some of Lissitzky’s elusiveness is by design. Among his most important contributions to the history of modern art is a series of abstract paintings that he refused to call paintings. Instead, he defined them as a “changing station between painting and architecture” and called them Prouns, a half neologism, half acronym uttered as two syllables: Pro-­un, short for “Project for the Affirmation of the New” (Proekt utverzhdeniia novogo). Amid Lissitzky’s proliferating experiments, the Prouns have often seemed like the key to an entire oeuvre. This book offers a new interpretation of Lissitzky’s career, focused less on the enigmatic Prouns than on the relation between his two most enduring preoccupations, print and architecture. The importance of this pair can be seen in a montage that combines two of Lissitzky’s best-­ known designs from the mid-­1920s: the typographical symbol from his professional letterhead and his experimental design for a horizontal skyscraper held aloft on three towers, which he called der Wolkenbügel (plate 1). At a glance, we see that Lissitzky has pasted his typographical symbol onto a red-­tinted reproduction of the Wolkenbügel set in a black field. But a second look reveals the playful simplicity that has long captivated observers of his art. Following a red arrow across an angled black line, our gaze alights on a lowercase signature, “el,” which phonetically triggers a minor epiphany: the black line is a backward capital L, which the arrow instructs us to mentally turn over. The strange form of the building also relies on delayed recognition: even as we look down from Introduction

1

above, we are invited to invert the form and imagine the view from below. There is something satisfying in the nestling of the forms, a similarity-­ in-­difference that testifies to an artist’s pursuit of stylistic unity. We may wonder how Lissitzky arrived at this uncanny parallelism. Which shape informs the other? Which of the artist’s pursuits is primary? This book seeks to answer these questions by attending to the apparently insignificant fact of the montage’s paper support. Paper is a ubiquitous part of Lissitzky’s oeuvre, easily overlooked yet indispensable. In the montage, it is the plane that lets the architect discover similar formal patterns in his letterhead and in a building meant to rise fifty meters above the earth. It served a similar purpose for Lissitzky in countless situations where a degree of abstraction gave complex problems an elegant formal economy. Of course, paper is the source neither of this problem-­ solving ability nor of the transparent virtual plane that twentieth-­century critics learned to distinguish from the material support of modern art.2 It is simply the arena in which artists pose, set aside, solve, or forget countless problems every single day, just as we all do.3 As a material that can be circulated, stored, or discarded at little cost, paper acts as a sort of second skin, at the boundary between thought and world. Lissitzky is far from the only Soviet architect to create fantastic “paper architecture” meant to exist primarily in the viewer’s imagination. Yet even his contemporaries noticed that his work acknowledged this form of existence with unusual frankness.4 As this book argues, Lissitzky’s preoccupation with the possibilities and constraints of paper offers both a sorely needed constant in an extraordinarily complex oeuvre and a window onto the larger project of transforming the arts that he shared with contemporaries in the USSR and abroad. This focus allows us not only to understand Lissitzky’s contributions to this shared project but to ascertain the basis of his collaborative partnerships, which have too often been presented with Lissitzky in a subordinate role, working to transmit the ideas and accomplishments of others.

Lazar Markovich Lissitzky was born in 1890 in Pochinok, a railroad settlement near Smolensk, just outside the Jewish Pale of Settlement in imperial Russia.5 From his father, a trader who tried his hand in America and read Shakespeare and Heine in their original languages, Lissitzky gained an early enthusiasm for art. As a teenager he spent several summers studying painting under Yehuda Pen in nearby Vitebsk, where he met Marc Chagall, a former pupil of Pen who would soon find success in the avant-­garde milieu of Left Bank Paris. After he finished grammar school in Smolensk, Lissitzky applied to enter the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg but was rejected because of a discriminatory quota for Jewish applicants, according to those close to him at the time. As an 2

introduction

admirer of Mikhail Vrubel, he also knew that his drawing was not in keeping with the academic canon.6 So he went abroad, to Germany, where Joseph Maria Olbrich and other young architects had founded an artists’ colony in Darmstadt, and enrolled at the city’s Technische Hochschule, earning a degree in architectural engineering before the outbreak of the Great War.7 After returning to Russia, he completed a second course of study at Riga Polytechnic, which had relocated to Moscow during the war, and worked as an assistant to the architect Roman Klein, a master of several historical styles who had employed Grigory Barkhin and the brothers Leonid and Viktor Vesnin. While still a student in Moscow, Lissitzky discovered that he shared an enthusiasm for Jewish art with a generation of poets and visual artists. After participating in study trips to the synagogues of Mogilev and Druya, partly funded by the Society for the Spread of Enlightenment among Jews in Russia, a philanthropic venture that treated shtetl culture as a primitive “other” to that of Russified Jews, Lissitzky found common cause with avant-­garde poets like Moishe Broderzon, who blended folk forms with futurism.8 In 1917, he designed a scroll and custom wooden casket for Broderzon’s poem Sikhes Khulin (Small Talk) that betrayed a new interest in what he came to call “the architecture of the book.”9 In spring 1919, Lissitzky accepted an invitation to teach at the new Vitebsk People’s Art School, which Chagall had founded the previous year. That fall, Lissitzky spearheaded the hiring of Kazimir Malevich, a Polish-­Ukrainian painter who had transformed Russian futurism with a colorful abstract style he called Suprematism.10 Inspired by their students’ enthusiasm for Suprematism, Lissitzky and Malevich joined a newly formed artists’ collective called UNOVIS, or the Affirmers of the New Art (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva) at the end of 1919. In a few short months, Lissitzky developed his own volumetric approach to Suprematist abstraction from a few of Malevich’s abandoned experiments and taught the technique to other UNOVIS members. The next year, he relocated to Moscow, where a new group calling themselves constructivists advocated participation in industry and sharply criticized UNOVIS for its continued attachment to painting. In winter 1921, Lissitzky returned to Germany, befriended artists associated with dada and abstract painting and, in what was seen as a rebuff to UNOVIS, joined his new friends in an international coalition under the banner of constructivism. This group rejected calls from Moscow’s constructivists to enter industry and from progressive artists in Germany to pursue trade unionism. Instead, they argued, artists must first undertake a systematic organization of their means of expression and make art “universally comprehensible.”11 Their goal of simplifying and rationalizing artistic technique found a sympathetic audience among students at the Bauhaus, but by the end of 1923 the international coalition of constructivists had collapsed.12 At the same time, Lissitzky was diagnosed Introduction

3

with pulmonary tuberculosis and left Germany to seek treatment abroad. After an eighteen-­month convalescence in Switzerland, where he turned his energies to photography and architecture, Lissitzky returned to Moscow and joined the faculty of the Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops, VKhUTEMAS (Vysshie gosudarstvennye khudozhestvenno-­ tekhnicheskie masterskie), as a specialist in woodworking, furniture design, and interior architecture. Although he remained friendly with constructivist architects, he joined their opponents in the Association of New Architects, ASNOVA (Assotsiatsiia novykh arkhitektorov), who prioritized the rational organization of space over the production tasks embraced by the constructivists. Like most of his peers, Lissitzky eagerly pursued state commissions at this time. Unlucky in architectural competitions and uninspired by the many posters and magazine covers he designed to make ends meet, he achieved his greatest success with the design of exhibitions, which gave him the chance to return to Germany several times between 1926 and 1930. Starting in 1928, these international exhibitions were designed exclusively for the Soviet state and fulfilled the dual role of promoting foreign trade and propagandizing the success of Bolshevik-­style socialism. In the last decade of his life, Lissitzky’s international presence waned. His desire to return to Germany in the later 1920s was strongly influenced by his courtship and marriage to Sophie Küppers, a widowed Hanover art historian who temporarily boarded her sons Kurt and Hans in Germany when she moved to Moscow in 1927. But with the arrival of Küppers’s boys at the couple’s little house outside Moscow, the birth of their son Jen in 1930, and Lissitzky’s continuing struggle with tuberculosis, travel became less and less practical. From 1930 on, Lissitzky worked only in the USSR. That year, after his submission to a closed competition for the new Pravda combine proved unsuccessful, he was awarded his only independent architectural commission: a printing plant for the illustrated newspaper Ogonek (Little Flame). At the same time, he took a supervisory position as the chief architect of Moscow’s new Park of Culture and Leisure (later called Gorky Park). Soon, however, he refocused his energy on the design of print propaganda, which required fewer trips to the city and allowed him to collaborate with Küppers. In this final phase of his career, Lissitzky embraced the new genre of large-­format photobooks and magazines, especially the lavishly illustrated SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction), which was published in four languages and distributed across the globe. These pursuits protected him from the terrible violence of the later 1930s and secured him an income until he succumbed to his illness in 1941.

Almost without exception, explanations of Lissitzky’s art have stressed 4

introduction

two things: the in-­betweenness at the core of his creativity and the exemplary expression of that quality in his abstract Prouns. According to the architectural historian Selim Khan-­Magomedov, Lissitzky possessed a special kind of “integrating talent.” In navigating the terrain between painting and architecture, he borrowed devices from the more original “style-­forming talents” behind movements like Suprematism, constructivism, and rationalism, often taking them to their logical conclusion and transposing them into other media.13 The historian of modern painting Yve-­Alain Bois proposed that Lissitzky’s career should be seen as the work of three distinct artists. After he viewed Lissitzky’s first American retrospective, curated by Peter Nisbet, Bois concluded that Lissitzky worked under the influence of Marc Chagall before 1919; that Malevich’s Suprematism allowed him to create Prouns with a special kind of perceptual instability, or “radical reversibility,” in the 1920s; and that Lissitzky’s unique creativity was extinguished by Stalinism in the 1930s.14 Accepting the critic’s verdict, Nisbet himself narrowed the focus of his subsequent research to the eight years in which Lissitzky created and exhibited Prouns.15 For all the insights these accounts offer, neither hazards more than a provisional explanation of Lissitzky’s oeuvre. As Khan-­Magomedov admits, we know little about why Lissitzky’s art developed in this way, only that it did. For him the most important question remains, why did Lissitzky need to make Prouns in the first place? He was trained as an architect twice over.16 Why did he not simply practice, like his peers? This book answers that question by examining two apparently distinct but, as we shall see, closely intertwined projects. Lissitzky’s desire to create a truly modern architecture has long been central to his story, and indeed, to the story of the avant-­garde more generally. What has not been recognized is how he consistently framed this goal in relation to the transformation of the book. Lissitzky regarded the book as an aesthetic totality, and for that reason he treated it as an obstacle to the progress of architecture. In 1919 he recognized that the book’s ability to join the arts of painting, literature, and music in a portable synthesis had rendered architecture strangely ineffective. “The book has become the monument of the present,” he wrote, “but in contrast to the old monumental art, it itself goes to the people, and does not stand in place like the cathedral, waiting while no one comes.”17 Just as consequential, in his view, was the way the printed page led architects to prioritize design discourse over building itself. In the following decade, he observed with growing unease that “the majority of projects are merely literature about architecture, not real architecture,” and resolved that “the printed sheet, the infinitude of the book, must be overcome.”18 To Khan-­Magomedov’s question about why Lissitzky did not build, we must therefore add a new variation: why, if he believed the printing press was leading architects astray, is this architect’s only built project a Introduction

5

printing plant? To answer this question, we shall focus less on the “integrating” tendency identified by Khan-­Magomedov than on a broader trend that Lissitzky called “disintegration and dematerialization.” His approach to these matters reveals a characteristic synthesis of the problems then current in German architectural criticism and Russian Symbolist literature and philosophy. Just as Marx saw that under capitalism “all that is solid melts into air,” the Russian Symbolists viewed the modern machine’s effect on society as one of dematerialization.19 These writers linked dematerialization to a spiritual “disintegration” of the world of traditional images, from religion to the fine arts, which culminated in a crisis of humanism.20 Unlike Marx and his followers, they did not view this phenomenon with hope. They lauded Richard Wagner and Stéphane Mallarmé for resisting the crisis by reuniting the arts in an integrating civic ritual that emulated Greek tragedy and Christian liturgy, and censured Pablo Picasso and F. T. Marinetti for embracing fragmentation in painting and poetry. Lissitzky’s understanding of these developments was shaped by the German architectural criticism of his student days, which identified a “principle of dematerialization” in the new “engineer aesthetic” that emerged in the nineteenth century as iron construction eclipsed cut-­and-­dressed stone.21 This school praised the spectacular exhibition architecture of Joseph Paxton and Ferdinand Dutert, but it also criticized the fatal pact between the structure of the iron truss and the engineer’s method of graphic statics, which reduced the art of building to a calculation of planar force-­relations.22 For Lissitzky, this confirmed the Symbolists’ verdict that “our epoch is the least architectural and least sculptured of all eras of world history.”23 Lissitzky’s attitude toward dematerialization and disintegration was ambivalent. He shared the Symbolists’ conviction about the civic purpose of art but came to reject their attempts at integration as premature and misdirected. “Complete epochs always had complete expression in architecture, in this materialized assemblage [stseplenie] of all the arts,” he wrote in 1921, “but then disintegration [rastseplenie] and dematerialization began, and subsequent epochs found their maximal expression in only one of the arts.”24 This statement draws on an august tradition. The Symbolists were only the latest commentators since Hegel to maintain that modern art had abandoned architecture and set out on a path toward pure spirit, which led through eras dominated by painting, music, and poetry.25 This idealist history, in which art helps the human spirit distinguish itself from the material world, culminated in Mallarmé’s conception of the book as a “spiritual instrument” that gives purpose to the whole of existence.26 In this dialectic, the book was both the last refuge of a bygone monumentality and the only contemporary form in which the social integration of the arts could still be perceived. Yet, as the Symbolists themselves recognized, the apparent solidity of this form was already melting away. 6

introduction

Lissitzky therefore regarded the book with a certain nostalgia, even as he resolved to disintegrate it. When photomechanical reproduction began to breed a new kind of illustrated magazine, he realized, “the enormous weight of type and the bucket of ink disappear, and so here again we also have dematerialization.”27 From the mid-­1920s onward, he treated the photobook as the vanguard form of the “wireless imagination” that Marinetti saw in telegraphy and mobilized against Mallarmé’s ritualized total book—­“the Book,” as Mallarmé believed, for “in the final analysis there’s only one.”28 In Lissitzky’s view, the task of dematerializing the book and the positive project of his Prouns served the same end: the retrieval of architecture from modern oblivion. But the destruction of the book consumed even the Prouns. As it turned out, the Prouns were also “literature about architecture,” despite their emphatic painterly materiality. Lissitzky saw them as the first “link in the chain [zveno v tsepi]” of a new architectural integration, but this vision sprang from a memory of social and artistic totality preserved in the pages of the book.29 Because Lissitzky treated architecture and the book as ciphers for the arts as a whole, rather than as single arts, I approach them as instances of what Russian formalist critics called a “dominant” from which the other arts take their “orientation.” The interplay of dominant and orientation allowed formalists to enlarge the domain of artistic autonomy to account for cases in which an artwork transgresses its own formal limits. When poets write verses to accompany a melody, or when they treat the sonorous intonation of their verses as a guiding principle of composition, they define their art by way of an external dominant, music. In a similar way, Lissitzky pointed out, images are created in a variety of media “from an orientation toward reproduction for the various demands of the book.”30 Formalist critics extended this insight by observing that the change of an artistic dominant first becomes evident in forms that act as “transitional regions” between the arts, like book illustration and architectural ornament.31 On this basis, I argue that Lissitzky’s oeuvre is less a wild proliferation of experiments than a specific set of forms oriented toward a shifting dominant, which subordinated the book to photography and film, and photography and film to architecture. As helpful as the formalist approach is, it has limitations. By the late 1920s, these critics conceded that a shifting dominant might explain the artistic purpose of many perplexing developments in the arts, but the cause of the change had to be sought elsewhere. Increasingly, they argued that the artistic dominant must be tied to the everyday life of the arts, which could in turn be correlated with broader sociological factors.32 This study is therefore rooted in a robust literature about the social history of print culture. Historians and critics have convincingly demonstrated that the printed book played a key role in the consolidation of national languages, literatures, and imagined geographies.33 They have shown how the expansion of the press from books to periodical literaIntroduction

7

ture and news supported the growth of reasoned public debate over aesthetic and political matters before devolving into consumption-­oriented media industries.34 Architectural historians, in turn, have relied on this literature to show how the dynamics of a dominant print culture were reproduced in architecture. Centuries after printed treatises introduced the first design standards for the building arts, laying the groundwork for the modern discipline of architecture, professional journals remained one of the most important ways of disseminating and regulating professional knowledge.35 At the same time, the proliferation of photographs in the architectural press reduced buildings to consumable images in the first decades of the twentieth century.36 Lissitzky’s impatience with the predominance of “literature about architecture” over “real architecture” conforms to these broad developments, but the conditions under which he worked in the Soviet Union differed markedly from those in Europe or the United States. Whereas the self-­understanding of bourgeois society foregrounds the democratic and deliberative aspects of the public sphere, Marxists emphasize how print culture consolidates the power of the dominant social class. At the turn of the twentieth century, Lenin argued that a newspaper was not only a means of propagating ideas, but also “a collective organizer” and as such, the sole effective means to achieve “real hegemony” for workers.37 Once the Bolsheviks took power, this led them to create a new kind of propaganda state based on the twin principles of universal literacy and information control.38 In the wake of the October Revolution, a rich but never wholly free sphere of public debate survived three years of civil war and continued under Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), which permitted limited private enterprise to operate alongside state-­ owned industries beginning in 1921. To regulate speech under these conditions, the Bolsheviks not only engaged in outright censorship, they also manipulated the country’s ever-­short paper supply to ensure that friendly texts were published at the expense of unfriendly ones.39 National literatures, like the Yiddish-­ language texts that Lissitzky illustrated in the late 1910s and early 1920s, were issued by state presses only if they were “national in form, socialist in content.”40 Anarchistic avant-­garde publications by Russian futurists, UNOVIS, and even some constructivists, which often eked out an existence on private presses in the provinces, were also shepherded into official channels by the mid-­1920s.41 For these artists, the most important debate after the October Revolution concerned art’s role in civil society. As early as 1909, the Old Bolshevik Aleksandr Bogdanov had developed a theory of cultural hegemony, which taught that art consolidates class power by organizing social experiences.42 After 1917, Bogdanov’s theories were promoted by one of the largest nonparty civil organizations in the early Soviet era, the Proletarian Cultural Organization, Proletkult, and adopted by constructivist artists 8

introduction

and critics as they made their peace with the Bolsheviks. These critics saw Lissitzky’s activities as typical of the technical intelligentsia, a class fraction charged with managing production.43 According to Bogdanov, the technical intelligentsia, like the bourgeoisie as a whole, could have only an ideological understanding of production because they experienced it secondhand, through language, in the form of information and orders.44 But constructivist-­affiliated critics maintained that the technical intelligentsia’s attitude was more decisively shaped by its management of new urban communications and transit infrastructures, which freed it from the bourgeois vice of possessive individualism and aligned its interests with the proletariat’s.45 Not only did they attribute a class content to the trends Lissitzky celebrated for dematerializing the printed book; they linked these trends to parallel developments in urban design that had similar importance in his architectural work. At the end of the 1920s, as Stalin took control of the party and began to centralize the economy, the Bolsheviks undertook a renewed campaign for proletarian dominance. Worker-­correspondents transformed journalism by agitating for industrialization from the factory floor, displacing the discursive policy debates that made Soviet newspapers resemble their bourgeois counterparts abroad.46 In the arts, the urgent need for cultural hegemony pitted proletarian artistic and literary groups against formalists who had styled themselves the technical intelligentsia of art.47 Avant-­garde periodicals like the constructivists’ Sovremennaia arkhitektura (Contemporary Architecture), which functioned as international clearinghouses for leading professional practices, ceased publication, even as constructivist buildings were promoted in the new high-­circulation magazine USSR in Construction.48 In April 1932, when the cultural field had been cleared of “alien elements, especially those revived by the first years of NEP,” the Bolsheviks chose to dissolve all domestic cultural organizations, rather than risk “elitist withdrawal” from political tasks, and adopted new policies to encourage cooperation among former adversaries.49 USSR in Construction is a prime example of this era’s print culture, produced with Stalin himself as the intended reader.50 Lissitzky was instrumental in establishing this status. His first design for the magazine, completed in October 1932 with a member of the recently disbanded Russian Association of Proletarian Photo-­Reporters, transformed Stalin from an inconspicuous presence in the magazine’s front matter to the central figure in its narrative, presented in a striking monumental style. This book argues, however, that Lissitzky’s enthusiastic work for USSR in Construction does not so much reveal him to be a committed Stalinist as testify to the real hegemony achieved by Stalin’s revolution from above. The magazine gave Lissitzky his first opportunity to realize his ideas about quasi-­cinematic photo essays in print and, just as importantly, offered photographic documentation of “the great awaited construction” that he had long desired to replace the glut of “literature about archiIntroduction

9

tecture” in the Soviet press.51 The ascendancy of this architectural spectacle represented a culminating moment in the arc of Lissitzky’s career, which began with his chagrined acceptance, during a 1916 study trip in the Pale of Settlement, that the architectural ornament he had set out to document derived not from local tradition but from the baroque frontispieces of religious texts he found in the synagogue’s library. These, he recognized, “served as models for the Jewish carver just as the works of Villon and Palladio served the architects.”52 Soon thereafter he realized that “the book is now everything.”53 The following chapters examine Lissitzky’s attempts to put an end to this state of affairs through the dematerialization of the book. Chapter 1 uses the concept of the “living picture” to relate Lissitzky’s lithographic portfolio of 1921, Prouns, to his Suprematist children’s book, Of 2 Squares. It sets this notion in dialogue with the theories of the Symbolists and the Proletkult, which treated art as the “living image” of a collective bound by religion and class, respectively. It shows how UNOVIS rejected these views and embraced what the philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev called the “dematerialization of the flesh of the world,” basing its activities on a science fiction of Martian creativity borrowed from the Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov. Chapter 2 follows Lissitzky to Germany in 1922–­1923 and examines two important exhibition designs that he executed while attempting to organize artistic trends in Germany under the banner of constructivism. Drawing on formalist critic Yuri Tynianov’s concept of “the artistic everyday,” it highlights Lissitzky’s turn to the quotidian “work” of art: the tasks of distributing, assembling, and installing that he encountered in the space “between the studio and the factory,” where he operated as a typographer and exhibition designer. Chapter 3 analyzes Lissitzky’s theoretical interest in photography as a means of dematerialization, while foregrounding the handicraft nature of his photographic practice between 1923 and 1925. Linking his experiments to precedents in Italian futurism, the theories of László Moholy-­Nagy, and the poetics of Kurt Schwitters, it shows that the photograph became a site of negotiation for Lissitzky and other artists as they transitioned to a new social role defined by the self-­promotion of the creative individual and, more progressively, his work for industrial clients instead of traditional patrons. Chapter 4 examines Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel projects of 1923–­1926, WB1 and WB2, in connection with the ongoing debate between constructivist and rationalist architects on the faculty of VKhUTEMAS. It relates WB2 to those polemics directly but argues that the quasi-­t ypographic form of WB1 is Lissitzky’s response to a problem of urban orientation that he developed from writings on the perceptual effects of modern mass transit by Peter Behrens and other theorists of the German Werkbund. Chapter 5 returns to Lissitzky’s exhibition designs, focusing on two 10

introduction

large trade pavilions completed in 1927–­1928—­the All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition and the International Press Exhibition in Cologne, known as Pressa—­which were separated by Stalin’s rise to power and the shift to a planned economy. It shows that these exhibitions allowed Lissitzky to adapt his ideas about architecturally scaled photography to political propaganda and, at the same time, that his attitude toward photography did not meaningfully change with the onset of Stalin’s first Five-­Year Plan, despite his turn away from purely artistic experimentation. Chapter 6 examines Lissitzky’s work as an architect and designer in the Soviet press in 1930–­1933, when the first Five-­Year Plan was in full swing. It locates the conditions of his commission to design the printing plant of the illustrated magazine Ogonek in the centralization of the presses and provides both aesthetic and economic arguments to explain why the picture press, rather than architecture, remained Lissitzky’s primary support for the last decade of his life.

Introduction

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1 UNOVIS, Utopian or Scientific? In the months between spring 1919 and fall 1920, when El Lissitzky ran his “Studios of Graphic Arts and Architecture” at the Vitebsk People’s Art School, his art seemed to undergo a total transformation.1 Before he came to Vitebsk, Lissitzky was recognized as an illustrator of Yiddish literature whose style favorably recalled the paintings of the Vitebsk school’s founder, Marc Chagall. But at the end of 1920, he returned to Moscow as an exponent of a collective of Suprematists, UNOVIS (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva, Affirmers of the New Art), and the maker of what he called Prouns. These volumetric abstractions, which Lissitzky described as a “station” on the way to architecture, helped steer Suprematism out of an apparent dead end. The inventor of Suprematism, Kazimir Malevich, had shifted his focus to writing and administrative matters when he started teaching in Vitebsk, concluding that “painting was done for long ago, and the artist himself is a prejudice of the past.”2 As the group’s only trained architect, it was left to Lissitzky to develop the architecture, “in the broad sense of the word,” that UNOVIS envisioned. Because Lissitzky’s Prouns are both the product of his individual effort and exemplary artifacts of a collective visual program, they raise two basic questions. How do these signature works relate to the artist’s previous work as an illustrator of Yiddish literature or the children’s book he designed shortly after UNOVIS was formed, Of 2 Squares? And what can they tell us about the aims and operations of UNOVIS as a whole? These questions, seemingly distinct, have similar answers. Consider the genealogy of the Proun idea. Lissitzky introduced the coinage in autumn 1920, months after he created many of the works that now bear the name. The novel acronym “Proun” (Proekt utverzhdeniia novogo, Project for the Affirmation of the New) was preceded by a descriptive term, “ex-­picture” (ekskartina), that negated the representational task imputed to painting. Prior to this, he had used the term “living picture,” which he defined as “an apparition, a sign,” against the dead weight of “what is already ready for us, already constructed in the world.”3 This earliest term, the least striking of the three, is also the most illuUNOVIS , U t o p i a n o r Sc i e n t i f i c ?

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minating, because it opens onto a broader debate about the nature and purpose of art. Traditionally, the phrase “living picture” referred to the game of tableau vivant, but for UNOVIS it became a means to distinguish itself from two influential strands of art theory. According to Aleksandr Bogdanov, the founder of the Proletkult, “art organizes experience by means of living images” rooted in the relations of production, making it a powerful weapon in the class struggle.4 For Symbolists like Andrei Bely, a poet, critic, and instructor of art theory at Moscow’s State Free Art Studios, the visual arts embodied “the living image of the Logos,” a pictorial counterpart to the “living word.”5 In Lissitzky’s Prouns and Of 2 Squares, as in UNOVIS more broadly, the image frees itself from the fetters of class and cult while preserving their collective basis. UNOVIS might resemble the “mystical brotherhoods” that, according to Bely, “unconsciously conceal within themselves the living elements of creation,” but Malevich insisted that it modeled itself on a research laboratory, where these elements were “examined and studied like any planet or entire system.”6 While Malevich reduced the Symbolist topoi of liturgy and icon to pure, senseless form, Lissitzky reimagined the national-­popular arts of ornament and storytelling as bearers of a meaning yet to come. But instead of the messiah, the Suprematist tale Of 2 Squares fills its heavens with the interplanetary imagery of futurists poets like Velimir Khlebnikov. Lissitzky intended his myth of Martian creativity as a purely formal device to distinguish the origin of art from its destination in church and factory, but it remains entangled with both. The need for new myths bound UNOVIS to the Symbolists and Proletkult in complex ways. UNOVIS inherited the Symbolists’ belief that the scientific worldview adopted by many Marxists was, “even in the best of cases, no more than utopian fantasies in the style of H. G. Wells.”7 But this did not put them at odds with the Proletkult, for Bogdanov also considered myths a necessity: between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, he experimented with a project of “God-­building” before writing two science fiction novels about the challenges of socialism on Mars.8 UNOVIS shared Bogdanov’s goal of “world-­building,” and its positivistic self-­observation brought it into the orbit of his critical empiricism. Even Khlebnikov, the self-­styled “King of Time” who predicted the events of 1917 five years before they occurred, deciphered the mathematical formula of Destiny “painted in words on the old canvases of the Koran, the Vedas, [and] the Gospels” while attending a Proletkult meeting in 1920.9 In the chaos of civil war that engulfed Russia after the October Revolution, the weak messianism of the disenchanted image helped reconcile the divergent views of the intelligentsia with Bolshevik power. But once their political victory was assured, the Bolsheviks turned their attention to the wild tangle of myths that had grown up within their institutions and reasserted control over the meaning of history. 14

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Of 2 Squares: An UNOVIS Primer

In the winter months of 1919–­1920, a group of Vitebsk apprentices embraced Suprematism, organized themselves into a collective, and, once their instructors had joined, adopted the name UNOVIS. The students’ enthusiastic embrace of Suprematism was spontaneous, but it was probably inspired by the collaboration between Lissitzky and Malevich. After Lissitzky persuaded Malevich to come teach in Vitebsk in October 1919, he designed a booklet for Malevich’s essay On New Systems in Art: Statics and Speed and printed it in his Vitebsk studio in December. The two artists then collaborated on the design of decorations for the second anniversary of Vitebsk’s Committee for the Struggle against Unemployment, which ranged from murals and banners to signage and printed matter.10 When this decorative program was realized by a collective effort of students and faculty, it galvanized the student body. This must have mattered a great deal to Malevich, who had tried—­and failed—­before 1917 to organize a “strictly partisan” group that would expand Suprematism into poetry, music, and the decorative arts.11 With UNOVIS, the idea of a “party in art” became a reality. In a speech of February 1920, Lissitzky affirmed that “only a united party of strong organization and general will” could combat those who conflate “the tasks of culture” with their existing “spheres of ‘competence.’”12 The earliest plans of UNOVIS betray the organizational form to which it aspired. After four sessions held between February 27 and March 2, the group’s faculty contingent of Malevich, Lissitzky, Vera Ermolaeva, and Nina Kogan proposed a Soviet for the Affirmation of New Forms of Art. Though this council never materialized, its program remains a valuable document of the UNOVIS agenda. Citing “the need for the immediate introduction into life of new forms of art, as much productive-­utilitarian as creative-­ laboratory,” the faculty outlined five divisions of activity.13 The first, devoted to art, affirmed the priority of creative work on objects of daily use, architecture, mural painting, printed and cast ornament, and furniture and book design. The artistic goals of this first division were to be supported by the organizational activities of the other four, which aimed to facilitate cultural education in workers’ organizations and unions and to develop large-­scale initiatives like museums and libraries of contemporary art, a technical school, and a publishing program. The burden of this expansive vision therefore rested squarely on the objects created by UNOVIS, which matched Suprematist concepts to workaday needs far removed from Malevich’s system of pure painterly abstraction. This gap between material object and pure nonobjective form opened Suprematism to an unexpectedly broad range of applications. A key example of this productive slippage is a series of six sketches Lissitzky completed in early 1920, Of 2 Squares. Published as A Suprematist Tale in 6 Constructions in Berlin in 1922, the little book was dedicated UNOVIS , U t o p i a n o r Sc i e n t i f i c ?

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Figure 1.1 El Lissitzky, “Don’t Read . . . Here are two squares,” Of 2 Squares, 1920–­1922. Letterpress, 11 × 17.6 in. (28 × 44.6 cm). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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“To all, to all children.” Its story follows a pair of squares as they journey through space and, after some exciting encounters, settle upon a new world. But in 1920, Lissitzky listed his forthcoming book in the almanac UNOVIS No. 1 with a title that links it to the group’s proposed new world of Suprematist objects: Suprematist Ornament. Of 2 Squares. A Suprematist Formation in 6 Constructions (In All Languages).14 The revised title of the 1922 printing reframes the book with a shift from architecture to literature. But Lissitzky’s preparatory sketches reveal only minor alterations to the book’s six main pages before publication. In principle, then, it remains possible to read Of 2 Squares in both registers. Its opening spread, which introduces the characters (“Here are two squares”), confirms as much by admonishing us: “Don’t read—­take paper, fold; posts, color; blocks, build” (fig. 1.1). Taken at its word, the book is to be read against or beyond the printed page, in oral and manual registers, as something performed or made. To read Of 2 Squares as ornament is to situate it in a series of pattern books, stretching from Owen Jones to Koloman Moser, which had gradually effaced the distinction between ornament and decoration by the end of the nineteenth century. Since Vitruvius, ornament had been treated as a sculptural preserve in which architects could rehearse the prehistory of their art, often by rendering stylized features of timber construction in stone. But in the nineteenth century, as building techniques were rationalized and industrialized, the function of ornament was displaced onto chapter one

flat decorated surfaces or onto the sculptural qualities of mass-­produced objects.15 When UNOVIS outlined its artistic goals, it took this evolutionary shift for granted: the group identified ornament with manufactured goods and regarded walls as surfaces for decoration.16 The festival designs that Lissitzky and Malevich created for the Vitebsk Committee for the Struggle against Unemployment also bear witness to this transformation. An elevation showing their decorative program for the barracks that housed the committee’s offices, published as a hand-­ colored insert in UNOVIS No. 1, uses a dozen Suprematist compositions to reinstate the bilateral symmetry of the building’s neoclassical façade on a new basis (plate 2). A sketch for one of the murals for the string course between stories has survived, along with Lissitzky’s instructions “to make six such canvases, two double and six the other way around, fourteen in all,” dated December 11, 1919, and signed with the artist’s Hebrew initials (fig. 1.2).17 Measured out in old Russian units, the 14.5 × 22.2 cm drawing is to be reproduced at the scale of three by one-­and-­ a-­half arshin (about 216 × 108 cm). This kind of mural-­scale decoration represents one possibility for a reader inclined to treat Of 2 Squares as a pattern book. Its “ornamental” counterpart can be found in a swatch of printed fabric that borrows its motif from Malevich’s design for a neighboring panel on the building’s first story (fig. 1.3). Lissitzky railed against the repetitive tedium of this work but found consolation in a vision of the artist as a demiurge that links his book’s architectural and literary registers.18 In the opening spread of Of 2 Squares, the words “two squares” (dva kvadrata) are broken into monosyllabic blocks that align the path of reading with deliberate childlike enunciation. Typographically, the column of “A”s trailing from the corner of the red square recalls the poetic theory of Malevich’s collaborator Aleksei Kruchenykh. Kruchenykh’s “Declaration of the Word as Such,” which Lissitzky knew in a revised version included in the UNOVIS almanac, held that “consonants render everyday reality, nationality, weight—­vowels, the opposite: a universal language.” Kruchenykh even included a poem composed exclusively of vowels to bolster his claim that “the artist has seen the world anew and, like Adam, gives everything his own names.”19 Lissitzky is far from inventing a new name for the square, of course. In this context, Kruchenykh’s reference to Adam is profitably read through Bely’s prior claim that the meaning of calcified words can be restored if we take up the position of the original name-­giver. This, for Bely, is the precise moment when the “purposeless play” of sound creates the ability to master a hostile external reality.20 The reader of Lissitzky’s book can likewise climb into language on a scaffold of linguistic building blocks or, heeding the injunction “Don’t read,” reconstitute the origins of Suprematism with paper and blocks. The performative dimension that binds play and speech also deterUNOVIS , U t o p i a n o r Sc i e n t i f i c ?

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Figure 1.2 Attributed to El Lissitzky, Untitled (study for a mural), 1919. Watercolor on paper, 5.7 × 8.7 in. (14.5 × 22.2 cm). Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

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mines the literary genre of Lissitzky’s book. In its final form, Lissitzky called Of 2 Squares a skaz, or tale, a type of oral narrative that links it to the artist’s contemporaneous work as an illustrator of Yiddish tales for children. Historically, the skaz and its diminutive form, the skazka (or fairy tale), rest on the symbiosis of children’s literature and the oral “folk” culture that educated Europeans began to treat as a paradigm of national culture in the eighteenth century. These folk forms grew in close proximity to copyright and print, and in doing so they domesticated a portion of the unlettered masses as the moral heart of the people.21 According to the critic Boris Eikhenbaum, the contemporary skaz could therefore be counted among the era’s “unexpected reversions . . . to questions that seemed long ago and conclusively solved for people of the nineteenth century.”22 On the basis of a new German “philology of the ear,” Eikhenbaum’s essays of the early 1920s rediscovered the nineteenth century as an ongoing battle between the improvisational cadences of the “living word” and its printed counterpart.23 The illusion of skaz was created in print, he argued, by writers who stressed the colloquial intonation, rhythm, and gesture of the speaker rather than the detailed descriptions on which the novel had come to rely. This opposition is readily apparent in Lissitzky’s opening spread for Of 2 Squares (fig. 1.1): on the left page, the injunction “Don’t read” is followed by a thin black line facetiously imitating the reading eye’s regular motion from left to right and top to bottom; on the facing page, a short diagonal line redoubles the phatic and indexical “here,” while the words dva kvadrata fall to pieces that stress their internal rhyme. chapter one

Figure 1.3 Ivan Chervinka, Suprematist fabric swatch, 1920. 8.1 × 3.8 in. (20.7 × 9.7 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

But as Eikhenbaum pointed out, skaz was only the watchword for a much broader trend. “Skaz in itself is not important,” he stressed. “What is important is the orientation toward the word, toward intonation, toward the voice, be it even in written transformation.”24 Eikhenbaum’s own studies were undertaken as part of a larger program supported by the Institute of the Living Word, where he and other Petrograd formalists were researchers. Craig Brandist has shown that this institute was one of several organizations devoted to the orator’s art, the importance of which grew after Lenin highlighted the agitational effect of the living word in party literature.25 The Bolsheviks were keenly aware that the newly democratized public life where the spoken word thrived was the basis of the revolutionary process that they sought to control and direct. UNOVIS , U t o p i a n o r Sc i e n t i f i c ?

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Figure 1.4 El Lissitzky, “And the Holy One came, Blessed be He, and slew the angel of death,” Khad Gadya, 1919. Lithograph on paper, 10.8 × 10.1 in. (27.4 × 25.7 cm).

Prior to the fall of the Romanovs, party theorists maintained that a revolution in Russia would represent the bourgeois-­democratic overthrow of an absolutist regime, like that of other European nations in the previous century. Yet they were unprepared for the surge of nationalist sentiment during the civil war, and only at its end did they learn to systematically restrain Great Russian chauvinism by harnessing the “democratic content” of non-­Russian nationalisms.26 The orientation toward the word that we find in Of 2 Squares has a strong precursor in Lissitzky’s illustrations for Yiddish children’s books, however different they are stylistically. The finest of these books, Khad Gadya, demonstrates Lissitzky’s initial investment in the living word. The book takes its subject from a folksong thought to be of Provençal origin and included in the Passover Seder from the thirteenth century.27 The song’s ten verses recount a series of acts linking the purchase of a goat (which is eaten by a cat, which is eaten by a dog, and so on) to God’s slaying of the Angel of Death (fig. 1.4). As a song of national liberation, Khad Gadya is eschatological rather than moralizing; its chain-­structure 20

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would be endless were it not interrupted by the ultimate appearance of God. Lissitzky devoted more time to the illustrations for Khad Gadya than to those for any of his other Yiddish books, as its intricate five-­color printing and careful preparatory studies show. But the distinction between the oral tradition and the individual author was far from absolute for Lissitzky, who also illustrated three contemporary tales by Ben Zion Raskin the same year. Khad Gadya was published by the Kultur-­Lige in Kyiv in February 1919, just after the Bolsheviks took control of Ukraine. That month marked the zenith of the Kultur-­Lige’s preeminence among the organizations promoting a new Jewish national culture and Lissitzky’s work in service of that project, which began before the revolution with his studies of historical ornament at synagogues in Mogilev and Druya.28 The Kultur-­ Lige operated one of the many presses in Kyiv that, after 1917, sought to transform Yiddish from a spoken tongue to a literary language, but it was more than just a publisher. It aimed to unite the most highly developed forms of autonomous culture with educational initiatives aimed at the “Jewish-­folk-­masses” by organizing theatrical events, artists’ colonies, kindergartens, schools, and clubs (some with their own libraries and cinemas); it operated a central bookstore and nationwide distribution system; and prior to the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, it had achieved de facto authority in all Yiddish cultural and educational matters in Ukraine.29 After being stripped of these powers by the Bolsheviks and mercilessly criticized by Jewish communists who viewed its populist program as insufficiently radical, the Kultur-­Lige took stock of its future at a national conference in Kyiv.30 Spurred by calls to merge the Kultur-­Lige with the Proletkult, Lissitzky considered the possible character of a proletarian culture before he left Kyiv. In a brief statement titled “The Proletariat and Art,” published in April 1919, he rejected the notion that this culture would entail “a kind of factory production of spiritual as well as material valuables.” Instead, he argued, a true proletarian culture would use “the machine for the sake of the worker” and create “a new form” to bring about a new culture.31 Some of the Kultur-­Lige’s populism remains in Lissitzky’s article. The protagonist in the scenario he sketches is not assigned a class position; he is simply an artist who acts in the worker’s interest. Yet there are significant changes. As the article makes clear, Lissitzky sympathized with calls to renounce the culture of the past, a position that moderates in the Kultur-­Lige rejected as petit-­bourgeois radicalism.32 Lissitzky’s early advocacy for a new culture helps us understand the transformation of his art in Vitebsk. But, ironically, this change resulted in a renewed attention to traditional forms.33 This formal conservatism can be clarified by turning to Malevich’s essay “On the ‘I’ and the Collective,” written shortly after the painter arrived in Vitebsk. According to Malevich, the multitude of egos have been forged into a unity by nations, UNOVIS , U t o p i a n o r Sc i e n t i f i c ?

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which must in turn be joined in a larger international unity. And for this to occur, “nations must lose all their particularity, language, religion, custom, clan, race, just as the whole world must lose its particularity, its ancestral origin.”34 For Malevich, the brotherhood of nations resembles previous social formations, rooted in the annihilation of the ego, that attempted to gather “the lost unity of the first origin” into “the image of a divine being.”35 The same mechanisms through which nations achieved particularity, then, must be used to free them from it. Lissitzky described this work to the critic Pavel Ettinger as “an ascent that will be completed with the Suprematism of the Spirit—­of religion.”36 At about the same time, Malevich wrote to the historian and philosopher Mikhail Gershenzon that “the people need to be led out of all religions to the religion of pure action, in which there will be no rewards or promises.”37 By this, he meant an economy in which spiritual debts are neither accumulated nor discharged, where the end of days will never come and “prayer will not be circumscribed by meaning and purpose.”38 In the essay “On Poetry,” published earlier in 1919, Malevich had argued that liturgy and ritual could be regarded as mere pattern in order to produce “a diagram of spiritual form.”39 As pure action of the Logos, he claimed, “the poet’s dialect, rhythm, and tempo divide the mass of sound and make clear the detailed gestures of the body itself” in such a way that a “new and living church” is recreated at every moment. Malevich’s example of this trans-­sense (zaum) versification, “Ule Elye Lel Li Onye Kon Si An,” is certainly otherworldly. But it is likely an elaborate second-­ order corruption of the Martian call “Aloo! Aloo!” from H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, based on Khlebnikov’s version—­“Ullya! Ullya!”—­in his 1916 manifesto “Trumpet of the Martians.”40 A further transformation appears in UNOVIS’s motto, “U el el’ ul el te ka,” which dances around the phonetic transliteration of the name “Wells” into Russian (because the Cyrillic alphabet has no w, the diphthong is represented as ue). In the first months of 1920, this verse appeared as the final line of the declaration “Unom 1,” in which, after declaring “I belong to no people and consider no tongue native,” Malevich pledged to follow the path of unity and “the language of the future.”41 It is no wonder that Lissitzky later told Malevich, “In you I value prophecy very much.”42 Malevich was quick to respond, however, that he was “not much interested in prophecy, but what I’m most of all interested in is political activity in Art.”43 In the space between these appraisals, the prophet emerges as a political persona. The value of this position lay in its ability to combat the Christian eschatological interpretation of the revolution espoused by some leading Symbolists. The poet Viacheslav Ivanov, for one, argued that the revolution marked the end of humanism and a renewal of religious consciousness, and envisioned “the next generations growing up with a new comprehension of the fact that we are all a single Adam.”44 In the theater department at Narkompros, Ivanov 22

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successfully instituted a form of faux-­religious pageantry in which, he believed, “everything private, individual, sick, and vulgar would fall away by itself, yielding its place to the depiction of heroic actions, national movements, and finally, to the ideal element in the symbolic images of myth, fairy tale, and legend.”45 In one sense, this expansive vision clarifies many of UNOVIS’s activities. But in the universalization of poiesis, UNOVIS sought to transform the whole world into a continuously renewed work of art devoid of content. In much the same way that Malevich reimagined religion as pure nonobjective form, Of 2 Squares treats the popular narrative as a mere scaffold for a postnational subject. The text sets out a simple sequence of events. The first two pages present the reader with a stable state of affairs (“Here are two squares / Flying to earth from afar”), the next two disrupt it (“They see black, alarming / Crash, all scattered”), and the last two introduce a new state, which is granted only provisional finality (“And on the black settled red clearly / Here it ended. Further . . .”). LisFigure 1.5 El Lissitzky, “Here it ended. Further . . . ,” Of 2 Squares, 1920–­1922. Letterpress, 11 × 8.8 in. (28 × 22.3 cm). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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sitzky’s book tells a story, but it is difficult to say what happens. Not only is the conclusion undermined, but visual continuity between episodes is distinctly lacking: the red circle representing “earth” disappears without comment, and the black square on which “red” settles in the fifth image becomes a black circle in the sixth, while the black square drifts away, toward “further” adventures (fig. 1.5). Later in the century, structuralist theorists will identify the device we see here, of alternating action and stasis, as the point at which a basic structure of speech opens onto a universal grammar of narrative.46 But in this case, the discontinuities help create the illusion that Eikhenbaum judged fundamental to the tale: “its narrative structure is only a scheme” that supports the endless invention of living speech.47

Contest of the Faculties: The Proletkult Purge and the Founding of VKhUTEMAS

In spring 1920, as the western front of the civil war drew closer to Vitebsk, propaganda took on new urgency for the self-­styled “party in art.” To some scholars, this moment has promised a direct view onto the political attitudes of the fledgling group’s members.48 On closer inspection, however, no such immediacy appears. UNOVIS itself glimpsed its political horizon from the embattled territory of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, Narkompros, where power struggles shaped in no small part by the autonomy of the Proletkult determined the shape of arts curricula. In the latter half of 1920, with the reorganization of Moscow’s institutes of higher education in the arts on the agenda, UNOVIS seemed to be gaining momentum. Once the process was complete, however, its goals were sidelined as so much “Unovisness” by Narkompros officials who rebuffed the group’s claim to ideological leadership.49 In the intervening months, the dream of a “worldwide unovis” (as one proclamation blared) led to chapters in Smolensk, Orenburg, Perm, Ekaterinburg, Saratov, and Samara, where new branches of the State Free Art Studios had also been created.50 This power base in the provinces would, it was hoped, give UNOVIS leverage in its push to reorganize the hub of this network, Moscow’s State Free Art Studios, along party lines. As Aleksandra Shatskikh has shown, the publications that raised the party’s activities to the status of a replicable model were essential to this project. In June 1920, UNOVIS representatives from Vitebsk arrived at the All-­Russia Conference of Art Teachers and Students in Moscow with a one-­page manifesto and an almanac, UNOVIS No. 1, stuffed with sundry theories, designs, and pedagogical programs that were soon deployed in other cities.51 Basing its core curriculum on the developmental sequence of cubism, futurism, and Suprematism, UNOVIS united the study of painting, sculpture, and architecture with “the decorative 24

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applied modelling of utilitarian objects” in a manner that the workers of Vitebsk reportedly embraced.52 Although its approach was less democratic than that of the Free Studios, where students elected instructors and chose their own course of study, UNOVIS had abolished the prerevolutionary division between fine and applied arts, which remained intact in Moscow.53 So when the conference concluded by resolving to organize a unified art school and make contact with artists abroad, it effectively ratified UNOVIS’s aims.54 In the subsequent summer months, Lissitzky traveled with Malevich to Orenburg and Smolensk, giving lessons on the art of propaganda and organizing new UNOVIS chapters.55 A photograph of the two men taken that summer shows Lissitzky clutching what is probably one of the five hand-­sewn prototypes of UNOVIS No. 1, with typewritten essays and hand-­colored plates, which were assembled in Vitebsk and carried across the USSR. The extent to which the program set out in the almanac predicted the interactions between UNOVIS delegates and their recruits is indicated by Shatskikh’s account of the Conference of Art Teachers and Students. In Moscow, when Lissitzky spoke of the “armies of creativity” that would soon replace the armies of labor, he was rehearsing the argument of his essay in UNOVIS No. 1, “Communism of Labor and Suprematism of Creativity.”56 Using terms that recall Malevich’s unpublished pamphlet “God Is Not Cast Down,” the essay insists that the wartime militarization of labor must remain an exception to the revolution’s promise of universal freedom, embodied by “the path of creativity” in art.57 “The commune makes labor a right and a duty of all, makes it free,” he states. “This means that we ourselves become its owner . . . [and] consume its fruits. But thinking that we control it, will it not take possession of us?”58 The many demonstrations of propaganda among the almanac’s plates must have assured potential recruits that this critique of wartime mobilization was offered in good faith, as did the popular poster that Lissitzky designed in Smolensk under the slogan Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.59 But in looking beyond the civil war, UNOVIS promoted the very “hope for the future” that Malevich identified as the ideological core of religious and state schools.60 In its curriculum and in essays like Lissitzky’s, UNOVIS promised students the ability to create a “living, pure, natural structure . . . that grows from us as we grow from nature.”61 Malevich and Lissitzky each referred to this phenomenon as a “living picture,” something continually sought in the history of art but rarely achieved. In Lissitzky’s programmatic definition, if “a living picture is an apparition, a sign,” it is also “the form in which we grasp the world.”62 Like the living speech of the Suprematist liturgy, this sign seems to spring from another world, the meaning of which we do not understand because, as Lissitzky put it, “the grooves of something other than the brain have still insufficiently multiplied in humanity.”63 This intentionally strange imagery is UNOVIS , U t o p i a n o r Sc i e n t i f i c ?

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yet another corruption of Khlebnikov’s “Trumpet of the Martians,” which advocated “tilling the human brain like ploughmen” with newly forged words.64 But what, “other than the brain,” needed tilling? The answer is suggested by the essay’s illustrations, which depicted the planet earth next to an image of Mars first published in 1877 by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, showing a network of “canals” that Schiaparelli compared to a Fourierist phalanstery (Lissitzky’s caption calls them “the result of Martian creativity”).65 This and other textual clues in UNOVIS No. 1 suggest that the group expected to cull recruits from the Proletkult branches that existed in every city where UNOVIS spread. Lissitzky, whose brush with the Proletkult in Kyiv has already been noted, probably considered its ideology the operative context for UNOVIS’s critical salvos. In pushing beyond Khlebnikov, his Martian allusions point to Bogdanov’s utopian novels Red Star and Engineer Menni, which, partly inspired by Schiaparelli, chronicled three generations of canal builders on a communist Mars.66 The title of Lissitzky’s second essay in UNOVIS No. 1, “Suprematism of World-­Building,” borrowed the neologism “world-­building” (mirostroitel’stvo) from Bogdanov, for whom it represented the highest level of social organization humanity could achieve—­and the native task of the proletariat.67 These allusions reveal a quarrel over the foundations of the world to come. The vehemence of Lissitzky’s assertion that “labor creates nothing. creativity creates,” must be read against the background of Bogdanov’s claim that “creation . . . is exactly the same as labor, the product of which is not the repetition of a ready-­made stereotype, but something new.”68 Months before, Lissitzky instructed the Vitebsk apprentices to “prepare yourselves for the hour when this bellicose and destructive communism becomes a world-­building [one]” that surpasses “the exigencies of proletarian art.”69 Until that moment arrived, strategic engagement with an organization that could boast an international bureau and nearly half a million Soviet members held nothing but advantages for UNOVIS.70 In the final months of 1920, however, this ideological entanglement with Proletkult suddenly became a liability. In Lenin’s view, the funds that the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, used to feed Proletkult’s dream of cultural hegemony needed to be redirected to the actual educational goal of Narkompros: fighting illiteracy. UNOVIS might have rejected Proletkult’s vision of a purely proletarian culture, but on the question of world-­building the two were in lockstep. Unsurprisingly then, one of the topics UNOVIS discussed in Smolensk was the outcome of that month’s Proletkult Congress, which drew sharp words from Lenin about Proletkult’s “attempts to think up its own special culture.”71 Before long, the broader consequences of Lenin’s rebuke were made explicit. In December, Pravda published a Central Committee letter, “On the Proletkults,” stipulating that Proletkult and Narkompros must be purged of “futurists, decadents, supporters of idealist philosophy hostile 26

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to Marxism and . . . renegades from the ranks of bourgeois publicists and philosophers.”72 By January, Narkompros was slated for a wholesale reorganization that would bring it in line with the principle that “art, like science, must be subordinated to the general tasks of the state.”73 After leaving Smolensk in late October, Lissitzky returned to Moscow, where the unfolding crisis in Narkompros turned his visit into a semipermanent relocation. One purpose of his trip was tied to a measure that Narkompros had approved on October 12, which united the fine and applied arts divisions of Moscow’s Free Studios in the new Higher State Artistic-­Technical Studios, VKhUTEMAS (Vysshye gosudarstvennye khudozhestvenno-­tekhnicheskie masterskie).74 He continued the campaign to expand UNOVIS with a lecture at the Free Studios on October 27 and stayed on afterward to print a new UNOVIS leaflet. But as he complained to Malevich in December, “a whole month of ‘tomorrows’ passed” with no new texts from Vitebsk, while old leaflets with ill-­considered attacks on Vladimir Tatlin eroded the group’s support on the artistic left.75 In the following weeks, political intrigues great and small narrowed UNOVIS’s horizons. In early January, Lissitzky was invited to join the architectural faculty at VKhUTEMAS, but Malevich’s return to Moscow was ruled out by faculty opposition stirred up by his former collaborator, the Suprematist painter Ivan Kliun. At the same time, word reached Lissitzky that the visual arts department of Narkompros, IZO, “will no longer exist . . . They want utter bureaucrats, with artists confined to some ‘Academic Center.’”76 He soon learned, however, that thanks to Lunacharsky’s intervention, the department would be transferred to the Chief Administration for Vocational Education (Glavprofobr), which organized polytechnical institutes according to the economic interests of the state. In this situation, Lissitzky realized, “there could be certain advantages for us” even if some matters “in connection with our program” now needed to be reconsidered.77 The most visible outcome of this development is the strictly disciplinary basis on which Lissitzky defended UNOVIS positions in 1921. Unlike his writings for the UNOVIS almanac, which are chockablock with poetic and philosophical speculation, Lissitzky’s sole published essay of 1921, “Catastrophe of Architecture,” takes aim at academic historicism in architecture with a single reductio ad absurdum: the utopia discovered in an archive.78 Lissitzky’s question, “Does this architecture need a whole faculty in the State Artistic and Technical Studios?” was far from impertinent. The IZO bulletin chose to serialize his article and promised a second installment in a coming issue devoted to “art in production and the construction of a contemporary art school.”79 For readers familiar with UNOVIS, the party line was evident enough in Lissitzky’s essay. It portrays the old academy as the deadly antithesis of “our living natural [prirodo-­estestvennoe] creativity,” which seeks an outlet in “the creation of structures.” But where UNOVIS No. 1 invited readers to view these UNOVIS , U t o p i a n o r Sc i e n t i f i c ?

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structures against the utopian horizon of a canalized Mars, here they are directly identified with “the living body of the factory or the people’s house,” on which historicism hangs like “a parasite.”80 With the architectural faculty of VKhUTEMAS under the sway of former academicians Ivan Zholtovsky and Aleksei Shchusev, Lissitzky initially balked at the offer of a teaching position, but later in spring 1921 he accepted.81 In the months before he gave his lectures on monumental painting and architecture at VKhUTEMAS, he worked elsewhere as an instructor of “drawing for engineers and electricians” because, he told Malevich, “this public will, in time, be very useful to us.”82 His decision was consistent with the premise that UNOVIS, as a party, should operate outside the confines of the academy. In Vitebsk, UNOVIS gave presentations on contemporary art at a labor school (after which Lissitzky fielded perplexed questions).83 The leaflet they distributed at the All-­Russia Conference of Art Teachers and Students called “not only upon those responsible for the arts, but also upon our comrades . . . who make useful things in the world at large” to unite under the banner of UNOVIS.84 With his article in the IZO bulletin, Lissitzky began to seek allies in architectural circles. The group of “young ones” he identified as fellow adversaries of academic historicism probably included Nikolai Ladovsky, whose work he had encountered at an exhibition in December.85 A key participant in debates over the basis of art and architectural education, Ladovsky would soon play a leading role at VKhUTEMAS, spearheading the basic course in the “Space” discipline, which was required for all students. The prospect of traveling abroad to establish a worldwide footing for UNOVIS gave Lissitzky another reason to keep VKhUTEMAS at arm’s length. In December 1920, his letters to Vitebsk allude to his plans to leave the USSR, even without “an official reason, which I will eventually obtain.”86 By the end of January, the director of IZO Narkompros, David Shterenberg, engaged Lissitzky to travel as a cultural liaison for an exhibition of Russian art in Germany. Shterenberg asked Lissitzky to collect art by UNOVIS members for the show but intimated that he must refrain from working on the group’s behalf while abroad.87 Instead, his activities should align with the aims of Narkompros and, by extension, the state. In spring 1921, the exchange of printed matter with foreign artists had resumed, thanks in part to an influx of international delegates to the Third Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. The international department of IZO Narkompros now advocated an international exchange of exhibitions, which, when tied to recent reforms in art education, pointed toward a new “Comintern of Art.”88 In the end, however, the opening of the German exhibition was delayed for over a year; although Lissitzky had hoped to return from Europe by summer 1921, he remained in Moscow until winter.89 Uncertain of his departure, he passed the year in a holding pattern in the capital, his liminal relationship to UNOVIS fueling rumors of a split. 28

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Proun: Toward a New Body

Lissitzky’s sojourn in Moscow coincides with a remarkable lacuna in his published statements. Since his lecture at the Free Studios in October 1920, he had been using the neologism Proun as a successor to the concept of the living picture. The unfamiliar name, he explained, was chosen to stress that “the easelist reality is no longer self-­sufficient” and requires further elaboration “in actual space, in the model and in technical material.”90 Over the course of 1921, he used the Proun concept to reframe his volumetric Suprematist paintings in a series of essays and lectures, all of which stalled on the way to publication. He wrote a short essay, “Not Worldvision—­but Worldreality”; a longer essay called “Proun,” which he also gave as a lecture; and a more substantial pamphlet, The Overthrow of Art.91 Even the first draft of his article “Catastrophe of Architecture” urged instructors at the new VKhUTEMAS to “make your studios into creative depots of structures,” where students “are working not on pictures, but on Prouns.”92 In this mass of unpublished text, we can observe the gradual winnowing of UNOVIS’s planetary rhetoric to its practical and pedagogical core. Yet once Lissitzky reached Berlin, he published a lightly edited version of the earliest and most speculative of these texts, which he conceived as “a few introductory words” for the lithographic portfolio Prouns.93 The abandoned bilingual edition of the portfolio, which he assembled in Moscow in the winter and spring of 1921, marks the eclipse of UNOVIS’s planetary utopia. A unique cover and colophon with an unfinished German translation of “Not Worldvision—­but Worldreality” suggests that he planned to issue Prouns in the hybrid manuscript-­lithograph style typical of UNOVIS’s Vitebsk publications (fig. 1.6). From the oils and watercolors he had completed since late 1919, Lissitzky selected eleven to be printed on near-­uniform paper, minimizing wide variation in the original works’ sizes (these are included in the prints as frames marked with a single pass of the litho crayon). Complementing this regular format is a new kind of serial titling. Each print is labeled like a laboratory specimen pulled from a larger sample and tagged for further study: P1 is followed by P1a and P1c through P1e; then P2b through P2d; then P3a, P5a, and P6b. For the Prouns in the P1 series, these titles replaced the more explicitly architectural names (Town, Bridge 1, House above the Earth, Suprematism of the City) that Lissitzky had used for works made before summer 1920; for subsequent works, which trend in a noticeably pictorial direction, he provided no such typological clues.94 To clarify the new order that Lissitzky imposed on this assortment of works, we shall read the portfolio as a demonstration of the essay’s claim that “the Proun is leading us toward the construction of a new body.”95 This seemingly simple proposition condenses a whole series of problems that Lissitzky wanted the Prouns portfolio to address. UNOVIS , U t o p i a n o r Sc i e n t i f i c ?

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Figure 1.6 El Lissitzky, Prouns portfolio, colophon and manifesto, 1920–­1921. Ink on paper, 17.9 × 27 in. (45.6 × 68.5 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Toward what sort of body is the Proun leading us? Rather than the “living body of the factory,” as Lissitzky’s published statements suggest, we encounter a paper architecture built on literary foundations, like Of 2 Squares. Lissitzky’s prints use the drafting techniques that he was teaching to young engineers and electricians that winter—­circuit diagrams and isometric projections—­to construct elaborate unities from partial and divergent views. In a similar way, he bookends the sequence of lithographs with two prints that encourage viewing from several orientations: P1 (formerly called Turn) has its new title printed along each of its four framing edges, and P6b, a variant of a lost tondo, is titled on two edges (fig. 1.7). This device frames the entire sequence in relation to a contemporary UNOVIS publication, Malevich’s 34 Drawings, which envisioned “a new Suprematist satellite,” a heavenly body “which will move in orbit” between earth and the moon.96 The Prouns portfolio assumes this perspective and returns our gaze to an earthly realm that will be reconfigured, Lissitzky predicts, as “a united world city of the people of the terrestrial globe.”97 By raising the image of the city to a planetary scale, the portfolio extends Khlebnikov’s Martian creativity to the scale of Bogdanov’s canal builders. As the prints of the portfolio’s second series show, this framing device effectively differentiated the perspective of the Prouns portfolio from that of Italian futurism. P2d, a Proun Lissitzky completed in Orenburg, strongly suggests that he renewed his attention to the work of Antonio Sant’Elia while in Moscow for the teachers’ conference (fig. 1.8).98 The picture’s preponderant negative space, asymmetry, and worm’s-­eye perspective are at odds with the emphatically centered configurations of the 30

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Figure 1.7 El Lissitzky, P6b, 1920–­1921. Lithograph, 13.5 × 17.5 in. (34.2 × 44.5 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

other Prouns in the portfolio. These features instead recall the lingering effects of the decorative, Secession-­derived treatment of the architectural image in the views by Sant’Elia that F. T. Marinetti published in 1914 as a manifesto of the “Futurist City” (fig. 1.9).99 In the Prouns portfolio, this aesthetic contemplation of the ideal city is juxtaposed with an exacerbation of the material texture (or faktura) of the image in P2c. Lissitzky’s original painting explored the combination of textures inherited from cubism—­pasted paper and oil paint mixed with grit—­and the minute patterns of his wood support (plate 3). He supplemented the tactile associations of these familiar materials with a triangular fragment of zinc, a substance widely used in the mid-­nineteenth century in embossed architectural ornament and more recently as a protective coating applied electrolytically to iron and steel in a process called galvanization.100 Taken together, these two Prouns place the remnants of the “literary ‘I’” that Marinetti wanted to destroy in direct opposition to the “molecular agitation” of vibrant matter that he celebrated as its replacement.101 Materialogical studies like P2c were an integral part of UNOVIS’s “laboratory” culture of experimental creativity. In Vitebsk, Malevich extended Marinetti’s insights by arguing that “the ‘I’ itself is an aggregate of elements and, accordingly, it is a collective,” and that any international body must incorporate “the world of metals.”102 After Lissitzky left for Moscow, silicon carbide, or carborundum—­a hard compound then finding new uses in industrial cutting and smoothing, including in the preparation of lithogUNOVIS , U t o p i a n o r Sc i e n t i f i c ?

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Figure 1.8 El Lissitzky, P2d, 1920–­1921. Lithograph, 17.6 × 13.5 in. (44.7 × 34.3 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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raphy stones—­captured the imagination of Malevich’s student Lev Yudin. Inspired by Kruchenykh’s “Chemical Famine: Ballads about the Carborundum Stone,” Yudin drafted a scientific table of faktura. He sought to connect “metallic, electric, and meteoric” textures in painting with the sensations of “collecting,” “joining,” “radiating,” “fragmenting,” and “distributing” signified by the linguistic prepositions “with,” “through,” and “from.”103 This experimental research into the poetics of material is probably what Viktor Shklovsky had in mind when he asserted that “the Suprematists did for art what chemistry has done for medicine: they isolated the active factor in the remedies.”104 As in Malevich’s theories of the mid-­1 920s, the UNOVIS researcher is closer to the pharmacist than the painter. Lissitzky’s commentary on the Prouns portfolio also develops this tenet of Suprematism by defining color as “the purest aspect of material, its status as energy,” which cannot be divorced from faktura. From this premise, he argues that “the force of contrast or agreement of two blacks, two whites, or two middle grays gives us the key to the correspondence between two technical materials.” Yet the existence of the portfolio itself testifies that no Proun is identical with its own materiality, however much it insists upon the latter. In the reduction of pictures like P2c to reproducible images, this testimony is especially forceful. Rather than being defined by available materials, in the last instance “the Proun creates new material in creating a new form—­if it cannot be incarnated [voploshchena] in iron, then it is necessary to transform iron into Bessemer steel or Wolfram steel, or something that has still not been made because it has not yet been necessary.”105 Investigations of faktura and assertions of pure form are, it turns out, two moments of a dialectic. Lissitzky’s language in these passages suggests that the body toward which the Proun leads is an instance of what Christine Poggi has called futurism’s dream of “metallized flesh.”106 In Russia, the meaning of cubism and futurism was debated in precisely these terms thanks to the mystical cosmology of the Symbolists. For the existentialist Christian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev, the crisis in art precipitated by Picasso and chapter one

Figure 1.9 Antonio Sant’Elia, “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture,” 1914. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Figure 1.10 El Lissitzky, Sliding (Advance), 1919–­1920. Graphite and gouache on laid paper, 3.5 × 8.9 in. (9 × 22.6 cm). Musée National d’Art Moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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Marinetti was only a passive reflection of mechanization, a fateful development that “must be conceived as a dematerialization, as the disintegration of the flesh of the world.”107 After futurism made the boundary between the human figure and the city permeable, Berdiaev concluded that painting, which had always been “formed flesh,” suffered “a final and irreversible severing” from the body, and with it every classicism.108 Viacheslav Ivanov experienced “the same feeling that the old inner form has been disincarnated.”109 For the poet, however, it was “our native language, this living verbal earth and maternal flesh of ours,” that was “becoming vague, incorporeal and aerial as it moves away from the tradition.”110 Ivanov’s mystical vision of a mother tongue fertilized by the divine Logos can be discerned in Kruchenykh’s division of the word into the universal language of vowels and the autochthonous texture of consonants—­as in his poem “Vysoty” (“Heights”), which preserves only the vowel sounds of the Orthodox liturgical chant.111 It survives in Lissitzky’s characterization of the Prouns as well. Like the Logos, Lissitzky tells us that a Proun is “masculine, active, dynamic” and “carries the seeds of the widest utility.” These it scatters not in the fields of language but on the “the reinforced concrete slab of the communist foundation under the people of the entire earth.”112 The image of a mystical union between Proun and communist slab in “Not Worldvision—­but Worldreality” is an open travesty of Symbolist mythopoesis. In one of Lissitzky’s earliest attempts at volumetric Suprematism, Sliding (Advance), we can glimpse an attempted figuration of this cosmic insemination of the commune by way of a Suprematist cylinder, a form that recalls the unambiguously phallic signs of the “image-­ body” that the critic Carl Einstein discovered in cubism (fig. 1.10).113 But the events of the previous months had shown Lissitzky that such literary gambits would only invite controversy. Among the first cuts he made to his introductory essay were its gendered statements about the Proun and

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Figure 1.11 El Lissitzky, P5a, 1920–­1921. Lithograph, 17.5 × 14 in. (44.5 × 35.5 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

references to communism. Sliding (Advance) was likewise excluded from the portfolio—­a symptom, perhaps, of art’s final severance from the human form. Of the images that remain, only P6b carries any residual memory of the human body, returning our gaze like an anthropomorphic eye. But Lissitzky’s talk of embodiment was not entirely dispensable. Where Ivanov envisioned an immediate return to art’s religious roots, Berdiaev admitted that “futurism has to be passed through and overcome,” and even praised Suprematism for returning to the creative act before he condemned it as nihilism.114 Perhaps taking aim at Berdiaev, who thought surpassing futurism required “sounding the depth, not the surface” of things, Lissitzky’s Prouns insist on the substance of their own superficiality.115 As Peter Nisbet has argued, the title of P5a is printed backward in order to demonstrate the “real reversibility” of the printed image (fig. 1.11).116 In a design that could hardly be realized in existing materials, this apparent printer’s error becomes a subtle celebration of dissemination. Lissitzky’s original Proun, known today only in a halftone reproduction, explored surface textures similar to those of P2c (fig. 1.12). Its material faktura is evacuated from a pencil and gouache version of the Proun in the Museo Thyssen-­Bornemisza that reverses the composition from left to right, as if in preparation for its union with the printing UNOVIS , U t o p i a n o r Sc i e n t i f i c ?

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Figure 1.12 El Lissitzky, Proun 5a, ca. 1920, from Das Kunstblatt 6, no. 7 (July 1922).

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matrix. Finally, in the lithographic version, the backward title becomes a token of the materiality of the image, reminding us that the seed of the idea inscribed on the printer’s stone has only one face to show. By stressing that the Prouns “are constructed from material and not from aesthetics,” Lissitzky distances himself from the definition of aesthetic pleasure as purposeless play, or subjective “purposiveness without purpose,” that prevailed in the Kantian tradition. In this, he follows in the footsteps of Symbolists like Ivanov, who saw the collectivizing power of the church organ and chorus as evidence of art’s objective purposiveness.117 Rather than the pulpit or stage, Lissitzky submits the image to the material processes of reproduction to escape the trap of subjectivity. He justifies his stance with the two modes of objective purposiveness identified by Kant: its internal form, perfection (whereby an object agrees with “the concept of what sort of thing it is supposed to be”), and its exchapter one

ternal form, utility (whereby it agrees with some end outside of itself).118 In contrast to the picture, which is an “end and completion [zavershennost’] in itself,” Lissitzky stipulates that the Proun “moves from station to station along a chain of perfections [sovershenstv].” By passing from inner to outer forms of purpose, Lissitzky insists, “every purposiveness gives birth to utility, they are concentric rings embracing a center—­the aim.”119 Each Proun is a question about what sort of thing it is supposed to be, a protoconcept arrested at the moment of imminent perfection. Nonetheless, according to Lissitzky it is always on the way to utility, its consummation with the needs of the wider world. On this path, the Proun faced a real system of abstraction and exchange in the principle of economy, which Lissitzky understood as “a measure of the organization of a growth of form.”120 In this case, he relies on the account of objective purposiveness in Bogdanov’s magnum opus Tektology: The Universal Science of Organization, which was excerpted in the journal Proletarskaia kul’tura (Proletarian Culture). For Bogdanov, the problem with the traditional notion of purposiveness is that it “presupposes someone who sets and realizes an aim, essentially a conscious-­active arranger, an organizer” of functions.121 In metaphysical and religious texts, the integration of “organs and tissues” with the vital functions of the organism inevitably reveals the hand of a divine creator. By contrast, Bogdanov argues that “purposiveness is the result of a universal struggle of organizational forms,” which can be mutually organizing or disorganizing, depending on how they are combined.122 The superiority of a given set of forms, he claims, can be measured by its ability to eliminate redundancies and overcome resistances. Lissitzky similarly maintained that the arts should neither contradict nor compete with other activities in the broader economy. The utility of art, he observed, “is justified only when it augments the ultimate purposiveness of the order of the day.”123 “The question about purposiveness” that Lissitzky addressed in his introduction to the Prouns portfolio was highly relevant to his colleagues at VKhUTEMAS.124 With the foundations of art’s autonomy recently unsettled, the organization of arts curricula also became problematic. Early in 1921, several young VKhUTEMAS professors organized a “Working Group of Objective Analysis” at the Institute of Artistic Culture, INKhUK (Institut khudozhestvennoi kul’tury) to determine how the basic concepts of composition and construction manifested in the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. The painter Aleksandr Rodchenko kicked off the discussion by proposing that in all the arts “there is only one kind of construction,” which organizes an object according to an aim.125 When the architect Ladovsky objected that construction exists as a necessary moment of architectural design, but only by analogy in painting, a paradoxical exchange of tasks resulted. As Maria Gough notes, “The injunction laid before architecture by engineering in the late nineteenth cenUNOVIS , U t o p i a n o r Sc i e n t i f i c ?

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tury was now laid before painting.”126 A splinter group of self-­identified “constructivists” abandoned painting to practice a new form of “spatial construction,” while Ladovsky and other architects investigated what Rodchenko called “constructive composition” as a means to break free of their academic training. When Lissitzky delivered a lecture on his Prouns at the INKhUK that fall, the audience split along these new fault lines. To the ex-­painters associated with constructivism, his views seemed retrograde, but to Ladovsky they were a revelation.127 Paradoxically, the use value of the Proun increased because the Prouns had no relation to industrial or civic architecture. As a pedagogical model, the Proun’s genetic sequence of creation–­perfection–­utility presupposed an experimental form-­finding process and the development of prototypes with a contingent relation to future needs. One compelling sign that the Prouns were understood this way is a wire and paper model made by a VKhUTEMAS student in the mid-­1920s, which bears a striking resemblance to P5a (fig. 1.13). The model was created to fulfill the first part of an exercise Ladovsky designed for the spatial foundations course he first taught in 1922. In the initial phase of the exercise, students explored formal qualities like mass, weight, rhythm, proportion, and mechanical stability. Later, they approached these formal problems within the framework of a salient building type: a grain elevator, warehouse, office tower, or housing block.128 The model shown here is meant to demonstrate the student’s grasp of mass and space. But it also shows that Prouns like P5a remained intelligible within the new curricular framework of VKhUTEMAS because Ladovsky’s foundations course had institutionalized the distinction between internal and external purposes. Of course, the Prouns were conceived before the emergence of these new positions and institutional dynamics, which exerted such a lasting influence on their meaning. By the end of 1921, UNOVIS was embroiled in the “uncompromising war on art” declared by the Working Group of Constructivists.129 But that spring, the artistic left was still united against the forces of the old academy. In May, Malevich excitedly told the members of UNOVIS that “all our Constructivist painting in its historical movement has reached architecture or Suprematist volume.”130 At the same time, Lissitzky reiterated Bogdanov’s call for mutually organizing activities in his introduction to the Prouns portfolio, proclaiming, “The new world of forms . . . will be constructed by an artist not in competition with the engineer-­constructor.”131 Instead of an artist who assumed the role of an engineer, as the constructivists in Moscow had begun to advocate, he envisioned a new type of “artist-­constructivist,” like those UNOVIS was matriculating in Vitebsk.132 Lissitzky did not claim to embody this new creative type, but he did present his Prouns as examples of the principle of noncompetition. In one unpublished statement, he emphasizes that the Proun is “only part of the realization of the creative act,” and therefore depends upon “a 38

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series of others standing in a community of creators.”133 This statement allows us to reconcile Lissitzky’s repeated claims that the Proun must be developed “in actual space, in the model and in technical material,” with the absence of a three-­dimensional Proun model in his oeuvre.134 Rather than a project harnessed to the trajectory of a single individual, the Proun must be perfected through the creativity of others. It is this constitutive incompleteness and dependency that left the Prouns open to uses beyond the horizon of UNOVIS. The most compelling resonance between P5a and the VKhUTEMAS student’s model is therefore the structuring absence that they share. While the model can explore the design in a spatial dimension that the print lacks, it creates a similar effect of implicit wholeness by articulating just a few vertices of an oblique open cube. From the perspective of the spatial model, we can see that the positivist reflection on the corporeality of images in P5a also has an intersubjective value: in itself, the printed sign is nothing; it exists only through active elaboration by a future interlocutor, which requires another, and another, ad infinitum. In the end, then, despite the planetary imagery that is the alpha and omega of the Prouns portfolio, the body toward which it points is a social one.

Figure 1.13 Unknown photographer, two views of a student model on the topic “constructing a cubical form based on combination of mass and space” for the “Space” course at the VKhUTEMAS, Moscow, 1920–­1926. Gelatin silver prints, approx. 2.8 × 2.3 in. (7 × 5.9 cm) each. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

Although UNOVIS has come to be seen through the lens of construcUNOVIS , U t o p i a n o r Sc i e n t i f i c ?

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tivism, it fashioned its concept of collective creativity from an earlier conjuncture, where Proletkult and Symbolist theories of art converged. Against the magico-­religious collective of the Symbolists and the laboring collective of the Proletkult, UNOVIS deployed the empty forms of popular expression: Lissitzky’s skaz, Malevich’s senseless prayer, and the faceless void of the square, decked in parti-­colored ornament. Here was the living image of collective creativity reflected in the Suprematist mirror: a myth of earthly paradise in which our creations no longer show us our own labor, a science-­fiction utopia harboring a truth about their absolute otherness, a transrational pharmacology for a collective organism. In Lissitzky’s Prouns, this groundless creativity became the ground of architecture, a civic art for the global commune. These unvarnished art school myths gave meaning to a curriculum that could have no basis in history. But as the battle lines within Narkompros shifted and UNOVIS was pushed to the margins, the future that sustained it also faded away.

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2 The International Set If Moscow had offered Lissitzky promising conditions for printing UNOVIS materials in 1921, Berlin must have seemed a place of almost decadent abundance when he arrived there the following winter. Because of the civil war in Russia, even the most basic materials were in short supply, and printing had become exceedingly difficult. As a result, a growing number of Russian publications (including many state-­financed projects) were printed in Berlin, where a large émigré population and more than seventy publishing houses thrived on the rate of exchange between the ruble and the catastrophically inflated German mark.1 Lissitzky took advantage of this situation when he was an IZO Narkompros liaison to the First Russian Art Exhibition at Berlin’s Galerie Van Diemen. The position paid him a modest sum, which he supplemented by designing book covers for the Jewish section of Narkompros and for a press friendly to émigré Symbolists, Skify (Scythians).2 The Scythians in turn published Lissitzky’s children’s book Of 2 Squares and three numbers of a trilingual journal he coedited with Ilya Ehrenburg, Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, before Andrei Bely alerted them to the “forbidding foe” in their midst.3 Lissitzky published more than he exhibited in Germany, but he treated the press and the exhibition hall as two faces of a single plane of activity. Scholars have long recognized that Lissitzky’s exhibition designs, beginning with Prouns Space, installed at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1923, facilitated a broader turn among the international avant-­garde from the discrete art object to its architectural environment.4 But Lissitzky’s engagement with the media environment of his exhibitions is just as important. He published the design for his Prouns Space in a new lithographic portfolio as the show opened and printed photographs of the installation in the new journal G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung soon after. A few months later, he designed a room to showcase his work as a typographer for Berlin’s Jury Free Art Show and featured these publications alongside Veshch’ and Of 2 Squares. To clarify the bond between these two aspects of Lissitzky’s practice, this chapter treats them as instances of what the formalist critic Yuri Tynianov called “the artistic everyday.” Tynianov argued that the “speech orientation” of literature connects the formal qualities of its artistic domT h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Se t

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inant to the social environments in which it functions “as a living form of address.”5 For Lissitzky, who saw contemporary art stranded “between the studio and the factory,” the exhibition hall not only oriented his Prouns toward architecture; it functioned as a space of assembly and transmission like the printed page. When he partnered with Theo van Doesburg and Hans Richter to form an International Faction of Constructivists, Lissitzky’s approach informed the concept of “demonstration” they used to challenge the values of the traditional art exhibition. Rather than a warehouse stuffed with unrelated objects, all for sale, they held that an exhibition must be a proposition on the coming collective that demonstrates solidarity and clarity of purpose. The group’s strategy follows a principle first articulated in Veshch’. “It is necessary to struggle for the liberation of objects,” Lissitzky and Ehrenburg wrote, for “only the object that is oppressed oppresses mankind.”6 Veshch’ itself, as the first piece of constructivist typography, embodied the new freedom that Lissitzky and his comrades wanted to realize in the exhibition hall. In Moscow, Aleksei Gan criticized the Veshch’ approach for its “inability to tear itself away from art.” The problem, for Gan, was that “in the West, constructivism flirts with politics, claiming that the new art is outside politics, but it isn’t apolitical either is it?”7 At the INKhUK in Moscow, where productivist critics took control at the end of 1921, artists were expected to abandon pure artistic research and move into production, leaving Lissitzky in a position regarded as “already obsolete for today’s INKhUK.”8 As Christina Kiaer has shown, the Moscow constructivists responded to the productivist imperative by working with state-­owned enterprises to reimagine the object as a “coworker” in the Bolshevik campaign to reshape everyday life.9 The echo of the Veshch’ editorial in this attempt to free objects from their capitalist oppressors may surprise us. After all, the antipathy of Gan and productivist critics led a generation of scholars to see Lissitzky as an unreliable messenger who rendered constructivism unrecognizable when he brought it to the West.10 But rather than reject art out of hand, the Moscow constructivists embraced design fields that served as established interfaces between art and industry. Even Gan wound up becoming a typographer for leftist art journals, despite his sharp words for Lissitzky.11 At home and abroad, then, constructivism encountered the artistic everyday as a precondition to a politics of everyday life.

Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand and the Economic Question

Lissitzky’s activities in Germany have often frustrated scholars hoping to isolate the various strands of the avant-­garde that he wished to unite. The journal he and Ilya Ehrenburg coedited in Berlin, Veshch’ Objet Ge42

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genstand, helped to obscure his own agenda by adopting a broadly affirmative, antipolemical posture. The editorial in the first issue advocated a “constructive art not adorning life, but organizing it” and urged readers to “quit declaring and rebutting, make objects!”12 The editors framed their journal as an informational index of exchanges rather than an arbiter of values—­a “price list” where emerging trends in the arts could be tracked across Europe. Perhaps the most notable exchange on the balance sheet of Veshch’ is that between the “constructive” art endorsed by its editors and constructivism, a term they scrupulously avoided.13 Strictly speaking, Gan was mistaken to claim that “Comrades Ehrenburg and Lissitzky . . . simply call the new art constructivism,” but he was right that this term was already in circulation abroad.14 The loose circle of “constructivists” that met in the studios of László Moholy-­Nagy and Gert Caden in 1922 included the brothers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, Lissitzky, van Doesburg, Richter, Viking Eggeling, and László Peri.15 Lissitzky did not play the decisive role in the dissemination of constructivism, but then again, he didn’t have to. He was surrounded by enthusiasts, and, like Gan, he viewed constructivism as an inherently international phenomenon tied to the development of the means of production. But why, if this is the case, did the editors of Veshch’ advocate for “constructive art” rather than constructivism? The broader term allowed them to distinguish the avant-­garde from the forces of reaction they identified in the West (represented by returns to classicism) and in Russia (represented by the “narrowly national” and “outwardly religious” art acceptable to the peasantry).16 Semantically, it lent itself to an equally broad distinction within the avant-­garde between positive (constructive) and negative (destructive) phases of activity. The latter lumped futurism and dada together with the anti-­art strain of constructivism that Gan professed, but it did not include the productivist platform embraced at the INKhUK in November 1921, which rejected “pure” painting in favor of “real practical work in production.”17 In this case, Veshch’ relied on a distinction between the maximum program of productivism, which would wholly dissolve art into life, and “its proximate goal (minimum program)—­to find the point where the paths of art and production cross. To reconcile their own purposiveness with the utility of technology.”18 This summary from Ehrenburg rehearses an argument we saw Lissitzky make in chapter 1. The difference is that Ehrenburg attributes the same position to Rodchenko, van Doesburg, Le Corbusier, and the poet Blaise Cendrars. These “honest workers” in the arts, who Ehrenburg simply calls “constructors,” are united by the fact that their work is located in the space cleared by the foregoing “destructive” tendencies.19 These broadly applied concepts quickly lead us to interpretive difficulties. When the editors proclaim “the triumph of the constructive method . . . in the new economy, in the development of industry, in the T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Se t

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psychology of contemporaries, and in art,” they echo Le Corbusier’s essay “Contemporary Architecture” in the journal’s first issue, which affirms that the “constructive method” of engineers like Gustave Eiffel exerted a vital influence on French architects.20 One of the two articles in Veshch’ that we can securely attribute to Lissitzky likewise asserts that UNOVIS is developing “a new method . . . as the basis of a new architecture in the widest sense of the concept.”21 If we join the editors in seeking common ground for these approaches, we arrive at the questions that fired Gan’s critique. In these years, Le Corbusier defended the rationalization of construction as a neutral application of scientific principles, drawing from the achievements of engineers and the labor-­saving doctrine of Taylorism.22 Veshch’ locates constructive art “outside of all political parties,” but not “outside of the transformation of social forms.”23 Does this topological neutrality mean that Veshch’ embraced the sort of managerial reformism advocated by L’Esprit nouveau? If so, how would it relate to the position Lissitzky advocated in UNOVIS? The method alluded to in Veshch’ is not explained by the editors so much as it is demonstrated by Lissitzky’s typography. In the journal’s third number, Lissitzky laid out the opening page with text and images that equate the “technical object” (a locomotive’s snowplow) and the “Suprematist object” (Malevich’s Black Square) with the notion of “economy” (fig. 2.1). Adjacent slogans praise the machine as a “lesson in clarity and economy” but liken the act of depicting it to painting a nude. Kristin Romberg has proposed that we read this figure according to drafting conventions, so that the dotted line connecting Suprematist and technical objects represents an electrical circuit and the “equals sign” a condenser, which stores a certain quantity of energy in the electrical field.24 The word “economy” is printed where a notation of the storage capacity would normally appear, suggesting that it regulates the respective “charges” of artistic and technical objects. This visual aid becomes slightly less obscure when paired with relevant textual sources. An essay by Malevich in the almanac UNOVIS No. 1, “Toward Pure Activity,” asserts that “every creative form is constructed on an economic resolution, and every object is an answer to a resolved economic question.”25 Even more revealing is a sentence Kruchenykh appended to the version of “Declaration of the Word as Such” published in the UNOVIS almanac, which asserts that “in transrational poetry the highest and most definitive universality and economy (eco-­a) are achieved.”26 This is likely a rejoinder to Viktor Shklovsky, whose 1917 essay “Art as Technique” had rigorously separated the poetic text from the realm of practical life, where “the over-­automatization of an object permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort.”27 After reading Shklovsky’s text, Kruchenykh defiantly coined the terms “eco-­et” and “eco-­a,” abbreviating the notions of “economy-­poetry” and “economy-­art” to reduce their share of verbal expenditure.28 UNOVIS thus rejected Shklovsky’s attempt 44

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Figure 2.1 El Lissitzky (designer), Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, no. 3 (May 1922). Letterpress, 12.2 × 9.3 in. (31 × 23.5 cm). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (85-­ S436).

to find a respite from the ever-­accelerating pace of the economy in art. The economic interrelation of technical and artistic objects is conveyed more clearly by two designs for Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “Svolochi” (“Scoundrels”) that Lissitzky completed in 1922. For the French translation by Marina Tsvetaeva published in Veshch’, Lissitzky transformed the poem into a mass of text punctuated by a swarm of bold black squares (fig. 2.2).29 These squares stand in for disjunctive breaks, reframing Mayakovsky’s staccato lines as a unitary utterance. In its visual impact, the block of text approximates the compact economy of the square, while the setting—­lines laid out margin to margin, like a telegram transcribed directly off the wire—­is appropriate to the poem’s theme. “Svolochi” decries the international response to the Transvolga famine, portraying it, in classic agit-­prop mode, as either cosmopolitan indifference or capitalist political cunning. An exemplary T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Se t

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Figure 2.2 El Lissitzky (designer), “Écoutez, canailles,” Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, no. 3 (May 1922). Letterpress, 12.2 × 9.3 in. (31 × 23.5 cm). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (85-­ S436).

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stanza captures the dynamic: “Radio roars across all borders / and in response / absurdity after absurdity / pours forth in the pages of the papers.”30 The treatment Lissitzky devised for Veshch’ highlights the poem’s role as a carrier of the original cry for bread, giving the border-­crossing translation all the immediacy of the live transmission. This telegraphic treatment is yet more explicit in a second version of the poem, which appeared in Dlia golosa (For the Voice), a slim volume of Mayakovsky’s poems that Lissitzky designed in winter 1922–­1923. Mayakovsky had arrived in Berlin in time for the opening of the First Russian Art Exhibition at the Galerie Van Diemen and participated in several events related to the opening of the exhibition.31 Before he returned to Moscow in December 1922, he engaged Lissitzky to design a collection of thirteen of his best-­known verses, which he planned to release under the imprint of the Soviet State Press.32 chapter t wo

For the version of “Svolochi” published in For the Voice, Lissitzky created a two-­page spread divided by the poem’s title, which runs vertically in a large sans-­serif font along the length of the gutter (fig. 2.3). At left, three large red dots marked with the names of the international capitals London, Paris, and Berlin are joined to three large red dashes by slender V-­forms, which fail to find the symmetrical sequence of dots that would complete the telegraphic distress signal, • • • − − − • • •, S O S. Instead, each dash terminates at a black skull-­and-­crossbones. Echoing this broken distress call at right, the poem’s first stanza presses the titular “Scoundrels” against these marks of death: “Nailed by lines / stand mute! / Listen to this wolfish wail / hardly pretending to be a poem!”33 Lissitzky’s design capitalizes on Mayakovsky’s potent opening metaphor, which, in imagining its poetic form materialized, treats writing as a force that immobilizes its object. Literalizing the poem’s opening self-­portrait, each line of verse is emphatically underlined with a thick black bar. This theme of rapid transmission extends to the entire form of the book, which abandons the traditional table of contents in favor of a thumb index. Lissitzky borrowed the device from a common type of address book, which he used to keep tabs on his transient comrades T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Se t

Figure 2.3 El Lissitzky (designer), “Svolochi,” in For the Voice, 1923. Letterpress, 7.4 × 10.2 in. (18.7 × 26 cm). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (85-­ B4888).

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Figure 2.4 El Lissitzky’s personal address book, 1920s. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (950076).

while abroad (fig. 2.4). In these cheap palm-­size books, with their alphabetically marked die-­cut pages, Lissitzky found a haptic principle that gives For the Voice an air of utility. This quotidian model draws an explicit analogy between the urgency of the poems’ agit-­prop rhythms and the fast, efficient movements of the hand seeking its next target. It was a movement Lissitzky subsequently described in greater detail: you have divided the day up into twenty-­four hours. There is not another hour for extravagant effusion of feelings. The pattern of speech becomes increasingly concise, the gesture sharply imprinted. It is just the same with typography . . . you are accompanied from your first day onwards by printed paper, and your eye is superbly trained to find its way about in this specific field quickly, precisely, and without losing its way.34

Some years later, he recalled wanting to design For the Voice “so the book would be an object, not like a decoration, but like an apparatus.”35 In its typography and in its overall design, the book comports itself like a device consulted in haste on the streets, rather than a fine edition perused at leisure in a private salon. Lissitzky supposes that the user of this technical object will find a suitably concise visual aid in the tiny Suprematist icons populating its thumb index. The class character of Lissitzky’s intended audience was analyzed by the productivist critic Boris Arvatov in a review of Veshch’ published in fall 1922. Arvatov concluded that the journal was “extraordinarily symp48

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tomatic as an ideological manifesto of the artistic detachment of the most progressive contemporary intelligentsia—­and precisely the technical intelligentsia—­having placed before itself for the first time the problem of the organization of objects.”36 Writing in the tradition of Aleksandr Bogdanov, who identified the technical intelligentsia as the class fraction responsible for efficiently organizing production, Arvatov connected it more specifically to the management of new transit and communications infrastructures. Bogdanov had argued that the technical intelligentsia experienced production as a system of utterances—­as orders and instructions, not as labor; Arvatov, in turn, stressed that the new urban environment in which this class thrived, “where a thousand transmission apparatuses replace labor,” also “dictated forms of gesticulation, movement and activity” specific to the material culture of a highly developed system of production.37 In his survey of the articles published in Veshch’, Arvatov singled out Le Corbusier’s proposal for mass-­produced housing as emblematic of this new class’s feeling for rational organization, but he found the journal’s attempt to position Suprematism among these efforts “opportunistic.” Pointing to Lissitzky’s diagram in the journal’s third number (fig. 2.1), he accused Veshch’ of refusing to recognize that “Malevich’s little square is not an object, especially not a purposive object (like a locomotive), but a naked visual form.”38 Arvatov could not regard the square as anything but painting, an art he saw as inescapably individualistic and bourgeois. But when we view Lissitzky’s typography in Arvatov’s own terms, we quickly grasp the point where the naked visual form acquires an extra-­artistic purpose.

From Destruction to Demonstration: Prouns Space in Circulation

As the first issue of Veshch’ appeared, the Düsseldorf group Junge Rheinland began to solicit participants for the “First International Art Exhibition,” organized to protest the exclusion of young artists from that year’s Great Art Exhibition in Düsseldorf. Lissitzky, Theo van Doesburg, Raoul Hausmann, Hans Richter, László Moholy-­Nagy, Kurt Schwitters, and Ivan Puni accepted the invitation, and all but Schwitters and Moholy-­Nagy attended the First International Congress of Progressive Artists. This event, held concurrently with the exhibition at the end of May, also in Düsseldorf, was intended to establish a Union of Progressive Artists to facilitate an international exchange of ideas and exhibitions.39 The project quickly fell afoul of the avant-­garde. According to van Doesburg, he, Lissitzky, Richter, Werner Gräff, and Cornelis van Eesteren met in Weimar before the congress to coordinate their responses, but events at the congress did not unfold as expected.40 On its second and final day, their group, calling itself the International Faction of ConstrucT h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Se t

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tivists, took the floor to protest the definition of “progressive” advanced by the congress: it was, they claimed, an incoherent mélange of creative individualism and guild mentality, with no hope of collectivizing the expressive means of art itself. After Hausmann made a statement in sympathy with their objections, a critical mass of constructivists, futurists, and dadas all walked out of the proceedings.41 Having secured a leading position in a strong current of dissent, this new coalition now faced the task of preserving its momentum. To frame their actions in a sympathetic light, Lissitzky, Richter, and van Doesburg quickly assembled the long-­overdue April issue of De Stijl from statements made at the congress, concluding with a summary of their views. In terms that went beyond the position of Veshch’, they called for an end to the “present exhibition-­as-­stockroom, where trade is conducted with unrelated juxtaposed objects,” and proposed that art be restored to a form that “organizes the progress of humanity . . . an instrument of the general work process.”42 To achieve this goal, the group resolved to form its own International. Doesburg felt convinced that “the second time round we’ll do it better,” but recognized that the task required immediate action. In early June, he wrote to his friend Antony Kok, “We’re working hard for the International now, which still has to materialize before winter.”43 Their natural partners in this effort were the Hungarian artists affiliated with the journal Ma (Today), who had been absent from the Düsseldorf congress but responded favorably to the call for a constructivist International with a proposal that would make Veshch’, De Stijl, and Ma organs of a single international body.44 The Hungarians also committed to holding a second congress before the end of the year, setting the stage for a meeting in Weimar in September. Lissitzky’s view of the situation can be inferred from a draft manifesto, dated 1922, which was written in advance of the September congress and perhaps even read there. His statement frames constructivism as a necessary but unresolved question: What kind of new concept has been born? Is it one and the same thing that everywhere goes by the same name—­konstruktivizm, construction, konstruktionalismus, and so on? One thing is clear—­it wasn’t born in the studio. It was conceived in the trenches and the battlefields, in the streets and the squares. The necessity of a new establishment [ustanovleniia], of construction, was born where everything was destroyed. Therefore, it is not a “new trend” in the arts. It is the system of a new formation [stanovleniia] of life.45

The convergence of multiple international trends in a concept whose sources lie outside of art is a position we recognize from the Veshch’ editorial. Here, however, Lissitzky appends an epigraph from Nikolai Bukharin’s 1921 handbook Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology, 50

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which gives his use of terms like “system” and “destruction” a slightly different valence.46 In Bukharin’s theory, destruction could affect the material forces of production and the internal equilibrium of the superstructure, where art represented a key phenomenon. Bukharin argued that superstructural elements were not passive reflections of the economic base. Rather, he called attention to “the peculiarity of the transition period” between economic systems, which manifests “a reversed influence of the superstructure . . . of long duration, filling an entire historical period.”47 The appeal of this notion for artists condemned to superstructural activity may explain why Gan drew so heavily from these same passages in Bukharin’s text when writing his book Constructivism.48 Unlike Gan’s lengthy theoretical exposition, however, Lissitzky’s manifesto reduces the entire historical transition to set of rapid-­fire slogans: “Not the studio—­the laboratory; not pictures—­plans; not sculpture—­models; not exhibitions—­demonstrations.” Lissitzky’s question about constructivism would go unanswered as the potential for a new International fell prey to van Doesburg’s antipolitical stance. Shortly before the September congress, van Doesburg learned from Sandor Bortnyik that some of the Hungarians who regularly met in Moholy-­Nagy’s studio had decided to form a Proletkult group, using representational art and humanist values as the basis for an art of communist political tendency (or Tendenzkunst). In a sudden reversal, van Doesburg decided to sabotage the constructivist International he advocated just a few months prior.49 To do so, he covertly arranged for Schwitters, Tristan Tzara, and Hans Arp to arrive in Weimar on the first day of the congress, cutting short a lively debate on Bauhaus pedagogy. Tzara’s antiauthoritarian speech in Weimar, which proclaimed that “the true dadas have always been separated from Dada,” might have offered some hope of consensus to those who longed for a strong central organization.50 Lissitzky, at least, praised the dada antics as a surgical removal of the “bourgeois belly-­brain” of consumption.51 He might have regretted the lost opportunity to set up a stable structure for an international avant-­garde, but his view of dada as a necessary moment of cultural destruction helped him forge new alliances. These friendly relations had an immediate practical impact. Lissitzky’s first solo show in Germany, secured for him by Schwitters after the meeting of dadas and constructivists in Weimar, opened at the Kestner Society in Hanover in January 1923.52 The show was a success. On behalf of the Landesmuseum in Hanover, Alexander Dorner purchased a version of Lissitzky’s Proun 1c (House above the Earth), and together with Eckart von Sydow he commissioned Lissitzky to print a portfolio of lithographs for the members of the Kestner Society.53 As it happened, Lissitzky assembled his Io Kestner Proun Portfolio in tandem with his design for a three-­by-­three-­meter space in the Lehrter T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Se t

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Figure 2.5 El Lissitzky, Proun GBA, 1923. Oil on canvas, 30.5 × 32.6 in. (77.5 × 82.7 cm). Kunstmuseum den Haag.

Bahnhof that the November group had placed at his disposal for the Great Berlin Art Exhibition in May.54 Seeing this exhibition as a chance to install a temporary expansion of a Proun, he concerned himself with the circulation of the project in print from the moment of its conception, devoting two of the Kestner portfolio’s six sheets to the untitled installation he would soon call Prouns Space. In the space itself and in associated publications, Lissitzky made the case for the transition from two-­to three-­dimensional work that he had outlined in his introduction to the Prouns portfolio in Moscow. But he did not view this new project as a purely constructive effort. Perhaps channeling the critical energy of his new dada comrades, he welcomed the enmity of painters, claiming that with designs like Prouns Space, “we are destroying the wall as a resting place for their pictures.”55 The first object of this destruction was Lissitzky’s own painting. Amid the several manifestations of Prouns Space stands a picture eventually named Proun GBA (for its association with the Grosse Berliner Ausstellung) (fig. 2.5). The status of the canvas is summed up in Lissitzky’s com-

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plaint to a patron that “museum directors are convinced of the perpetual infallibility of their own spectacle lenses so that it never occurs to them to devise another method of exhibiting” what he calls “these documents of my work.”56 Assigned to the wall facing the room’s entrance, Proun GBA served as the ground for a negation that Lissitzky outlined in an essay describing the project’s focus on the concept of space. “Space,” he wrote,” is “not what one sees through the keyhole, through the open door. Space is not only there for the eyes. It is not an image.”57 Lissitzky did, it seems, abandon the painting to the bespectacled museum directors. It is included in the Kestner portfolio only in an axonometric projection of the entire design, which demonstrates how fully it has been subordinated to the exhibition space (fig. 2.6). The elements at the composition’s lateral edges now correspond to low reliefs that continue around the corners onto the adjacent walls. One of these reliefs, mounted on the wall directly to the painting’s left, is represented in the portfolio by a full-­bleed print (fig. 2.7). The print reminds us that the space was something more than an optical experience in a way that Proun GBA cannot, because it signals two interdependent absences: the tactile materiality of the relief and its integration into a larger ensemble. As a fragment of the installation, it functions primarily as an index of scale for audiences who may not have experienced it in person. T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Se t

Figure 2.6 El Lissitzky, Untitled (Io Kestner Proun Portfolio, Sheet 6), 1923. Lithograph, 17.4 × 23.8 in. (44.3 × 60.4 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Vershbow, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Glaser, Mr. and Mrs. Irving W. Rabb, and Mrs. Irving M. Sobin.

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Another small spherical relief marks out the exact center of the wall with an asymmetrical X that points to its corners, where the volume is articulated. The ascending line on the right-­hand wall wraps around the corner to overlay the large vertical band of Proun GBA, as if pressing the planar elements of the picture flat against the wall. By propping up the composition in this way, it stresses the materiality of the planar strata and the space between the center wall and the room’s entrance. The combined effect of this device and the spherical relief’s gesture toward the base of the adjacent wall is to dramatize the physical forces holding the wall upright—­an operation echoed by the exhibition catalogue’s inclusion of “wall” among the materials of Lissitzky’s installation.58 Here, and in the accomplished and serene rectilinearity of the room’s left side, a tonal contrast to the room’s initial dynamics appears, which

Figure 2.7 El Lissitzky, Untitled (Io Kestner Proun Portfolio, Sheet 5), 1923. Lithograph, 23.8 × 17.4 in. (60.4 × 44.3 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Vershbow, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Glaser, Mr. and Mrs. Irving W. Rabb, and Mrs. Irving M. Sobin.

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extends to the floor and ceiling. The square on the floor continues an arc described by rectangles on the right wall and adjacent to the door, while the two perpendicular lines on the ceiling link the cruciform arrangements of the center and left walls. The totality of these interrelations is given a compelling presentation in the axonometry, which has been unfolded into a chute to stress the unity of the sequential and simultaneous aspects of the space. In the spring of 1923, Lissitzky’s reflections on the state of the exhibition space had a historical cast. In addition to mounting his Prouns Space, he was scheduled to give a lecture on new Russian art in May, in conjunction with the First Russian Art Exhibition, which traveled from Berlin’s Galerie Van Diemen to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.59 The lecture, which Lissitzky wrote as he installed his work at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, relates how Soviet artists were “left in a space between [zwischenraum] studio and factory” and commends Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, and Gustav Klutsis for attempting to “find other methods of demonstrating their work” by combining an open-­air exhibition with public lectures and the distribution of a poster-­size manifesto.60 The in-­between space highlighted here echoes a passage in the call for a constructivist International that Lissitzky penned with van Doesburg and Richter, which refers to the transition period between economic systems. “Today,” they declared, “we still stand between a society that does not need us and one that does not yet exist; therefore we consider exhibitions only as demonstrations of what we want to realize (projects, plans, models) or what we have realized.”61 The same idea returns in the short article about Prouns Space that Lissitzky wrote in May, in the Netherlands, and published alongside photos of his completed installation in the first number of the journal he cofounded with Richter that summer, G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung. If the compelling spatial logic of the axonometric view Lissitzky published in the Kestner portfolio grows from the reflective retreat of the studio, the realized design has the earmarks of a transitional space. In G, Lissitzky reports that “for material reasons” the floor could not be realized when his Prouns Space was installed, but this compromise has only a minor effect on the design. His early sketches include neither the floor treatment nor the central relief that would be integral to the projection’s more active right side; instead, they treat the space as a sequential unfolding of four walls and the ceiling as an afterthought (fig. 2.8). In fact, Lissitzky embraced the changeability of the space, stressing in G that “the equilibrium I want to establish in the space must be elemental and mobile, so that it cannot be destroyed by a telephone, a piece of standardized office furniture, etc.”62 The additions to Prouns Space that Lissitzky specified in G would certainly push it away from the reflective retreat of the studio, but they would orient it less toward the factory than toward the modern office. In this respect, they show us a T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Se t

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Figure 2.8 El Lissitzky, Prounen Raum, 1923. Ink on paper, 7.8 × 4.9 in. (19.9 × 12.5 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

negative reflection of Lissitzky’s Berlin studio, for it was precisely his lack of a telephone that had prevented the organizational nerve center of the constructivist International from being headquartered there.63 It is therefore fitting that these remarks appeared alongside a photomontage of Prouns Space on the back page of G (fig. 2.9). For while most scholars now agree that Lissitzky designed the journal, it was Richter’s telephone number that appeared on its masthead. 56

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Like his early sketches, the reproduction of Prouns Space in G focuses on the sequential unfolding of four walls in plan and panorama, excluding both floor and ceiling. A rudimentary square plan to the right of the photomontage, which Lissitzky cross-­references with numbers along the upper edge of the panorama, echoes the large square abutting the paper’s titular G—­a letterform he invites us to read as a counterclockwise arrow, in accordance with his preferred viewing order for the square plan of the Prouns Space. Rather than assemble four pictures of individual walls as the plan might suggest, Lissitzky photographed the room’s corners to stress the unifying function of the elements that traverse them. As a result, the space buckles like a bellows at a crease in the center of the wall created from Proun GBA, where two points of view abruptly meet. The location of this spatial rupture, on the surface one would see through the open door of the gallery, reinforces Lissitzky’s printed remarks. Indeed, by retraining our gaze to the corners of the space, the montage inverts the hierarchy of attention on which the painting relies. The disjunctive visual experience of the photomontage is repeated and reinforced in the reading experience produced by Lissitzky’s overT h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Se t

Figure 2.9 El Lissitzky (designer), G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung, no. 1 (July 1923), recto. Letterpress on newsprint, 17.9 × 23 in. (45.4 × 58.4 cm). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-­S1338).

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Figure 2.10 El Lissitzky (designer), G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung, no. 1 (July 1923), verso. Letterpress on newsprint, 17.9 × 23 in. (45.4 × 58.4 cm). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-­S1338).

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all design for G. As Maria Gough has shown, Lissitzky set two phrases adapted from Engels and Marx, respectively—­“Just no eternal truths” and “Art should not explain life, but change it”—­on a vertical axis along the inner and outer folds of the paper, adapting a rotational movement he first explored in his Prouns.64 This attention to the constructive particularities of the newspaper format is analogous to his treatment of spatial givens in Prouns Space. In both, it appears that Lissitzky has devised new ways to foreground the “corners” of a space (this time, the nook created by the newspaper unfolded in the reader’s hands). But if the constructive device developed in Prouns Space informs the reading space of G, it also points toward a further mediation. Across the top of the paper’s inner spread runs a strip of Richter’s film Rhythmus 21, from whose frozen frames Richter’s commentary (like the Marxian slogan, typeset vertically) hangs like icicles (fig. 2.10). To read these annotations, viewers must either crane their necks leftward or turn the paper. Righting the paper and turning to its back page, readers can hardly fail to notice the visual rhyme of Lissitzky’s Prouns Space with the sequential unfolding of Richter’s film: the black square that ends Richter’s chapter t wo

top-­to-­bottom filmic progression now begins the back-­to-­front viewing of Lissitzky’s room—­and of the paper itself. The newspaper, Lissitzky’s design suggests, mediates between two analogous kinds of movement: the exhibition panorama “where one goes around and around,” and the unspooling of the film before the projector lamp.65

Set/Reset: Orientation and the Everyday

In Prouns Space, Lissitzky claimed to have destroyed the wall’s passive relationship to painting by constructing a spatial equilibrium consistent with the principles of standardized furnishings and new media like film and the telephone. His account of the project made novel use of the semantic pair construction-­destruction, but it still relied on a position he had adopted in 1921: “‘Pure painting’ will not save the picture with its non-­objectivity, but here the artist begins his own transformation . . . from an imitator into a constructor of a new world of forms.”66 For this reason, Prouns Space failed to satisfy critics. Even a friendly reviewer like the Hungarian critic Ernő Kállai puzzled over the way Lissitzky devised “fictitious constructions of fictitious mechanisms” in order to forestall the dangers of “primitive utilitarianism.”67 Lissitzky’s characterization of the Proun as a transfer point required that these two moments be reconciled. But how? Were the reliefs he installed in the room simply placeholders to be refitted with a public telephone or some similar device? The ambiguity that frustrated critics like Kállai can be traced to Lissitzky’s original claim that “a Proun begins its sets [ustanovki] on a surface, transfers to model spatial constructions and goes further, toward the construction of all of life’s forms.”68 Although Lissitzky used this phrasing more than once in Moscow, he omitted it from the German translation of his essay “Not Worldvision—­but Worldreality” published in De Stijl in 1922.69 One factor in this decision may have been the polyvalence of the word ustanovka. Its range of uses is partly illuminated by the English word “set,” a serviceable but inexpressive equivalent. Unfortunately for us, the more exacting translations of the word—­installation, assembly, setting, orientation, aim, directive, attitude—­can refer to technical objects, subjective mental states, and everything in between. How we read this statement will therefore have some bearing upon how we regard the room-­scale installation of Prouns Space. The “fictitious mechanisms” noted by Kállai suggest that Lissitzky might be using the term ustanovka in a technical sense, as when engineers and electricians applied it to mechanical and electrical assemblies. As a former drawing instructor for electricians, Lissitzky was certainly familiar with this usage. But he was probably not aware that after his departure from Moscow productivist critics had enlisted the term in their efforts to redefine the object as a component within a system rather than T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Se t

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Figure 2.11 Gustav Klutsis, Installation for the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, 1922. Lithograph, 10.3 × 4.3 in. (26 × 10.8 cm). Art Institute of Chicago.

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a self-­sufficient thing. In a March 1922 lecture at the INKhUK, Boris Kushner introduced this technical use of ustanovka when he argued that many products of contemporary industry function less as discrete objects than as complexes constituted through interdependent acts of consumption.70 His INKhUK colleague Nikolai Tarabukin went even further when he pointed out that mechanical ustanovki, or “installations,” now mediated the consumption of pure, nonobjective energy in the form of utilities like electricity.71 For Tarabukin, this recent development in industry revealed the shortcomings of the constructivists’ tendency to draw a direct equivalence between artistic and technical constructions. He maintained that artists could realistically expect to play only an ideological role in production, and that any resemblance between the products of art and industry was strictly incidental. Both the problems and promise highlighted by Tarabukin can be seen in the work of Lissitzky’s former UNOVIS comrade Gustav Klutsis. In preparation for the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922, Klutsis designed an ustanovka as a lightweight support for a radio receiver, which could be used in conjunction with a loudspeaker to broadcast party discourse on the street (fig. 2.11). The artist’s embrace of ideological production would undoubtedly have pleased Tarabukin, but by treating his collapsible stand as a dynamic equivalent to the device it supports, Klutsis begs the question. For an electrician or radio engineer, the “radio set” would refer only to the loop antenna—­a large X-­shaped wire structure with a perimeter equal to the signal wavelength it receives—­that Klutsis has interwoven with the charmingly corrupted English slogan “Vorkers of the Vorld, Unite.” For Klutsis, by contrast, the “installation” comprehends the antenna and stand as a whole. Other critics embraced the broader metaphorical use of ustanovka that we encounter in Klutsis’s propaganda stand. In 1923 Aleksei Gastev, the futurist worker-­poet, Proletkult theorist, and director of Moscow’s chapter t wo

Central Institute of Labor, published a unified theory of social, cultural, and labor ustanovki, or “settings.” Drawing on the semantic ambiguity between the spatial and mechanical senses of the term ustanovka, Gastev announced “a new directive on [ustanovka na] culture” that exploited his method of training the mind’s “power of observation” to execute tasks with machinelike efficiency.72 As one of the USSR’s most prominent advocates of Taylorism, Gastev argued that psychic automatism freed nervous-­muscular energy for new goals. One of these goals is evident in an educational program developed at Gastev’s institute, which treated the industrial worker as the basis of a new form of colonization. Just as the worker’s nervous system could be set up for efficient labor, so the electrification of the USSR’s immense territory would create new social and cultural circuits that required a precise, disciplined operation.73 From workers who would relocate to the provinces, Gastev demanded a mastery of “the coarse language of trade letters, strange double-­entendres, the language of telegrams . . . in a word, all those words that are born in a compressed temporal and spatial situation.”74 Gastev had been one of the first Proletkult theorists to single out the revolutionary potential of futurism’s fragmented, telegraphic language.75 Now he endeavored to build this language into a curriculum that would allow him to “isolate the moment of the creation of social capital” amid the vast cultural and educational disparities of Soviet citizens.76 To conclude his training regimen, he even proposed that a “cultural setting [kul’turno-­ustanovochnyi] maneuver” might be used to assess the composition of social capital in graduates.77 Gastev’s vision illuminates Klutsis’s portable agit-­prop installation and Lissitzky’s telegraphic book For the Voice, but its relevance to the fictitious mechanisms in Prouns Space is much less clear. The absence from Prouns Space of an overt ideological purpose such as we find in the book and propaganda stand is only partly to blame; after all, Lissitzky had placed his Prouns in the service of Bolshevik propaganda in Vitebsk on more than one occasion. The more fundamental issue, as Kállai pointed out, was the relationship of the Prouns to technology. For productivist critics like Arvatov, the source of the fiction Kállai identified in the Prouns was Suprematism itself. The tropes from electrical engineering that Lissitzky used to suggest a relationship between Suprematism and technical objects in Veshch’ (fig. 2.1) would not have changed Arvatov’s mind, even if he had identified them. The relation between these spheres proposed in Veshch’, he would undoubtedly object, must rest on an appeal to pure technics, cut off from the fundamental class of the proletariat. Because Arvatov’s critique is basically sound, it points us toward a more fruitful approach to our problem. His insistence that the Black Square was not an object suggests that he viewed Lissitzky’s circuit diagram primarily as an illustration of Malevich’s axiom “Whoever feels T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Se t

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painting sees the object to a lesser degree; and whoever sees the object feels less what is painterly.”78 Malevich’s statement is best understood in relation to a 1919 essay on futurism by Roman Jakobson, which gives a more precise formulation of the relation between objects and nonobjective painting. Here, Jakobson uses the term ustanovka to refer to the philosophical problem of apperception, where it designates the dependence of the object of perception on the perceiver’s standpoint. He distinguishes between what we would call, in everyday parlance, two different mindsets: “the set toward nature,” which he identifies with the tradition of naturalistic representation, and “the set toward pictorial expression,” which he credits with discovering the interdependence of color and form.79 In other words: a mind set on the object and a mind set on what is painterly in it. Jakobson borrowed this pair of “sets” from the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, whose term Einstellung is more commonly rendered as “attitude.” Husserl explains that when we inhabit the “natural attitude,” we assume that all thought is based on our everyday apprehension of the world as a set of factual states and empirical objects. By adopting a phenomenological attitude, which neutralizes or “brackets” empirical phenomena, he sought to show how ideal intersubjective entities like numbers and concepts give order and coherence to the endless contingency of the natural world. For Husserl, positive knowledge of empirical things is possible only on the basis of a relationship between a purely intentional consciousness and its intentional object.80 Jakobson’s notion of a “set toward expression” can be traced to Husserl’s treatment of signs, which, in keeping with his larger concerns, must be distinguishable from the contingent facts of the world if they are to communicate ideas.81 For Jakobson, what is expressed in a painterly sign is not the object or state of affairs to which it refers—­the external reality or internal psychological state that we seek in the natural attitude. Instead, it is the structure of the sign itself, its sense or meaning, which grants it an enduring self-­ same existence in each iteration through time. He would not hesitate to point out that Malevich’s “set toward expression” allowed Arvatov to decipher the typographical representation of the Black Square in Veshch’ as the naked form of pure, nonobjective painterliness. Formalist critics believed that by breaking from the “set toward nature” to reveal the repeatable intersubjective essence of signs, art disclosed both the conditions of its own autonomy and its imbrication with everyday life. Husserl argued that the natural attitude must be founded on something that transcends it, but his goal was to discover a common origin for both empirical vision and eidetic insight, not to claim an exclusive validity for one or the other. As his student and major commentor in prerevolutionary Russia, Gustav Shpet, explained, it was primarily “a question of the various advertances of the look ‘into’ the source, of the various attitudes [ustanovki] that yield a difference in insight.”82 Read in a 62

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formal-­phenomenological vein, Lissitzky’s claim that a Proun “begins its ustanovki on the surface” would imply a similar series of modifications of the gaze: a set of “attitudes” that link what he called the “chromatic and axial foundations” of his abstract Prouns to certain kinds of empirical things and situations in day-­to-­day life.83 The critic Yuri Tynianov argued that this process of reconciliation with daily life depends upon the fact that the “principle of construction” on which an artwork is based “can also involve a particular orientation [ustanovka] toward a role or use for the construction.”84 Taking the system of the arts as his horizon, rather than the single artwork, Tynianov maintained that new constructions emerge as the dialectical negation of a disintegrating form. A new constructive principle appears not as the opposite of what is intended in the old but where the old intention falters: it “takes shape from ‘incidental’ results and ‘incidental’ anomalies, mistakes.”85 For him, the ustanovka of this new principle is more closely bound to an empirical spatial orientation than to an intentional attitude. He notes, for example, that when smaller poetic forms become exhausted, their proximity in a published collection or anthology can generate a new interest in larger forms. The new constructive principle of this ersatz large form, which is initially misrecognized in the contingent relations of worn-­out small forms, then requires a new application in fresh material. But, as Tynianov stresses, the social conditions that allow a new constructive principle to find an appropriate application are very particular, and “if these conditions are not in place, the phenomenon will stall as a mere attempt.”86 According to Tynianov, the rapprochement between a new constructive principle and the terrain of daily life relies on a mediating stratum, which he calls “the artistic everyday” (khudozhestvennyi byt). Everyday life, he explains, “teems with the rudiments of different intellectual activities. In terms of its makeup, everyday life is a rudimentary science, rudimentary art, and rudimentary technology.”87 These elementary activities exist in a border zone that connects and delimits the autonomous realms of science, art, and technology from life. As he puts it, “The ‘artistic everyday’ is something other than art according to its functional role, but they adjoin along the form of the phenomena.”88 Art and the artistic everyday are therefore just “different ways of interacting with the same phenomena.” For this reason, the everyday serves as a historically variable frontier through which some phenomena become artistic, pervade greater and greater regions of the arts, and then become “automatized,” before returning to everyday life as the worn-­out devices of yesterday’s art.89 Tynianov’s account of the way the orientation of a constructive principle discloses its relation to the artistic everyday clarifies a number of closely related developments in Lissitzky’s art. Prouns Space embodies what Tynianov calls “the ‘imperialism’ of the constructive principle,” which drives art to constantly transgress the frontiers of day-­to-­day life T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Se t

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in a “quest to seize the greatest possible territory.”90 The critic’s example of a new orientation toward large forms that emerges from the aggregation of smaller ones perfectly captures the way Lissitzky transformed the Proun from a discrete object into a larger spatial installation with elements that traverse the space between reliefs. More importantly, the same process accounts for the formal resonances between Prouns Space and the newspaper G that we highlighted earlier in this chapter. To illustrate the way devices migrate across the boundary between the realm of art and the artistic everyday, Tynianov pointed to “a heightened interest in newspapers, journals, and literary almanacs” among his contemporaries, who had come to regard their incidental literary and visual aspects as the basis of a new principle of montage.91 If we treat G as an instance of this new attitude, we can finally grasp the quotidian basis of the threefold analogy its design asserts. Lissitzky’s layout draws our attention to a constructive principle that unites the signifying dynamics of the exhibition hall, newspaper, and film screening. In these spaces, the art of assembling, fitting, and installing physical components often engages us even more than the intentional content of the signs they carry. For Marxist critics, it was the reduction of social significance to zero that rendered the dazzling intricacy of formalist theories unsatisfying. It is not difficult to see in Tynianov’s “‘imperialism’ of the constructive principle” a pale reflection of Gastev’s industrially colonized territory. Neither must we struggle to see Lissitzky’s assembly of an avant-­garde installation or leaflet as an instance of what Gastev called a “cultural setting maneuver.” From this perspective, the formalist account of the artistic everyday simply modifies its gaze to bracket out what is most foundational: the imbrication of these mechanisms in the creation of social capital. But by the same measure, the formalist account allows us to grasp Lissitzky’s orientation toward journals, newspapers, telegrams, and films as serial, service-­based objects, which are consumed less as discrete things than as subordinate moments of a nonobjective process. As Tynianov would point out, these media can acquire a negative charge only because this process tends to render their content incidental.

Installation: The Room of Typo-­Lithography

In the summer of 1923, as G went to press, Lissitzky was invited to install another room at Berlin’s Jury Free Art Show that autumn. Having decided to present a “room of typo-­lithography,” he developed the new exhibition design not from the axonometrically projected Prouns Space of the Kestner portfolio, but from the more quotidian panorama seen in his early sketches and in G (plate 4). Lissitzky’s design for the 1923 Berlin exhibition is still little known, despite the fact that he regarded it as a summa of his activities in Germany. The only drawing associated with the space 64

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was not published until 1993, at which time its exact date and purpose were unclear. Two years later, Peter Nisbet connected the sketch to the Jury Free exhibition based on correspondence from the show’s organizer, Hermann Sandkuhl, which described a plan to “present four different spatial solutions [Raumlösungen]”—­from Lissitzky, Erich Buchholz, Willi Baumeister, and Vilmos Huszár—­as a “massive competition of ideas.”92 Sandkuhl’s invitation gave Lissitzky the opportunity to replace the fictive constructions of his Prouns with the more concrete signifying mechanisms of his graphic production. He chose to display three pairs of printed works in different formats: the book designs Of 2 Squares and For the Voice; the journals Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand and G; and portions of two lithographic portfolios: two sheets from the Kestner portfolio and one from a set of costume designs for Kruchenykh’s futurist opera Victory over the Sun. The checklist brings together Lissitzky’s work in several modes: autonomous works of art and design, artist’s editions (both independent and commissioned), and journals that, as he will later state, “enable me to demonstrate my creativity at the editorial stage—­ when the material is being assembled.”93 This three-­tiered catalogue charts the social terrain Lissitzky cultivated while abroad by mapping his audiences onto the intended durations and uses of different types of printed matter: from the archival fate of the limited-­edition print to the careworn books on the shelves of readers of different ages and the disposability of yesterday’s paper. With characteristic irony, Lissitzky arranges the works chronologically for a counterclockwise viewing. Starting from the right margin, two covers and two page-­openings of the journal Veshch’ stand against a black background, with four pages from Of 2 Squares in an overlapping course just below. The horizontal element supporting this lower series extends across much of the adjacent gray wall; below its right end, three orange rectangles continue the descending progression, and to the left stands an open copy of For the Voice (the color of the rectangles on the right suggests they are copies of the book’s cover). The remainder of this wall shows cursory marks on a white vertical field, which Nisbet interprets as a series of page spreads from For the Voice, perhaps encased in a vitrine.94 From the lowest of these spreads, the viewer’s gaze turns the corner and meets the cover of Lissitzky’s Kestner portfolio, from which a bar leads upward to the start of another descending sequence: two of the lithographs from the portfolio, each shown in duplicate. A brief ascending duo—­the cover and New Man sheet from Lissitzky’s Victory over the Sun portfolio—­ commences the final section, which concludes after a span of gray at the sheet’s left margin with a vertical series of small rectangles, each labeled G. To date, commentaries on the room have focused primarily on its contents, both because its design is the only piece of evidence to confirm that Lissitzky designed the first issue of G, and because some basic questions remain unanswered. Perhaps most importantly, the lack of a published T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Se t

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catalogue for the 1923 Jury Free Art Show has created uncertainty about whether any of the rooms commissioned by Sandkuhl were installed. It now appears that a design by Huszár and Gerrit Rietveld was realized, but there is no definitive evidence that the contributions of Lissitzky, Baumeister, or Buchholz were.95 A subsequent article by Kállai does mention “the relief that Lissitzky designed as a uniform circumferential structure . . . at the Jury Free exhibition in Berlin in 1923.”96 Unfortunately, the critic’s praise of the room’s “happy unity of surface painting and relief” is vague enough that it could also refer to Prouns Space, a design he saw during the previous exhibition season and illustrated in his essay. Doubts about whether Lissitzky’s design was mounted have blocked even the most basic consideration of its spatial architectonics; even the number of walls shown in the drawing has not been established.97 But the knowledge that Lissitzky intended this sequence of walls for a specific room (or type of room) at the Lehrter Bahnhof does allow us to partly reconstruct the competition of ideas envisioned by Sandkuhl. The spatial architectonics of Lissitzky’s sketch can be clarified by turning to the room designed by Huszár and Rietveld. In the autumn 1924 issue of L’Architecture vivante, the de Stijl artists published three colorized photographs of a scale model and a plan of their design (plate 5, fig. 2.12). If at first glance the drawing in figure 2.12 suggests an isometrically projected cube, recognizing it as a plan—­a two-­dimensional overhead view—­reveals a hexagonal space with existing walls on five sides (marked Figure 2.12 Vilmos Huszár, exhibition diagram, 1923, from L’Architecture vivante, Autumn– Winter 1924.

“I”) to which three temporary dividers have been added (marked “T”). The viewer enters and exits through the unwalled sixth side. The form of the given exhibition space therefore suggests that Lissitzky’s elevation is most plausibly divided into five walls: three short walls interspersed with two longer ones, all of regular lengths (corresponding to the five main sections of color on the upper walls: black, gray, red, black, gray). The Lehrter Bahnhof, where both the Jury Free Art Show and the Great Berlin Art Exhibition took place every year, included several galleries with this configuration. Huszár and Rietveld’s design would likely have been installed in a large hall partitioned into smaller exhibition spaces, such 66

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Figure 2.13 Great Berlin Art Exhibition 1923, plan of exhibition. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

as the corner galleries of halls 19 or 20 (fig. 2.13).98 To facilitate the kind of dialogue Sandkuhl intended, Lissitzky would likely have been offered a comparable space in the same hall. Irregular spaces like these required novel design solutions. If the present interpretation of the intended site holds, the red wall at the center of Lissitzky’s elevation would have stood on the diagonal opposite the room’s entrance. The splash of vibrant color would attract passing viewers while the composition’s overall asymmetry implicitly encouraged perambulation, as in Prouns Space. Lissitzky’s treatment of the walls balances alternating black and middle grays with red accent against a conT h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Se t

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trapuntal scheme along the lower portion of the walls (rising no further than the viewer’s knee). As a backdrop to the printed matter on display, the interaction of these two fields—­one enveloping the viewer, the other only peripherally visible—­might have produced some unexpected effects, especially where the vibrant red baseboard shouts from beneath the mute gray wall. Overlaying these fields, the network of shelves and brackets serves as the framework for the displayed materials and as a secondary rhythmic counterpoint, which Lissitzky diagrammed in pencil just beneath the gouache sketch. What Lissitzky’s room shares with that of Huszár and Rietveld is a desire to integrate an abstract color composition into a functional space. The competition envisioned by Sandkuhl presented a rare opportunity for the invited artists to prove that “color design does not have to be the design of pictures,” as the architecture critic Adolf Behne put it.99 In the Dutch room, floating squares of color traverse the corners and crawl up from the floor to the surface of the wall, much as the relief elements wrap around the corners of Prouns Space. Seeing the same device here, however, only highlights Lissitzky’s departure from the approach he momentarily held in common with his Dutch friends. Instead of maintaining Prouns Space’s focus on liminal constructive details, Lissitzky has normalized its network of low reliefs into an orthogonal grid for use as shelving. The compositional role played by reliefs in Prouns Space, and by floating blocks of color in Huszár and Rietveld’s design, is now fulfilled by printed matter, which substitutes tactility and repetition for the unique visual effect of the Dutch room. Viewed comparatively, Lissitzky’s application of paint has hardly any compositional value at all; it largely restates the given unit of the wall as a bearer of goods. These differences testify to the diverging attitudes of new friends. The faction of constructivists that emerged from the Düsseldorf congress had coalesced against “the dominance of the individual mindset,” but Behne now saw a greater obstacle: the “national mindset.”100 As the critic acknowledged, the Dutch had recognized just as fully as the Russians that “the picture is a convention.” But while the Russians, he noted, gladly “sacrifice certain formal elements that are ultimately grounded in the current formation of society,” the Dutch preference for “completion within the given circumstances . . . leads to a final stabilization of the picture.”101 Despite these differences, he hoped that the pragmatic Dutch gradualists and Russian radicals could be reconciled through further collaboration. With his tongue firmly in his cheek, he remarked that “it is just a bit unlucky that they would rather exclude each other than recognize their fateful complementary relationship.”102 All available evidence indicates that Lissitzky remained optimistic about the future of the alliance. But in the end, his orientation toward production—­tentative as it can seem when compared to his comrades’ in Moscow—­sharply distinguished his approach from that of his Dutch counterparts. 68

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Lissitzky’s room of typo-­lithography is unequivocally a showroom. By downplaying the formal problems of architectonic color composition, he emphasized the seriality of the items displayed. The combined effect of the custom display devices and the mechanically reproduced objects they frame implicitly promotes the ability of his system to accommodate any comparable series of objects. From the formalist perspective developed in this chapter, what is most compelling in Lissitzky’s room of typo-­ lithography is the formal and functional analogy between the network of shelves holding the printed matter to the wall and the frame of typographic bars on the interior spread of G (fig. 2.10). These lines materialize the artistic everyday, tracing a border between a zone of meaning and one of handling. In each case, the external aspect of the texts—­the column-­ inches consumed in the setting or the dimensions of the printed pages against the wall—­serves as the basis for an installation that is necessarily contingent. Here, the analogy drawn between the newspaper and Prouns Space in G is reversed again, pushing painting into the background of a more practical use of the exhibition space.

The pair of exhibition spaces Lissitzky designed in Berlin demonstrates a logic of progressive functionalization that he had espoused in his writings for several years. With Prouns Space, he hoped to show that a Proun was not (or not just) a painting but part of a series of interrelated activities. Like any art exhibition, Prouns Space was a showroom from the outset, and only a mind set on formal totality could conclude that the component parts installed in the corners of the exhibition space were the reason for the space itself. The room of typo-­lithography reversed this hierarchy by taking its orientation from the object. In it, each item on display was emphatically multiple, whether it was one in a series of identically printed Prouns or, like the books and magazines, merely the platform for another object, which in turn points to another. In this printed matter, the functionalism of Lissitzky’s work outran the Prouns. Even so, his impatience for change can be measured with the analogies that G and For the Voice draw between their humble paper support and the new media of film and telegraphy. For productivist critics like Tarabukin and Arvatov, such analogies could only remystify the artist’s activities by assuming a relation to advanced industry that did not exist. In his own way, Lissitzky recognized the validity of this critique. But like the formalists, he was inclined to see these comparisons as a quotidian recognition of the ways that artistic techniques already interfaced with industrial processes.

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3 Still Movements At the end of 1923, Lissitzky’s creative and organizational activities were still closely tied to his Prouns, but experiments with photography were slowly shifting his priorities. These changes first appeared in the field of book design. After making several photomontages to illustrate Ehrenburg’s 1922 book Six Tales with Easy Endings, it appeared to Lissitzky that the long-­standing hierarchy of text and image could be reversed. In a set of provocative theses published in Merz the following year, he proclaimed that “the printed sheet, the infinitude of the book, must be overcome” to make way for “the electro-­l ibrary.”1 Now, he advocated “the continuous page-­sequence—­the Bioscopic book” as a corrective to the way “the printed sheet transcends space and time.”2 By comparing the etched halftone blocks used to reproduce photographs on the page to the most widely used motion picture camera in Europe, the Bioscope, Lissitzky invited his readers to consider how the camera’s intimate bond with actuality could reconnect the book with the time that its “infinitude” had long held at bay.3 In Switzerland, where Lissitzky was treated for pulmonary tuberculosis from 1924 until summer 1925, the idea of the motion picture book shaped two short chronicles of contemporary art. With Kurt Schwitters, he created a special issue of Merz entitled Nasci (roughly, Being Born), and with Hans Arp, a book, The Isms of Art 1914–­1924, published in Zürich by Eugen Rentsch. The way photography affected Lissitzky’s practice was unexpected, even to the artist himself. The distinction between photography as a reproductive means and as an end in itself became blurred almost immediately in his private experiments, creating a confusion that slowly registered in his public image. Building on his illustrations for Six Tales with Easy Endings, he included a photomontage—­what he called a “photoun”—­in The Isms of Art. A Proun by another name, perhaps, but what was a Proun without a project—­without architecture? A similar uncertainty surfaced in Lissitzky’s correspondence. Any exhibition of his works, he decided, “would have to have almost a retrospective character, because I do not know what I will do in the future.”4 One new activity proved unexpectedly fertile. While getting accustomed to the new medium, Lissitzky made portraits of himself, Schwitters, and Arp. He was initially motivated by his friends’ (and his own) S t i l l M o v eme n t s

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need for promotional images, but he also saw these portraits as an occasion to explore the potential of light-­sensitive emulsion. In his delight at the effect created by multiple exposures, he shot portraits that test the boundaries of the still and the moving image, predicting the rise of the “cinema imaginary” that, according to Michel Frizot, increasingly referred photographs to the experience of film.5 At the same time, Lissitzky’s prints ransacked the history of photography, turning its oldest techniques—­contact print, cameraless photogram, multinegative composite—­to his own ends. If Lissitzky’s photography practice remained quasi-­filmic, lagging behind the medium he judged so transformative and at best approximating its effects, his thinking irresistibly leapt ahead of it. In film, he discovered another aspect of the dematerialization of art. As in the notion of the “Bioscopic” book, the projected, time-­based medium convinced him that art might soon inhabit a purely imaginary space located neither in the object nor in the embodied viewer, but in the intercourse between them. He advanced this idea in his 1925 essay “A. and Pangeometry,” a demanding theoretical prise de position that enters into dialogue with a critique of art originating in Berlin dada and with the ideas of the Hungarian constructivist László Moholy-­Nagy, whose important book Painting Photography Film appeared that same year. Like Moholy-­Nagy, Lissitzky prized photographic media for the way they moved beyond the factional debates of the avant-­garde onto the more pressing question of art’s relation to mass-­produced visual culture. For him, it seemed clear that art was on the threshold of a new phase of its existence. But the ability to create a mass-­produced, dematerialized, “imaginary” object also entailed a new kind of subjection to industry, which all but deprived the artist of the craft-­based production that had hitherto guaranteed his economic independence.

Ghosts of Production: Old Novelties Reviewed

Among artists close to Lissitzky, the idea had taken root that the number of mediations between an image and its printed reproduction could be reduced by making photographs themselves a site of experimentation. In terms borrowed from Soviet debates over the end of painting, Moholy-­ Nagy referred to this as a shift from “reproductive” to “productive” photography.6 Moholy-­Nagy’s use of these terms was equivocal by design. Like some in Moscow, his primary frame of reference was psychological.7 At the forefront of his mind was likely the Kantian distinction between the productive imagination, with its a priori ability to construct geometric figures, and the reproductive imagination, which remained wholly empirical and representational in character.8 In the first decades of the twentieth century, this terminology was still used in studies of Gestalt 72

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phenomena in Vienna, which showed that viewers of ambiguous figures could “produce” distinct visual Gestalts by altering their mindset.9 This semantic pair shaped Moholy-­Nagy’s identification of “productive creation” with “hitherto unknown relations” and reproductive “virtuosity” with “already existing” ones, much as it had Lissitzky’s advocacy for “a creativity that does not replicate—­reproduce—­but creates—­produces.”10 By targeting photography, phonography, and film, Moholy-­Nagy aimed to interrupt imaginative reproduction in the very technologies that brought about the mass production of art. This ingenious variant on the Russian formalist case for estrangement combatted the effects of commodification at their source. But Moholy-­Nagy’s equivocation elided the inevitable reproduction of unique photographs that occurred when “productive” originals were distributed. Moreover, on the imaginative plane, productive and reproductive functions could operate simultaneously in photography, with demanding formal innovations brushing up against established promotional devices, often in the same image. These theoretical difficulties come into view when experimental photographic practices enter the sphere of (re)production. For any artist producing periodicals at the time, photography was already a workaday activity. Lissitzky regularly made photographs that could circulate among curators and prospective patrons, or be converted to zinc halftone blocks for printing. In Switzerland, he conceived a “Bioscopic” book that would present a visual review of avant-­garde battalions.11 Summoning the veterans of a decade of avant-­garde battles, the trilingual Isms of Art offers a parade of avant-­garde microstyles in reverse-­chronological order, from constructivism to expressionism, beginning with a blank page devoted to the future, inscribed vertically, “?–­1925.” As a survey of the recent past, Isms of Art is intended to be wholly “reproductive.” So it is somewhat surprising to find a new work in its pages, the sole product of Lissitzky’s brief and unhappy collaboration with Hans Arp (fig. 3.1). The page bearing Lissitzky’s “photoun” of Arp, which juxtaposes a photomontage with a conventional headshot of the artist, shows the mechanisms that assimilate “productive” experimentation to the reproduction of existing relations. In the montage, Lissitzky replaces Arp’s head with one of his wooden reliefs, The Glove, which is almost identical to a cardboard version the artist holds in his hands. The Glove has not survived, but it was a potent image for Arp; in a statement decades later, he cited it as a substitute for an ancient head, which reveals the unreality of the bourgeois world and the “nullity of its endeavors.”12 Held in Arp’s hands, the geometrically simplified form recalls the wooden vessels he and Sophie Taeuber turned on a lathe in 1916 (chalices, bowls, vases, and the like); in place of the artist’s face, it resembles the marionettes Taeuber made for the production of King Stag at the Swiss Werkbund exhibition of 1918, illustrated in Isms of Art just a few pages later. The psychoanalytic themes of the play, which introduced S t i l l M o v eme n t s

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Figure 3.1 El Lissitzky, Photoun, from Die Kunstismen = Les ismes de l’art = The Isms of Art (Erlenbach-­ Zurich: Eugen Rentsch, 1925). Letterpress, 10.1 × 7.7 in. (25.7 × 19.5 cm). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (930030).

characters named Freud Analytikus and Dr. Oedipus Komplex into the framework of an eighteenth-­century fairy tale, recur in Lissitzky’s montage.13 The single hole punched through The Glove and, below, the artist’s finger sticking through its cardboard double, evoke the Cyclops’s eye and its blinding, while the generic—­even totemic—­gendering of the vessel-­like form as female turns Arp’s finger into a sophomoric joke. In a quintessentially dada gesture, puerile humor reveals a high-­minded Freudian reference to blinding as castration (without the hand, The Glove is lacking).14 Lissitzky had passed enough time with Arp between the Weimar congress and his convalescence in Switzerland to become fluent in dada’s laconic idioms, as his montage shows. But the desired effect is undercut by Arp’s portrait, reassuringly situated nearby. The “photoun” is a new work and a witty one, but “reproductive” nonetheless, trafficking in a technique whose imaginative productivity was on the wane. Lissitzky thought so, at least. After a brief try at photomontage, he had turned his attention to other photographic techniques in 74

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Figure 3.2 El Lissitzky, In the Studio, 1923. Gelatin silver print, 4.3 × 3.3 in. (10.9 × 8.3 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Ford Motor Company collection.

late summer or fall of 1923, after his trip to the Netherlands. An early example of Lissitzky’s experiments is In the Studio, a multiple-­exposure photograph previously owned by Vilmos Huszár, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 3.2). A rollicking document of Lissitzky’s studio packed with friends, the photograph’s topsy-­turvy logic takes the horizontality of the printing process as its explicit theme: here, the upright posture of the camera gives way to the indifferent receptivity of the photosensitive paper, which accepts impressions from any number of orientations. The phenomenon of the picture without a horizon, in which the picture plane itself assumes the horizontal function, had already been explored in Lissitzky’s Prouns portfolio. In a 1988 exhibition review, Yve-­ Alain Bois connected In the Studio to these lithographs of 1920–1921, which he described in terms of the “flatbed” picture plane that Leo Steinberg first identified in the works of Robert Rauschenberg: a surface akin to “tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—­any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be perceived, printed, impressed.”15 To Steinberg’s list, we should therefore add gelatin-­silver paper, a surface that Lissitzky’s photograph treats like a dematerialized double of the studio floor. In the Studio makes the provisional designation “photoun” slightly less opaque, but in doing so it obscures some other sources to which Lissitzky had recourse in making his print. To be sure, he might have transferred the idea of the horizontal picture plane directly from his Prouns to his photographs. It is just as likely that he noticed a parallel phenomenon in dada photomontage. In a letter of 1925, Lissitzky reS t i l l M o v eme n t s

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Figure 3.3 Attributed to John Heartfield, Double Portrait of Johannes Baader and Raoul Hausmann (for Dadaco), 1919. Halftone print, 10 × 6.2 in. (25.4 × 15.8 cm). Grafische Sammlung, Kunsthaus Zürich Collection of Prints and Drawings, 1980.

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called that shortly after he arrived in Berlin he had proposed a publication “dealing with productive, not reproductive achievements” to Moholy-­Nagy and Raoul Hausmann (a plan that seems to have resulted only in the Russian translation of Hausmann’s research on optophonetics, published in Veshch’).16Among dada’s productive achievements, Lissitzky might have counted an unpublished double portrait of Hausmann and Johannes Baader created for Dadaco in 1919, and later chosen by Tristan Tzara for his ill-­fated anthology Dadaglobe in 1921 (fig. 3.3). The photomontage offers a twist on the conventions of the friendship portrait by nestling the sitters ear to ear, one over the other, as if the two shirtless friends were lolling on a sandy beach. Tristan Tzara liked the portrait enough that he made a variation on it for Dadaglobe—­a double exposure showing himself (inverted) and Jacques Rigaut joined at the chest, in the guise of a royal playing card. In the Studio preserves the sociability of these dada precedents and applies it at a slightly larger scale. For many of the dadas who contributed to Tzara’s anthology, the obligatory promotional author photo mapped the tradition of the calling card onto new forms of bureaucratic identification. Citing Tzara’s ongoing difficulties in securing a legal residence in Paris, Adrian Sudhalter has argued that the Romanian poet’s request for “a clear photo of your head (not body), which you can alter freely” for Dadaglobe represents a burlesque of the recently instituted League of Nations standards for passport photographs.17 Such parodic inversions of the bureaucratic neutrality of national identities lay at the heart of dada’s procedures. Roman Jakobson observed early on that dada represented “one of the few truly international societies of the bourgeois intelligentsia” that survived in a Europe divided into “a multiplicity of isolated points by visas, currencies, cordons of all sorts.”18 This internationalism made it possible to broker the uneasy alliance between dada and constructivism in Weimar in fall 1922. If, for Lissitzky, the balance had shifted in dada’s favor, perhaps it is because his Swiss residency was not entirely above board. In a dada mood that summer, he boasted that “when it is least expected, the illegal El will surprise everyone and make a mockery of them.”19 (After some pochapter three

Figure 3.4 El Lissitzky, Portrait of Hans Arp, ca. 1924. Gelatin silver print, 7 × 5 in. (17.9 × 12.7 cm). Galerie Berinson, Berlin.

lice harassment, he would be expelled from the country in spring 1925.)20 Dada was an important catalyst in changing Lissitzky’s attitude toward photography, though it was by no means the only factor. In the Studio had fused elements of photomontage and his own Prouns, but Lissitzky’s portrait of Arp bears no evident relation to either precedent (fig. 3.4). He probably made the portrait in June 1924, when Arp and Taeuber visited him in Locarno, on Lago Maggiore, to decide the contents of Isms of Art. Using a 13 × 18 cm view camera brought to Switzerland by his dealer and confidant, Sophie Küppers, Lissitzky shot two exposures of Arp—­once full-­face and one in profile—­against the backdrop of an issue of the journal 391 that advertised Arp’s book Die Wolkenpumpe (The Cloud Pump). S t i l l M o v eme n t s

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This combination of sitter and backdrop suggests that the impetus for the portrait study was promotional. Insofar as it closes the gap between the artist’s person and his creative activity, Lissitzky’s portrait of Arp is akin to the photomontage of Hausmann and Baader. It might even have been considered for this purpose in Isms of Art. Writing to Küppers that fall, Lissitzky recalled “how pleased we all were (Arp included) with the portrait of him which I did. I was proud to put my sign (eL) on the print I gave to Arp, to get a block made (you know I do that very rarely).”21 But Lissitzky was dismayed to discover that Arp had removed his signature from the print before having the block made. He never learned why Arp had struck down his claim to authorship; this was just one of many misunderstandings that bred ill will between the two collaborators. One reason Arp might have refused Lissitzky’s authorial claim is that the device of the photograph belonged in the public domain. More than any example from dada, Lissitzky’s portrait of Arp recalls the experimental photographs of the Italian brothers Arturo and Anton Giulio Bragaglia, the first artists in futurist circles to make a claim for the medium’s artistic potential. The brothers had publicized their efforts in a 1911 booklet, Futurist Photodynamism, but after Anton Guilio was expelled from Marinetti’s group in 1913, the Bragaglias’ experiments with long-­and multiple-­exposures were marginalized and excluded from Italian exhibitions until the 1930s. Still, Lissitzky would have had many opportunities to learn about their ideas. The Italians’ experiments were known to Tzara, who met Anton Giulio in 1916 and later published one of his photographs in a dada review.22 It was Tzara who first exposed Lissitzky to Man Ray’s cameraless photographs in Weimar, and it is possible that the poet informed Lissitzky of the Bragaglias’ contributions to photography as well.23 But he could also have learned about the brothers even earlier. In the early 1920s, the gallery that Anton Giulio operated in Rome was enlisted in a campaign to reassert the international position of Italian futurism, as Maria Versari has shown. The Italian state sponsored a Futurist House in Berlin coordinated by Ruggero Vasari, with support from Herwarth Walden, which was attractive to émigré Russian artists like Aleksandr Archipenko and Ivan Puni.24 On a visit to Rome in 1921, Archipenko was photographed by Bragaglia in the company of Enrico Prampolini, a contributor to De Stijl and participant in the 1922 Düsseldorf Congress of Progressive Artists, who designed the sets for Bragaglia’s 1917 film Thaïs.25 Although Lissitzky’s attitude toward Puni was cool, the Italians’ renewed campaign for international influence had also effectively engaged young artists from Japan with whom Lissitzky tried to cultivate relations, notably Murayama Tomoyoshi.26 This competition for international allies might have motivated Lissitzky to return to the same photographic terrain that Italian futurism had briefly occupied. In photographs like Dynamic Sensation Produced by the Face of Luciano Folgore, the Bragaglia brothers sought to capture the living essence of 78

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the sitter (fig. 3.5). “We can achieve art with the mechanical means of photography,” Anton Giulio claimed, “only if we overcome the pedestrian photographic reproduction of the real as something static or caught in a pose.”27 Although it was Bragaglia’s claim to the mantle of art that got him expelled from the ranks of the futurists, his status within the group was liminal and his recourse to the rhetoric of dynamism ambivalent from the start. More than a love of the machine, his subsequent writings revealed an interest in the photography of parapsychological phenomena that had been practiced in one form or another from the late nineteenth century.28 The images of “ghosts” that fascinated Bragaglia first appeared as unintended results of the wet-­plate collodion process in the 1860s, when the reuse of poorly cleaned glass plates occasionally produced photographs with faintly perceptible afterimages of previous sitters. Soon, these images were manufactured intentionally, as evidence of belief or simply as entertainment.29 Bragaglia was inclined toward the former view. Multiple and long exposures, he maintained, could capture an invisible reality on the photographic plate. S t i l l M o v eme n t s

Figure 3.5 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Dynamic Sensation Produced by the Face of Luciano Folgore, 1912. Gelatin silver print, 3.3 × 4.5 in. (8.5 × 11.5 cm). Fondazione Echaurren Salaris, Rome.

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The imperative not just to record movement but to recreate its inner essence on the plate arose from Bragaglia’s critical encounter with the chronophotography of Étienne-­Jules Marey. Bragaglia regarded Marey’s chronophotographs in much the same way that he viewed the spiritualists’ double exposures: in each case, he sought to wrest meaning from chance occurrence. Convinced that the purely “external” perspective of chronophotography was creating pictures that “appear to depict more than one subject,” Bragaglia assimilated the empirical trace of movement to the unity of the spirit. He claimed that “with Photodynamism, which registers what occurred between one stage and another, a work is presented that transcends the human condition.”30 This attitude allowed for a certain laxity with regard to technique since, from the perspective of transcendental unity, both multiple-­and long exposures captured the same phenomenon. A similar credulity is not in evidence in Lissitzky’s photographs. His portrait of Arp breaks Bragaglia’s cardinal rule, which stipulated that photodynamism “must be a dynamic synthesis of a complex evolution and not a synthesis of two rigid static states within a transition that can’t be seen.”31 If Lissitzky’s portrait of Arp did not simply ironize the transcendental conceit of spirit photography, it engaged with what Freud identified as “a real core of facts in occultism round which cheating and phantasy have spun a veil which is hard to pierce.”32 In spirit photography, the relevant fact was the indifference of the photosensitive emulsion to the sequence, continuity, intelligibility, or meaning of the impressions it receives. These concerns are native not to film, but to viewers and camera operators. Rather than attempt to make visible the transcendental meaning of movement, Lissitzky’s portrait tries to locate the productive potential of the medium in the interval between exposures.

Imaginary Constructions: Film and the Unity to Come

There are really just two readings of Lissitzky’s portrait of Arp: either the contiguity of these two impressions fuses into a convincing multidimensional image of the subject, or it is merely the inscription of two chance impressions. Friedrich Kittler posed this problem in the psychoanalytic lexicon of Jacques Lacan when he remarked that “cutting in the real, fusion or flow in the imaginary—­the entire research history of cinema revolves only around this paradox.”33 What is significant for us in Lissitzky’s portrait is not only the fact that it reconceived photodynamism in explicitly filmic terms; it also kept the paradox of filmic motion in play. This interest also appeared in Lissitzky’s theoretical writings. He spent the first half of 1924 preparing an essay called “A[rt] and Pangeometry,” which addressed the newfound importance of time in contemporary art’s 80

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most recent formal developments.34 Turning to his preferred conceptual framing, he sought to show how film, as “a dematerialized projection of the plane,” had introduced to art “an a-­material materiality” that exists in temporal articulation rather than in bodies themselves.35 In some respects, the core concerns of “A. and Pangeometry” are more fully illuminated by the concept of suture that was developed in Lacanian psychoanalysis and applied in film theory in the 1960s. Analysts used this term to refer to the way subjects depend on signs to close a perceived corporeal rift opened by a lost object, only to discover signification as an endless chain of substitutions. For film theorists, this deferred imaginary unity helped explain the anticipatory pleasure of film viewing. Summarizing the concept’s appeal, Stephen Heath remarked that “the imaginary of the spectator and the imaginary of the film move apart together,” creating a fleeting unity in gaps that are constitutive of the subject.36 To Lissitzky and his contemporaries, it was clear that film was an unfulfilled promise. Film, Lissitzky believed, would not be the only art to exist in imaginary space. He predicted that future developments would make use of “an endless diversity of effects” that arise from “a whole series of properties belonging to our visual faculty,” including stereoscopy, polarization, and the transposition of acoustical into optical phenomena.37 By the mid-­1920s, experiments in these areas already linked dada and constructivism. In a 1922 essay, “Dynamic-­Constructive System of Forces,” Moholy-­Nagy and his coauthor, the critic Alfréd Kemény, had connected “the problem of freely floating sculpture as well as of film as projected spatial motion” to a new kind of construction that might avoid the pitfalls of an engineering-­influenced constructivism, which they derided as “technical naturalism.”38 Lissitzky knew that Hausmann’s optophonetic research was directly related to the technologies of the synchronized sound film.39 He might also have been aware of Marcel Duchamp’s ongoing experiments with stereoscopy, which included a failed attempt at a three-­dimensional film and the creation of his Rotary Demisphere in 1924–­1925.40 So far, however, none of these efforts had yielded positive results, and Lissitzky could claim no concrete artistic contribution of his own. Even so, in “A. and Pangeometry,” he stakes out a position in a growing field of artistic research. For Lissitzky, film had opened the new terrain of “imaginary space” by revealing that “our visual faculty is limited when it comes to the conception of movement and indeed of the whole state of the object.”41 This is a claim that goes beyond the sources he drew on to prepare the essay, which span contemporary psychology, biology, and the history of mathematics. The shifting title of Lissitzky’s essay, which he called “1 = 1” and “The Amechanics of Art” before settling on the slightly gnomic “A. and Pangeometry,” hints at the range of topics it weaves together.42 His use in the essay of the abbreviations “A.” for art and “F.” for form recalls the notion of eco-­a, which he borrowed from Kruchenykh (discussed in S t i l l M o v eme n t s

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chapter 2). Here, however, the “law of economy” is also informed by the writings of Hungarian biologist Raoul Francé, for whom the expression of identity, 1 = 1, represented a state of rest in which an organism’s form and function are separated only by “the smallest measure of force.”43 Like Moholy-­Nagy, Lissitzky drew on Francé’s “biocentric” approach to technology in assessing the organ function of the human eye.44 Francé maintained that “the mammalian eye is a camera obscura and the ear is a stringed instrument,” which had evolved to constitute an optimal relationship between organism and environment.45 He shared his interest in the constitutive role of the senses in conscious experience with an entire generation of critical monist philosophers, but as a biologist he asserted the primacy of organ function over organs themselves. In his view, “‘Hearing’ does not mean the establishment of real qualities of worldly beings, but only the statement: ‘I have this or that structure’ that I acquired in order to be oriented through sounds.”46 This line of thinking strengthened Lissitzky’s suspicion that the art of the film currently “makes use of only one property of the visual faculty,” which might in fact support a range of a-­material forms more functionally appropriate to the organ of sight.47 These biological themes remain in the background in the essay, while mathematical ideas take the lead role in explaining the variance of spatial concepts in art. Lissitzky’s interest in mathematics first appeared in his “Proun” lecture of 1921, which imported a bevy of mathematical concepts from the first volume of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, a history that treated the morphology of culture like the life cycle of an organism.48 In Moscow, he had enthusiastically appropriated Spengler’s argument that the purely functional number of the modern West and the “integral and corporeal number” of the classical world, expressed in Euclid’s geometry, were just two of the many distinct “number worlds” comprising the history of mathematics.49 Spengler helped Lissitzky arrive at the view that the dematerialized spaces of contemporary art could be illuminated by those of modern mathematics, but by 1924 his already appreciable departures from the conservative historian had become decisive.50 When he wrote “A. and Pangeometry,” Lissitzky relied on an unidentified history of mathematics, resulting in a very different picture. Notably, where Spengler claims that “the great arts are . . . based on number,” Lissitzky cautions that he can only draw a series of analogies between the fields of mathematics and art, “for every time they overlap it is fatal for A.”51 He nonetheless devotes most of the essay to outlining four spatial systems—­planimetric, perspectival, irrational, and imaginary space—­ that he likens to natural, rational, irrational, and imaginary numbers. These systems are presented as a series that comprehends art’s development from ancient Egypt to the present day, but Lissitzky’s mathematical analogies do not endorse a post-­Euclidean future. As Linda Dalrym82

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ple Henderson pointed out long ago, he invokes the multidimensional spaces of “pangeometry” (a term borrowed from Nikolai Lobachevsky) in order to criticize their abuse by artists.52 For Lissitzky, the advantage of these mathematical analogies lay in their ability to differentiate spatial systems in the visual arts that were sometimes indistinguishable to the naked eye. To be sure, different spaces appear to us in individual art objects, but their effectiveness as a system is tied to a pattern aggregated over time. For this reason, Lissitzky thinks film is just a “first step . . . toward the construction of imaginary space,” which awaits validation by future artistic achievements.53 As a dematerialized projection of the plane, film is still entangled with the “irrational space” of contemporary art, a space Lissitzky associates with the accomplishments of Suprematism in particular. A similar relation, we learn, once held between irrational space and the perspective system: perspective was put under duress by the Impressionists and inverted by the cubists and futurists, whose spatial constructions dissolved the distinction between painting and sculpture, but it was not truly overcome until Suprematism appeared. At this point, the system of irrational space achieved retroactive validity for a type of art in which “distances are measured only by the intensity and the position of strictly defined color areas.”54 Lissitzky treats this kind of space as a purely perceptual phenomenon, but in explaining it he gives pride of place to a mathematical metaphor introduced by Malevich, according to which “it is only now in the twentieth century that the  is being acknowledged as a plastic value, as 0 in the complex body of A.”55 The significance of the zero in Lissitzky’s essay can be clarified by referring it to Jacques-­Alain Miller’s classic formulation of suture, which also addresses the transformation of the number zero from a literal absence to a sign in a system of values.56 Both writers face the same problem. Until the zero is conceived as a sign, the chain of signifiers (whether numbers or representations) remains bound to a parallel series of objects. Every number refers to an empirical quantity, even zero, which is conceived as a lack of something or other. But if its identity lies in a relation to the world, so too will its relation to other numbers be mediated by relations among worldly things. In this respect, Lissitzky admits no real difference between perspective and the protospatial system of planimetric representation, which makes images coplanar with their support; the latter, he explains, operates like an arithmetic sequence, and the former like a geometric one. But as Miller stresses, every sequence needs a concept that operates according to the principle of identity without being self-­identical, standing outside of the sequence yet referring to it alone. This is the role of the zero. Zero can ground the axiom that engenders the sequence of numerals, (n + 1) = n′, because it “counts” as one even though it “is” not one. Miller claims that only by positing and then repressing this paradoxical entity can signs have autonomy; the S t i l l M o v eme n t s

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zero allows the order of signs to achieve closure as a coherent, repeatable series, from which the subject vanishes.57 What suture fixes, then, is the split between the subject and its position within signification, a rift that is also on display in Lissitzky’s portrait photographs. A companion piece to the portrait of Arp, his portrait of Kurt Schwitters (plate 6) joins two images of different scale at the hinge of a shared eye. The margins of the photograph are filled with text: designs for Schwitters’s journal Merz and a passage on the chemistry of fixative solutions drawn from a photographic manual, which is printed backward and in reverse tonality.58 A toy parrot superimposed over the sitter’s mouth introduces an iconography of repetition to the theme of process and stasis. Together with the arrow curling into the ear of the adjacent face, whose open mouth suggests speech, this iconography invites us to view the photograph as a study of Schwitters the poet.59 At the time Lissitzky made the portrait, Schwitters was developing his Ursonate, a long-­form poem that began as an elaboration of Raoul Hausmann’s 1918 Poster Poem. In it, Schwitters transformed a more or less random sequence of letters selected by Hausmann, f m s b w t ö z a u, into a series of phonemes, Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu, which were repeated in increasingly elaborate variations over the course of the three-­part composition.60 Lissitzky was quite familiar with this work, having used the verses of its thirteenth and fourteenth stanzas in a poster he designed for a joint performance by Hausmann and Schwitters in 1923, but for our purposes this example is only an expedient; further on, we shall see that poems Schwitters composed from numbers are equally relevant here. Regardless of what is being recited in the portrait, we encounter a subject who, in poetically uniting a chain of signs, loses himself to the poem that takes hold of him as its operator. Moreover, the construction of a speaking subject across distinct moments, which now suggest the pulse of time more than the illusion of movement, achieves the same effect for the viewer of the photograph. It will not go unnoticed, however, that in Lissitzky’s essay the function of the zero is applied to the historical series rather than the individual artwork. When he asserts that the square marks the point “where we first arrive at an A. complex, with which we can compare the mathematical analogy of the unbroken line” of real numbers, uniting integers and irrational numbers around zero, he is characterizing the history of art as a set of spatial devices that had no unity without an internally defined limit.61 Of course, it was already conventional to claim that the historicity of art lay in its conception of space rather than its relation to the world. In his 1915 book Principles of Art History, the formalist art historian Heinrich Wölfflin had argued that the apperceptive basis of art developed from planarity to depth in accordance with a historical law. In a similar spirit, Bois has proposed that Lissitzky’s four spatial types represent an implicitly Hegelian narrative of development and sublation.62 84

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But close attention to Lissitzky’s text reveals that he construed this problem somewhat differently. Like the continuum of real numbers, his spatial taxonomy appears less as a pattern of historical development than as a set of historically constituted types in the present. For the contemporary artist, the suturing of art as an autonomous field—­its historical closure by the square—­shed new light on problems of self-­ reference and the contemporaneity of historical styles. In Lissitzky’s view, the accomplishment of irrational space meant that artists could freely distinguish between “pastiche embracing all the monuments in the museums” and the imaginary space on their horizon.63 The historical pathos of Lissitzky’s portrait of Schwitters appears more clearly when we focus on its technique. The two “shots” that constitute the subject of the photograph are in fact two double exposures, as we see when examining the negatives held in the Sprengel Museum. On the right, Schwitters mimes the act of speech, with his mouth open and then closed (fig. 3.6); on the left, he lies on the ground below the photographer, mouth agape, with a barely visible impression of a toy bird superimposed upside down on his nose (fig. 3.7). In showing the poet with his mouth both open and closed, the first of these images follows the precedent of Lissitzky’s portrait of Arp, with its problematic of implied movement. The second, in combining a portrait study with an extraneous object, recalls the practice of photomontage. But unlike photomontage, which foregrounds the seams between its component parts, the bird here is almost totally merged with the poet’s face. It is made legible only by its perch, which casts a shadow that terminates in Schwitters’s eye, and by the subtle shift in tone extending through the sitters’ forehead to a nearly perfect sphere that replaces the tip of his nose. In the final portrait, Lissitzky prints the two negatives together and again overlays the toy bird, this time on the poet’s mouth, so that it metonymically defines his features and metaphorically names his attributes. But the unity Lissitzky sought in this technical experiment does not appear. What is compelling in theory is practically unintelligible, as Lissitzky’s liberal retouching shows (plate 6). Moreover, even with full awareness of the artist’s intentions, his appropriation of various devices stands perilously close to pastiche. Just as the problematic of filmic motion showed Lissitzky’s desire to push photography beyond futurism, so the allusion to photomontage in his portrait of Schwitters takes a position on dada. Indeed, the whole of “A. and Pangeometry” is framed as a response to George Grosz’s facetiously titled 1925 essay “Art Is in Danger,” which characterized dada’s engagement with art as a mistake and instead pledged allegiance to revolutionary Tendenzkunst.64 What attracts Lissitzky’s attention is the way Grosz disavows art as a product of bourgeois society, even as he reserves the status of art for his own work, pending the victory of the proletariat. As Lissitzky points out, such a claim presupposes “universal S t i l l M o v eme n t s

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Figure 3.6 El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, ca. 1924. Glass negative, 6.9 × 4.9 in. (17.5 × 12.5 cm). Sammlung Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, Sprengel Museum, Hanover. Photo: Herling/Gwose/Werner.

criteria for A.” but offers only the prevarication that “at all times all art has a tendency.”65 Lissitzky’s critique is not only motivated by his alliance with Schwitters, who counted abstraction and sound poetry as dada’s “core” concerns.66 It is also impelled by the weight of Grosz’s position in the Hungarian debates that led to the demise of the constructivist International. The argument put forward in “Art Is in Danger” first appeared in an essay Grosz published in Egyseg (Unity) in 1923, which urged constructivists toward “concrete engineering work” and condemned as “metaphysical 86

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Figure 3.7 El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, ca. 1924. Glass negative, 6.9 × 4.9 in. (17.5 × 12.5 cm). Sammlung Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, Sprengel Museum, Hanover. Photo: Herling/Gwose/Werner.

speculation” the same theories that Lissitzky gathered under the heading of imaginary space.67 On behalf of the dadas and constructivists engaged in this area of research, Lissitzky is keen to argue that art is a producer of new spaces, rather than a pure instrument of class power—­a point made more effective by his open agreement with Grosz that “the future belongs to the working classes.”68 In the same way, his return to the techniques of photomontage in a new modality shows his desire to build on the legitimately artistic contributions of dada, which Grosz is ready to abandon. S t i l l M o v eme n t s

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By highlighting Lissitzky’s statement of solidarity with Grosz, we can more clearly grasp that the contention at the heart of “A. and Pangeometry” concerns the nature of art historical change itself. Grosz’s forceful assertion that only militant depictions of class struggle can move art forward arises from his disillusioned view that “formal revolution lost its shock effect a long time ago.”69 For Grosz, formal experiment has lost its efficacy because art is a tool—­a weapon blunted by use. For Lissitzky, by contrast, formal revolution is a historical event with a unique punctual character, which he likens to a chemical reaction among sedimented historical elements.70 From this perspective, the task of the artist is not to seek an instrument capable of immediately provoking shock among the bourgeoisie but to contribute to the collective accretion of signs where instabilities in the reigning spatial system are most evident. Lissitzky and Grosz agree that the question is how art relates not to workers themselves but to the historical interests of workers, a distinction that must be eliminated if art is to have any immediate relevance to the proletariat. Under current conditions, that relation is mediated by intellectuals—­artists and party organizers—­who speak in the name of the working class qua subject of history. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have argued that by projecting a future unity of these two levels, a “hegemonic suture” allowed a broad spectrum of tasks—­even those with no clear basis in social class—­to be associated with the labor movement.71 Lissitzky’s formalism refuses the instrumental relation between politics and art that Grosz assumes, but it ultimately accomplishes the same kind of suture. The class subject, which appears in Lissitzky’s essay as excluded from the irrational space of contemporary art, nevertheless finds a place reserved for it in the imaginary space on art’s horizon. And film is where this reconciliation first appears possible.

Irrational Desires: Reckoning with Advertising

Even though Lissitzky thought highly of the films produced by his friends and collaborators Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling, his own experiments were confined to still photography. In this respect, he could claim only a supporting role in the historical process he validated in “A. and Pangeometry.” What’s more, apart from the 13 × 18 cm view camera on loan from Sophie Küppers, in Switzerland he was working with very rudimentary photographic materials that required no darkroom.72 The evidence we have indicates that Lissitzky’s photographs are all contact prints, made without an enlarger using only a fixative agent and printing-­ out paper, on which an image gradually appears during exposure to natural light.73 This makeshift setup is reflected in Lissitzky’s technique, making his photographs particularly hard to classify. At first glance, his work belongs 88

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to a long tradition of composite prints designed to trick and delight the viewer. But in another sense, every print Lissitzky made in Switzerland is a photogram, even those that used camera negatives. Among the many composite prints in the history of photography, Lissitzky’s are unique in distinguishing the marks recorded on the negative from those registered by the photosensitive paper in the printing process, and they foreground this disparity as a testament to the dominance of irrational space. When viewed as a group, they also show that Lissitzky understood this space to be integrated with the economy through advertising. As a workshop for the production of desire, advertising made the replacement of objects with functions in irrational space concrete. An image Lissitzky made with Vilmos Huszár, which appeared in Merz in 1923, shows that he had been thinking of the photograph as irrational in the sense defined in “A. and Pangeometry” for some time (fig. 3.8). A positive print from a lost negative original, the picture appears to be a straightforward record of translucent objects such as a Philips light bulb, an ink bottle, and an eyedropper, which have been laid in various positions on photosensitive paper. Titled on its right margin 4 i Lampe and credited as a “Helioconstruction 125 Volt by El Huszár and Vilmos Lissitzky,” the photograph takes its cues from the concept of the i picture recently defined by Schwitters. For Schwitters, an i picture is an anonymous creation, which can be appropriated as a readymade whole in an act of cutting or framing that reveals an existing rhythm. Although it is a performative valuation, the i is not the I of individual subjectivity, with its will and desire; it is only the alphabet’s middle vowel. According to Schwitters’s paradigmatic definition, “it is much more difficult” to create an i picture “than to formulate a work by evaluating [wertung] parts, because the world of appearance bridles at [wehrt sich dagegen] being art, and one seldom finds [a place] where only access is needed to get an artwork.”74 Alongside his essay, Schwitters published two X-­ray photographs, of which he is the author, he claims, not the doctor who made them. From the i, which Schwitters calls the “decadence of Merz,” Lissitzky and Huszár’s “Helioconstruction” fashions an act of collective creation.75 The unusually elaborate caption with which 4 i Lampe was published is just as important as the photograph itself. The title of the picture is printed on its right margin, but the caption continues below, nesting an assertion that “the procedure of this Heliostruction [sic] is grammatical” below a sequence of repeating 62s along the photograph’s lower margin. After this brief methodological interruption, the numerical sequence resumes at 63 and continues to the right margin, counting up to 67. Four subsequent rows of mixed fractions, each aligned with the gaps in the series above, hint at a space of potentially infinite divisibility that terminates in a square. The sequence recalls the number poems that Schwitters created in the early 1920s, such as “Gedicht 25,” which begins: S t i l l M o v eme n t s

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25 25, 25, 26 26, 26, 27 27, 27, 28 28, 28, 29

In a sensitive reading of these poems, J. C. Middleton has noted how, “in amongst a set of signs which suppress the poetry of lexical and oral values entirely, moves the phantom of those values.”76 The consonance of these concerns with Lissitzky’s view of photography becomes clearer when we recognize that the sequence of numbers beneath 4 i Lampe is tied to the issue’s pagination, like a numerical i picture: the photogram appears on the issue’s penultimate page, number 62, and the square marks the halfway point between the actual page number and the journal’s stapled binding. Part concrete poem, part methodological statement, the increasingly hairsplitting fractions remind us of those spaces in Suprematism that “cannot be measured by any finite measure,” namely, irrational ones.77 Here, the appearance of the square makes the simple turn of the page into a protofilmic demonstration of Zeno’s paradox, the logic of which infinitely defers the brute fact of movement. In a jocular way, this photo-­grammar claims the rationality of the irrational for photography, withdrawing the materials of image production into a realm of signs. The same pattern holds for Lissitzky’s most celebrated photograph, the self-­portrait often titled The Constructor (fig. 3.9). Recent interpreters of this image have declined to celebrate its depiction of a coolly rational, calculating subject and instead sought to recover traces of the artist’s experience of illness and corporeal frailty as a critique of rationality.78 But as we have seen, Lissitzky viewed the irrational as less the dialectical opposite of the rational than a distinct mode of spatiality. Surprisingly, the rationality of the irrational as he understood it has escaped comment, even though the self-­portrait manifests signs of this logic in abundance. Lissitzky’s original print patches together bits of white cardboard, a circular segment added with pen and ink, and exposures from multiple negatives on a single sheet. The picture creates formal tension between depth and surface less through the text neatly sequestered in its upper left corner than through the superimposition of translucent objects—­in this case, parts of the artist’s own body, framed, fragmented, and transposed onto glass plates—­whose relation to the photosensitive paper is not so different from that of the bottle and bulb in 4 i Lampe. This analogy is explicit in another early picture commemorating Lissitzky’s friendship with Huszár: a cameraless photograph of two light bulbs exposed with a negative showing cameo portraits of the two artists laid casually on top (fig. 3.10). The frank, quotidian relation between these objects is evident in the faint rectangular silhouette of the glass S t i l l M o v eme n t s

Figure 3.8 (facing) El Lissitzky and Vilmos Huszár, 4 i Lampe, reproduced in Merz, no. 6 (1923). Letterpress, 8.7 × 5.6 in. (22.2 × 14.3 cm). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (85-­ S179 vol.6).

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Figure 3.9 El Lissitzky, Self Portrait (Photo-­painting), ca. 1924. Ink and paper on gelatin silver print, 7.7 × 8.4 in. (19.5 × 21.4 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

plate distinctly visible along three of its sides. Looking back at 4 i Lampe, we find an image littered with these traces, which disrupt the illusory immediacy of the photograph and invite us to reconstruct their assembly on the sheet of paper. In Lissitzky’s self-­portrait, careful matting eliminates the registration of glass plates, transforms photogram elements into an abstract frame, and confines the doubling of the sign to the figurative heart of the picture. Using exposures of his face and hand against a gridded paper ground, Lissitzky concocts a paradox of interlaced yet discontinuous spaces. The gridded paper on which the artist’s hand rests overlays the right side of his face, the left side of which blocks out a differently gridded layer. In the real scenario that the camera records, the hand lies upon one grid and the face before the other. But in the nongridded zones of the artist’s hand and face, the photographic emulsion’s indifference to the empirical reality of spatial recession plays out. The artfully contrived union of hand and eye, anchored so securely by the alignment of the thumb and bridge of the nose that the severed wrist is entirely forgotten, continually labors at the impossible task of pulling the hand back beneath the grid it rests on. The opposite also occurs, as the eye is raised from “behind” the gridded plane into the recess of the palm and thoroughly severed from the face. But these effects are perceived as movements only within 92

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Figure 3.10 El Lissitzky, Untitled (Double Portrait), 1923. Gelatin silver print, 6.9 × 9.3 in. (17.6 × 23.7 cm). Art Institute of Chicago.

the horizon of lived space encoded on the negatives, which the print insistently undoes. The real material fact of the print’s surface makes these records of distance copresent on a single plane as signs in a total gestalt we can only call irrational. The format of the photograph is intimately connected to its perceptual effects. As a promotional image, like his portraits of Arp and Schwitters, Lissitzky thought it appropriate to enlarge his self-­portrait to poster size, to be viewed “from a distance of seven to ten paces.”79 In a text published in the Swiss architectural journal ABC, Lissitzky and Mart Stam mocked “art morality” for preaching that “poster art is the prostitution of painting,” and praised the poster for demanding an account of “the how of reading itself.” According to the authors, “advertising acts on the public through communication, more strongly through propaganda, and more strongly still through suggestion.”80 This explicit connection between advertising and propaganda will become significant in Lissitzky’s future work in the USSR, but for our present purposes, these distinctions can help us distinguish the operations of his experimental photographs. After all, doesn’t the perpetual allure of Lissitzky’s self-­portrait lie in the way it suggests something while communicating nothing, like an advertisement without a product? (Consider the inexplicable X Y Z.) Such effects are not rational, but they are reproducible S t i l l M o v eme n t s

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from the standpoint of reason, which can give an account of the how. As this example suggests, Lissitzky oriented his still photographs toward what he saw as the most productive applications available to him. In “A. and Pangeometry,” he asserted that in the period dominated by irrational space “the only important thing was accomplished by the modern dynamic advertisement, because it developed from the immediate necessity of acting on our psyche, and not from aesthetic reminiscences.”81 This compared favorably, he thought, with recent attempts at kinetic sculpture, like Naum Gabo’s Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave), which tried (and in his view failed) to break from the system of irrational space. He stated the same position somewhat differently elsewhere, contrasting the “growing collective understanding of elementary means” nurtured by advertising with the “individual arbitrariness” that thrived in art.82 Even if it did not quite articulate imaginary space like film, the stammering of advertisements pointed toward it. An account of how advertisements are read, he claimed, would reveal that “names or brands are just recognized,” not read at all. Photography excelled as a medium of advertising because advertising relies on simple acts of naming and showing more than explaining or persuading. When “the object bears the name of the factory or firm, its appearance alone wordlessly imprints itself in the memory of passers-­by,” so it suffices to reproduce “the photographic representation of the advertising object itself, or its effect, or both together.”83 These remarks are not entirely theoretical. When Lissitzky was writing “A. and Pangeometry,” he was earning his daily bread by designing print ads, letterhead, and the like for the Pelikan brand office products made by the Hanover-­based firm of Günther Wagner. He had been hired by Fritz Beindorff, the son-­in-­law of Wagner and a founding member of the Kestner Society. In the work Lissitzky produced for Pelikan, we find many instances of the techniques he praised in his written assessments of advertising. In a poster for Pelikan ink, for example, we see how the appearance of the object and its mnemonic effect can be derived from a cameraless photograph (fig. 3.11). Composed of a Pelikan logo, a pen and bottle of ink, and the stenciled word Tinte (ink), the photograph stages a fantasy in which the animated commodity names itself and produces its own image. The flat surface of the ink bottle, flush with the plane of the printing surface, anchors it frontally so that its raking shadow suggests a three-­ quarter view. While the dreamlike distortion is quite distinct from cubist planar faceting, the latter is nonetheless suggested by object’s stenciled name, whose exaggerated denotation mimics the function of a label even as it hovers above the bottle’s surface. This irrational depth allows the objects to rise up from the horizontal plane and play out a small scene: as the bottle sets itself upright, proudly resting on a distorted base, the neighboring pen stands and, absent any supporting hand, inscribes the mark of its maker in a flawless shadow script. 94

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Figure 3.11 El Lissitzky, Untitled (Ink), ca. 1924. Gelatin silver print, 19.6 × 13.7 in. (49.7 × 34.8 cm). Berlinische Galerie. Photo: Anja Elisabeth Witte/ Berlinische Galerie.

The pretext of this scene is acknowledged and heightened by the way Lissitzky repeats the image’s reversal of tonal values. While the initial photogram yields a unique print with a darkened ground registering the absence of the object’s trace, Lissitzky’s design, rephotographed and printed from a contact negative to restore its “natural” positive tonality, absents the objects’ photogrammatic absence, and instead lends them a phantasmatic presence. This use of the photogram technique for promotional purposes is part of an ongoing exchange within the avant-­garde about the operations of word and image. Lissitzky would undoubtedly have been aware of the draft covers Moholy-­Nagy made for a 1923 issue of Broom by using paper cutouts to create the illusion of letters hovering in a void alongside varS t i l l M o v eme n t s

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Figure 3.12 László Moholy-­ Nagy, Untitled (Broom cover), 1922. Gelatin silver print, 7 × 5.1 in. (17.8 × 12.9 cm). Musée National d’Art Moderne/ Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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ious softly undulating light-­ forms. The fluttering edges of the resulting images recall the film studio trademarks that are projected at the start of motion pictures, as does their surprisingly commercial art deco modernism (fig. 3.12). Later, in his book Painting Photography Film, Moholy-­ Nagy would link this kind of experiment to what he called typo-­photo: a nonlinear form of typographic experimentation that makes use of the “positive and negative values of the plane,” which he linked to film, electric signs, and even, he predicted, a new domain of philosophical work.84 Well before Moholy-­Nagy published these remarks, the optimism he expressed about typo-­photo had been a subject of debate between Lissitzky and Schwitters. Around the time the Hungarian artist undertook his first experiments in this new technique, Lissitzky had proposed in Merz that the communication of concepts could be shifted from the word to the letter and from phonetics to optics.85 Despite the clear echo of the i picture in this hypothesis, Schwitters expressed reservations about Lissitzky’s ideas and countered that “typographical content does not paint a picture of textual content.”86 This skepticism is merited. The expressive core of Lissitzky’s Pelikan work is not the neutral ground of language but the auratic “painterly mark” of the commodity, such as Rosalind Krauss identifies in the cameraless photographs of Man Ray.87 Lissitzky’s exchanges with Schwitters on these matters were almost entirely supported by Pelikan. Schwitters too created advertisements for the company in these years, and he published some of them in a special issue of Merz devoted to advertising. There, opposite the essay “Theses on Typography,” in which he rebutted Lissitzky’s claims about the future of text, we find the advertisement that turns up in the background of Lissitzky’s portrait of Schwitters (fig. 3.13). The numbers of Pelikan’s 8000-­series typewriter ribbons that appear here—­8000, 8001, 8002, 8000Z 8001Z, 8002Z—­suggest that the logic of Schwitters’s numchapter three

Figure 3.13 Kurt Schwitters, advertisement for Pelikan typewriter ribbons, Merz, no. 11 (1924). Letterpress, 11.7 × 8.7 in. (29.8 × 22.2 cm). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (S179. no11).

ber poems could be extended to product lines. Reveling in the industrial poetics of the commodity, Schwitters discovers a suggestive banality in these numbers that eclipses the communicative task of the advertisement. From the manufacturer’s perspective, the poet’s decision to omit the functional descriptions that correspond to these codes undoubtedly made the design less effective. Still, Pelikan considered it advantageous to finance the issue’s publication and distribution, since it associated the firm with the avant-­garde. To Schwitters, the transaction gave an air of bourgeois respectability and, more concretely, the funds to print his own commercial letterhead and launch himself as a graphic designer.88 To some extent, Lissitzky’s relations with Pelikan were also marked by this transformation of the artist-­patron relationship into an exchange of commercial services. Beyond arranging Lissitzky’s employment by the S t i l l M o v eme n t s

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firm, Fritz Beindorff was a patron who had purchased one of Lissitzky’s works, and the new letterhead Lissitzky designed for himself in 1924 was almost certainly paid for with money he earned at Pelikan.89 But unlike Schwitters, Lissitzky did not enjoy equal standing in his relationship with the firm. However sincere his enthusiasm for advertising as a medium of mass communication, his work for Pelikan was not undertaken freely: the contract he signed at the end of 1923 was designed to guarantee him the minimum income required for Swiss residence, without which he could not receive treatment for tuberculosis.90 Moreover, the technical experiments that interested him were at odds with the firm’s desired public image. He made at least seven photogram advertisements for the firm during the winter of 1924–­1925 but was almost entirely unsuccessful in meeting its standards for publication.91 Were his income not tied to Pelikan, he could simply market his wares to other buyers. Instead, his production increased in proportion to the firm’s dissatisfaction, a trend that made him understandably restless. By December 1924, he wished to renegotiate his contract under more favorable conditions, for which he devised a basic strategy: rather than continue to produce a seemingly endless string of designs in exchange for a monthly salary, Lissitzky planned to make Pelikan compete for his services by making designs outside of his monthly quota, on which they would have to bid.92 Fittingly, it was during these contract negotiations that Lissitzky hit on the idea of self-­representation. “Am now working on a photographic self-­portrait,” he wrote to Küppers in mid-­December, “a great piece of stupidity if everything goes to plan.”93 What was the plan, exactly? Lissitzky had proposed to Küppers a few days earlier that she serve as his agent during the negotiations with Pelikan. Perhaps masking some embarrassment with a flirtatious tone, he wrote that “concerning my new contract with Beindorff, I’d like to inform the [Pelikan] people that they should surrender to you, my legal representative, if you’ve got nothing against that?”94 Küppers apparently did, for she let the comment pass, but two days later Lissitzky again tried to enlist her.95 This time he succeeded. By the beginning of 1925, Küppers was taking meetings on his behalf with advertising firms in Berlin and pitching the kind of objects he had theorized in “A. and Pangeometry.” When representing Lissitzky, Küppers was instructed to show the printed books of the previous years as well as the recent photographic advertisements; she should “tell them besides, that I have a series of ideas for mobile and plastic advertising,” he added optimistically.96 Neither at Pelikan nor at the firms in Berlin did negotiations go as planned. Far from acceding to his demands, Pelikan awarded the design of its latest brochure to another designer, granting Lissitzky only a minor role.97 “Maybe I’m really over-­extended,” he wrote upon receiving the news, “but I’d rather sell the holes in my socks on Kurfürstendamm to 98

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earn such money.”98 (The expression is telling. What was he doing for Pelikan, if not selling the material sign of a lack?) The remaining maneuvers of what he had conceived in December as a multifront campaign against Pelikan happened in March, too late to achieve the desired effect. Power of representation was finally transferred to Küppers, and a badly cropped version of his self-­portrait appeared in ABC with a British patent number in the lower-­left corner and the caption “Lissitzky’s Photo-­Image Studio.”99 The image is decidedly ambivalent, for its deadpan caption is not only a ruse: it is as much a parody of the artist’s current dilemma as an instrument designed to pry him out of it. The venture it named was real insofar as speculation is real under capitalism. But absent the underwriting enjoyed by Schwitters, Lissitzky’s studio could hardly be expected to succeed. As his oblique reference to intellectual property suggests, Lissitzky’s self-­portrait is at once a serious bluff and a fantasy of control in the field of representation. On this basis, we may compare it to the contemporaneous work of his Soviet comrades Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky, who in 1923 formed a small advertising business called Reklam-­Konstruktor (Advertising Constructor) and marketed their services to Bolshevik-­run enterprises. As Christina Kiaer has shown, the proprietors of Reklam-­Konstruktor aimed to stimulate consumer demand for socialist commodities during the NEP period, but they quickly discovered that wage disputes arose even when dealing with communists.100 Lissitzky’s clients were no socialists, of course, but it is his status as a producer that is in question here. As an employee of a large industrial firm in Europe, Lissitzky did not own the product of his labor like his counterparts in the USSR, who remained small independent producers. Beyond this important distinction, however, the work of advertising is remarkably similar. In each case, we see the artist extending the reach of industrial concerns to the point of sale, and creating a bond between producers and consumers at the expense of merchant middlemen. This is the basis of the “necessity” Lissitzky identified in advertising and the collective understanding he believed it brought about. Viewed as part of industrial capital’s struggle for dominance over merchant capital, the avant-­garde’s turn to advertising can be seen as evidence of what Laclau and Mouffe have called a hegemonic task. These tasks, they argue, are endowed with a class character distinct from that of the actor who carries them out—­a distinction deemed necessary to clarify the hegemonic relations of Russian politics, where the representatives of the working class assumed a leading role in the historically incomplete “bourgeois” tasks of democratic revolution and economic industrialization.101 Advertising’s unique contribution to the development of industrial capitalism attracted artists sooner than it did communists. Kiaer explains that the Bolsheviks, unlike Rodchenko and Mayakovsky, were embarrassed by their need to advertise socialist commodities in the mixed S t i l l M o v eme n t s

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economy of NEP. The hegemonic power of marketing is clear in Mayakovsky’s plea that “we cannot leave this weapon, this agitation on behalf of trade, in the hands of the NEP-­men, . . . the bourgeois foreigners trading here.”102 The task of seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie, which Mayakovsky uses to give advertising a revolutionary air, is demonstrated quite literally in his promotional slogans. In a poster for cookies from the Red October factory (plate 7), the consumer is reminded that the product continues to be made in the “former Einem” facilities, a manufacturer popular prior to the revolution.103 But because the product’s desirability still rests on its association with a prerevolutionary brand, the appeal subtly undermines Mayakovsky’s revolutionary enterprise. To the artist, it seems, this ambiguity is immaterial. Advertising is simply a school that teaches the poetry of mass production, regardless of the economic system under which it is produced. Lissitzky’s work in this field is distinguished from that of his Soviet comrades as much as that of his friend Schwitters, the ironic bourgeois, by the way it mapped the form of consumer desire onto the contours of photographic space. In photography, Lissitzky found the drama of separation and return playing out in the realm of signs, which corresponded to the movement of commodities from the hands of their producers to those of their consumers. His self-­portrait stages this drama at the level of his own product. To fully illuminate this aspect of the picture, we must turn to the structural relation between Lissitzky’s self-­portrait and the “photoun” of Arp in Isms of Art (fig. 3.1). If the Arp montage toyed with an iconography of blinding and castration (with Arp’s finger-­ phallus sticking through the displaced hole of his own Cyclops-­eye), his self-­portrait inverts that image, almost without remainder. Here, the eye is severed only to survive in a hand with all its phallic fingers intact (and a compass to extend them). In the play of fantasy, Lissitzky is not separated from his creative powers by an asymmetrical exchange for wages but maintains dominion over his products like the artist of old—­or his comrades back home.

In “A. and Pangeometry,” Lissitzky expressed the hope that the experiments of his contemporaries would converge in a new imaginary space, but in the end, he acknowledged these efforts only as part of the “destruction of the old idea of art, that of monumentality.”104 For him, photography and film represented a force of transience, historicity, and change that replaced objects with signs. This substitution introduced the artist to a different kind of obduracy: an impersonal system of exchange with its own compelling force. Lissitzky recognized this system as the domain of history, a grand process that moves according to its own unpredictable logic. In it, he was made to recognize his status as a contract worker 100

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whose alienation from his product bought him a precarious existence. For an artist who had strenuously resisted arguments equating creativity and labor, this was a difficult lesson. The Freudian imagery in Lissitzky’s “photoun” of Arp, like the formalism that he mobilized against Grosz’s arguments, shows us the compensation he received in exchange for embracing photography. The medium held tremendous appeal as a new interface with advanced industrial processes, but in practice it could be approached like the craft of a small producer. In this latter respect, it also allowed for a certain continuity with the familiar comforts of painting, an art that Lissitzky had now left behind.

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4 Typographical Architecture Whatever misgivings Lissitzky might have had about his ventures in the field of photography, they were undoubtedly offset by the monumental architectural project he undertook during these same years. The horizontal skyscraper that he called der Wolkenbügel—­a nearly untranslatable neologism that plays on the German word for skyscraper, Wolkenkratzer (literally, “cloudscraper”)—­did not scrape the sky so much as press, frame, hook, hang, or bracket it—­all of which Bügel implies. Having developed the project during his Swiss convalescence, Lissitzky was elated to discover in summer 1925, when he returned to the USSR, that “my Wolkenbügel is the answer to a whole series of questions which are of current importance in Moscow.”1 In Soviet Russia, as in Europe, there was a great deal of interest in the design problems presented by the skyscraper, much of it stimulated by the international competition in 1922 for the headquarters of the Chicago Tribune. Le Corbusier’s 1925 book Urbanisme, which proposed that standardized tower blocks could alleviate problems of density and circulation in historic urban centers, was also gaining traction in Moscow when Lissitzky returned home. But, as its name suggests, the Wolkenbügel actively distanced itself from the existing typology of the skyscraper. In two Wolkenbügel designs, WB1 and WB2, Lissitzky proposed a new type of high-­rise building for a city chafing under the hybrid free-­market economy of NEP and still lacking a formal city plan. Before he left Switzerland, he described the project to J. J. P. Oud as “an office building that emerged from concerns of city-­planning, at which I strove to be the least ‘architect’ and artist.”2 This reduction, an artifact of the existential crisis of the arts ushered in by the constructivist polemics of 1921, defined Lissitzky’s position in a discourse that had developed only haltingly since his departure. Both of his Wolkenbügel designs take their impetus from the primal scene of constructivism, the 1920 unveiling of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. Like Tatlin’s Monument, Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel attempted to break out of a mindset that treats height as a pure function of market demand and engineering capabilities. Instead, T y p o g r a p h i c a l A r c h i t ec t u r e

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he interpreted the monument as a marker that orients us in space and in history. By focusing on this power of orientation, which unites built structures with signifying ones, he discovered an irreducible remnant of art in the problems of contemporary architecture. As Lissitzky’s contribution to a discourse of urban orientation, the Wolkenbügel is distinguished by its reliance on the architect’s typographical reserves. His efforts to justify the building’s strange form are made intelligible by their debt to theorists of the German Werkbund, who traced a number of new design problems to the disparity between the scale of existing urban spaces and the forms of perception privileged by modern rapid transit. Le Corbusier likewise based his proposal for central Paris on this framing, but he reduced the matter to a problem of pure geometry, which could be resolved by rebuilding the urban grid for a rational subject “who walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going.”3 By contrast, the elevated horizontal corpus of WB1, which doubles as a monumental semaphore, is addressed to a subject defined less by knowledge than a sensorium constrained and aided by technical means.

Playing against Type: The Wolkenbügel as Historical Monument

Upon returning to the USSR in summer 1925, Lissitzky was engaged to design and coedit the bulletin of a group of rationalist architects, the Association of New Architects, ASNOVA (Assotsiatsiia novykh arkhitektorov), which had asked him to serve as its foreign representative in 1923. The first and only issue of Izvestiia ASNOVA, which was dedicated to the problem of the skyscraper, became the vehicle for Lissitzky’s own design for an elevated horizontal office building (fig. 4.1).4 With only a passing reference to WB2, his essay “A Series of Skyscrapers for Moscow, WB1 (1923–­1925),” reported on a project he developed with the engineer Emil Roth in winter and spring 1924–­1925. It explained how a construction using standardized components of rust-­proof, high-­tensile Krupp steel would allow the building to be assembled without scaffolding at minimum inconvenience to daily street traffic, while preserving most adjacent structures from harm.5 First, three 50-­meter towers would be erected, their bases linked to bus and future underground rail lines; then, a two-­to-­three-­story horizontal office structure could be attached with brackets, “like a train car placed on a stand.”6 Beyond these questions of construction, Lissitzky’s essay betrays a concern for street life at the heart of the Wolkenbügel project. It addresses a perceived contradiction between radial cities with corridor streets and the American skyscraper, which transformed “the horizontal corridor into a vertical elevator shaft.”7 “The new type of building proposed here 104

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can be ascribed to the genus of skyscrapers,” Lissitzky assures his readers, with the notable caveat that “the system of the city determines the character of its structures.”8 Because the design of the Wolkenbügel owes at least some of its critical distance from the skyscraper to this principle, what is typical in it must first of all be understood as an expression of what is typical of Moscow. Lissitzky’s first Wolkenbügel design is his most visible and celebrated architectural work, yet its exact origins are still unclear. The main barrier to understanding the project’s genesis lies in the unusual circumstance of its first appearance—­in sketches and technical drawings executed by Roth between November 1924 and February 1925 (fig. 4.2). Careful readings by Peter Nisbet and J. Christoph Bürkle of Lissitzky’s correspondence with Roth have corrected the previous attribution of Roth’s drawings to Lissitzky and revealed that the building’s three-­legged structure, which ranks among its signature design decisions, was almost certainly Roth’s contribution.9 This reminds us once again of the collaborative nature of Lissitzky’s process, which is acknowledged in the architect’s stated desire to erase himself from the design. Just as significant, however, is the fact that the Wolkenbügel was elaborated at intervals from 1923 to 1926, as Lissitzky made his way across T y p o g r a p h i c a l A r c h i t ec t u r e

Figure 4.1 El Lissitzky, “A Series of Skyscrapers for Moscow, WB1 (1923–­25)” from Izvestiia ASNOVA, 1926. Letterpress, 14 × 21 in. (35.5 × 53.4 cm).

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Figure 4.2 Emil Roth, Wolkenbügel, plan and section, 1924. Graphite and colored pencil on paper, 19.9 × 27.1 in. (50.5 × 68.9 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Europe. Over and above Roth’s contributions, Lissitzky’s return to the USSR was decisively important for the project’s final, published form. There, he began his second Wolkenbügel design, WB2, and elaborated a scheme for an array of eight WB1-­t ype structures along Moscow’s boulevard ring. Each in its own way, these final developments illuminate the concerns that drove Lissitzky to seek out Roth’s collaboration in the first place. In the absence of an original sketch from Lissitzky, a dialogical reconstruction of the Wolkenbügel concept is made possible by several features it shares with works by contemporaries. In France the raised horizontal building appeared with Tony Garnier’s Cité Industrielle and in the Ville-­Pilotis that Le Corbusier envisioned while still in the offices of the Perret brothers, while in Russia the architectural fantasies of Velimir Khlebnikov gave currency to the idea of structures untethered from the earth among both Suprematist and constructivist factions.10 Thus, Kazimir Malevich’s Future Planits, Anton Lavinsky’s City on Springs, and Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel all emerged more or less contemporaneously. The slightly later drawings of Lazar Khidekel, a former Vitebsk student and UNOVIS member, bear the strongest family resemblance to the Wolken-

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Figure 4.3 Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the III International, 1920. From Nikolai Punin, Pamiatnik III Internatsionala. Proekt khud. V. E. Tatlina, 1920.

bügel, but where Khidekel imagines an entire city erected upon a grid of skyscrapers, Lissitzky limits his ambitions to the single structure. In this respect, the Wolkenbügel was, like the designs of Malevich and Lavinsky, as much a response to Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International as to the utopias of contemporary futurist literature or the architecture of Western Europe (fig. 4.3). The bond between Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel and Tatlin’s Monument is attested by Lissitzky’s attempt to narrate the development of Soviet architecture for an international audience. In spring 1924, after Lissitzky contacted Le Corbusier on behalf of ASNOVA, the Swiss architect commissioned an essay on Soviet architecture for L’Esprit nouveau “in the densest form, even in telegraphic style.”11 In response, Lissitzky distilled T y p o g r a p h i c a l A r c h i t ec t u r e

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Figure 4.4 El Lissitzky, Lenin Tribune, 1924. Gouache, India ink, and photomontage on cardboard, 25.1 × 18.9 in. (63.8 × 48 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

the debates of 1920, which he had experienced firsthand, and later developments, which he knew only indirectly, into a few key events and ideas. In early drafts he explains how, at the public meeting in Moscow where Tatlin unveiled his Monument, “I was the first to sharply criticize the design yet [also] to vote for it. Now . . . I vote still more decisively in favor. I judged this glorification of mechanical engineering . . . as more than just a powerful reaction against the old aesthetic.”12 In early layouts for the essay, Lissitzky juxtaposes an image of the Monument with a perspective drawing of Ilya Chashnik’s Speaker’s Rostrum, signed “UNOVIS 1920” (fig. 4.4). The formal affinities between Chashnik’s rostrum, which Lissitzky remade for the 1924 International Exhibition of New Theater Techniques in Vienna, and Tatlin’s Monument, whose diagonal spine, Lissitzky recognized, “can stand without the spiral,” apparently confirmed for him the dialectical necessity of the 108

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opposition.13 As his subsequent designs make clear, the Wolkenbügel was partly an attempt to draw this cycle to a close. Each of Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel designs can be connected to this dormant contest with Tatlin, but the relevance of the Monument to WB2 is perhaps more immediately intelligible. Taking the tripartite form of Lissitzky’s Proun 84 as its raw material (fig. 4.5), the second Wolkenbügel variant uses an enlarged version of the diagonal truss seen in the Speaker’s Rostrum as the model for its three towers. Lissitzky left us two incomplete elevation studies that show WB2 from opposed viewpoints and incorporate some modeling of light and shade to articulate the three towers’ intricate geometry. But these drawings remain unintelligible without Lissitzky’s parti, a diagram that he used to organize the elements of the building into a coherent system and to aid him in drawing the elevations (fig. 4.6).14 Taken together, the three extant drawings reveal a structure defined by strict rotational symmetry: three steeply inclined towers form a tripod, which supports a large multifloor structure—­Y-­shaped when viewed in plan—­crowned by a similar but shorter form turned clockwise about fifteen degrees. In one sense, the double Y is less ambitious than the Monument’s stack of three mechanically rotating volumes, but because it inverts the conical schema that stabilizes Tatlin’s design—­ expanding as it rises—­it is also more unnerving. Several other features of Tatlin’s Monument shaped WB2 more directly than WB1. The impact of the Monument can be felt in the massing of WB2, which is both larger and more compact than WB1. Lissitzky did not indicate the intended scale of his WB2 design, but if we assume core dimensions similar to those Roth specified for WB1, we find that WB2 would, at the same height as WB1, offer almost three times the interior area. This is due in part to the building’s lower clearance, a feature that rules out a site over a roadway (like that proposed for WB1) in favor of a larger, denser concentration of office space. Even more important is the intuitive analysis of Tatlin, the nonarchitect, which divided the Monument into pure mechanical structure and undifferentiated stereometric volume. In an analogous way, the enormous glazed Y topping WB2 appears less directly supported by the pinwheeling triad of oblique towers than suspended from its uppermost story by a façade system of Vierendeel trusses. In the Tretyakov Gallery’s elevation, Lissitzky’s gouache treatment suggests that these trusses span an empty area, open to the elements, between the building’s uppermost level and the gridded, panelized curtain wall enclosing its interior (fig. 4.7). They then extend beneath the floor slab of the lowest suspended story, as in WB1. But in contrast to WB1, where the curtain wall rests on the slab, stressing the horizontal run of each story, this emphasis on the building’s vertical rise treats the glass volume like a weightless shell cradled in a steel net. If WB2 takes its cues from the formal audacity of Tatlin’s Monument, T y p o g r a p h i c a l A r c h i t ec t u r e

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Figure 4.5 El Lissitzky, Proun 84, 1923. Ink and collage on precoated paper, 17.8 × 17.9 in. (45.3 × 45.5 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Figure 4.6 El Lissitzky, Untitled (Study), 1924–­1926. Graphite and colored pencil on paper, 19.7 × 15.8 in. (50 × 40.2 cm). Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

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WB1 reveals a formative investment in its symbolic dimension. Tatlin had, after all, proposed his design under Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda, a policy he helped implement while serving as head of IZO Narkompros in Petrograd.15 Lenin’s plan to cover Petrograd and Moscow with plaques and statuary commemorating revolutionary history produced just a handful of new monuments, but it succeeded in scrubbing the Russian capitals of their imperial symbols or, where this proved impossible, reinscribing them within a historical-­materialist chronology.16 The Wolkenbügel engages historical memory but not, like Tatlin’s Monument, through the auto-­monumentality of its great height (indeed, T y p o g r a p h i c a l A r c h i t ec t u r e

Figure 4.7 El Lissitzky, Project for a Building on Crossing Piers, 1925. Graphite and India ink on paper, 11.9 × 18.5 in. (30.1 × 47 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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compared to the four-­hundred-­meter Monument, the Wolkenbügel seems positively humble). As Bürkle points out, Lissitzky’s WB1 design alludes to the formal conventions of the city gate and triumphal arch.17 The resonance of the arch form is strengthened by the likelihood that Lissitzky initially conceived WB1 as a single building: a letter he sent to Oud just before his return to the USSR included a thumbnail sketch of Moscow marked with just one Wolkenbügel, emphatically labeled with the singular article, “der WB,” at the intersection of Bolshaia Nikitskaia and the boulevard ring, where it would loom over the Greater Church of the Ascension.18 As a unique structure, the Wolkenbügel would have joined the chorus of monuments legitimizing the appropriation of the old Russian capital as the base of Bolshevik power. By the time Lissitzky returned to the city, however, the power of monuments to mark a newly Soviet space was enveloped in broader questions about their significance in the urban fabric. The division between engineer and artist, which had generated so much polemic in 1920, still shaped the debate on these issues. One of the founders of ASNOVA, Nikolai Dokuchaev, argued in his 1926 essay “Architecture and the Planning of Cities” that “in the field of art,” contemporary architecture’s task is to focus on the “meaningful perception” that emerges from “the mutual relation and subordination of objects, structures, and so forth.” This, Dokuchaev asserts, is “exactly how the most modern architectural structures and historical ensembles of city squares and streets function.”19 In terms that recall Camillo Sitte’s seminal book City Planning According to Artistic Principles, Dokuchaev explains how demolition has destroyed the enclosure of Moscow’s urban squares. Red Square he finds formless when empty and massive only when filled with the masses. As a static substitute for such political mobilization, “monuments remarkable to no one”—­even those dedicated to Marx—­proliferate in ill-­defined urban spaces.20 In Izvestiia ASNOVA, such analyses lead to the unlikely justification of Vladimir Krinsky’s project for a skyscraper in Lubianskaia square as a solution to the site’s “currently characterless appearance,” which would “give tone to the remaining buildings and influence the form of the square” itself.21 The intersection of the two relatively young discourses of urban planning and urban preservation made unlikely allies of ASNOVA and the former academician Aleksei Shchusev. Since 1918, Shchusev had led a team of architects in creating a plan for greater Moscow under the authority of the city council, Mossovet. Proceeding from the principles of garden city planning, the massive and exhaustively researched New Moscow project, published in 1922–­1923, introduced more designated green spaces into the center of the city and reserved huge swaths of its perimeter for the ventilation of new industrial sectors. Like a related proposal by Sergei Shestakov, Shchusev’s plan would support an urban population of up to four million, with the majority of new growth projected outward.22 For 112

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Shchusev, this would make it possible to preserve the basis of the old city in any future development—­both its architectural landmarks and what he called “its naturally established, historically beautiful plan.”23 But as Dokuchaev lamented, even the conservative principles of the New Moscow plan could not be fully implemented because NEP continued to encourage the private development of public lands that Shchusev meant to exclude from building activity: open land “intended to be emergency reserves of clean air and places of leisure for residents” was instead being “leased for the little individual houses of ‘developers,’” he complained.24 For ASNOVA, it would be better to ratify even the most conservative plan than continue with no plan at all. Lissitzky’s decision to publish WB1 and not WB2 seems to have been motivated by a desire to engage the history of its intended site. If a single Wolkenbügel could stand as a triumphal arch, a series of eight buildings along the boulevard ring would more nearly recall the gates punctuating the walls of Moscow’s White City, which had survived until the 1780s. One of the first significant attempts to unify the various walled precincts of Moscow, the Project Plan of 1775, completed for Catherine II, had called for replacing the old fortifications with a tree-­lined boulevard that would link a new set of administrative squares at major thoroughfares (a vision that became possible with the destruction of Moscow by retreating Napoleonic armies in 1812).25 For a historically minded observer, the form and function of Lissitzky’s series of WB1-­t ype structures could therefore call to mind both the pierced enclosure of the medieval city and its modernization by a rational administrative state oriented toward trade. Moreover, when viewed in terms of the spatial categories advocated by Dokuchaev, the buildings appear tailor-­made for the boulevard ring. The fifty-­meter clearance beneath WB1 is well proportioned to the large parklike promenades below, which vary in breadth from fifty to eighty meters, while its horizontal offices stitch together the discrete phases of urban development on either side of the absent fortifications. Confined to the squares at major intersections, these structures would not interrupt the boulevards so much as rearticulate their relation to the city in spatial and historical terms. In a certain sense, then, WB1 could be said to preserve the boulevard ring it encloses, even as it seeks to reshape that space. Mossovet’s partial implementation of Shchusev’s recommendations in October 1925, in the form of new zoning guidelines, makes this aspect of Lissitzky’s WB1 proposal fully evident.26 The new law’s ban on skyscrapers in central Moscow had effectively halved the daily newspaper Izvestiia’s new twelve-­story office tower, designed by Grigory Barkhin and already under construction on Strastnaia square. Unsurprisingly, the newspaper also served as a platform for dissenting views: in its pages the head of the Moscow Real Estate Commission, MUNI (Moskovskoe T y p o g r a p h i c a l A r c h i t ec t u r e

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upravlenie nedvizhimymi imushchestvami) skewered Shchusev’s vision with a sharply worded editorial, “The New Moscow Is Not a Museum of Antiquities,” while supporters of high-­rise construction criticized Mossovet’s “middle position” on height restrictions as unsustainable in the long term.27 Under the new law, the Wolkenbügel straddled a zoning boundary, on either side of which its height would be more than double the permitted maximum. Yet WB1 manages to negate and preserve both sides of the debate over Moscow’s zoning. By raising the experience of perambulation to a higher plane, the Wolkenbügel places the city’s streets under glass, as if in a museum, without endorsing the emblem of capitalist architecture, the skyscraper.28 At the same time, the very zoning restrictions that the Wolkenbügel towers transgressed would preserve their exceptional perspective on the historic center of Moscow, a site of struggle finally subordinated in the name of the working class.

A Visiting Card for Moscow: Transit, Communication, and the Production of Space

However deep its engagement with the questions Tatlin’s Monument had renewed, the compass of WB1 was not limited to local circumstances. Indeed, the Wolkenbügel’s relation to its site was relevant insofar as Moscow’s historical experience had general significance. Testifying to this broader scope is the roster of “foreign representatives” on the masthead of Izvestiia ASNOVA, a publication Lissitzky referred to as his “visiting card for Moscow.”29 The names Adolf Behne, Le Corbusier, Mart Stam, Knud Lonberg-­Holm, Emil Roth, Karel Teige, Ljubomir Micić, and Murayama Tomoyoshi—­all figures with whom Lissitzky had cultivated relations while abroad—­show Izvestiia ASNOVA to be an attempt at a modernist quorum, like the one achieved at the end of the decade by the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM).30 The Wolkenbügel even anticipated the impact of standardization on the conception and construction of buildings and rationally organized urban traffic, as the CIAM program would advise in 1928.31 Lissitzky’s approach to these matters can be partly explained by his debt to the prewar German Werkbund, a formative influence he shared with the most successful popularizer of these views to reach the world stage, Le Corbusier. But his holistic attitude toward traffic led him to treat urban transit and everyday communications as two aspects of a single problem. Compared to the normative international modernism that emerged from Le Corbusier and CIAM, this position was eccentric: to the emerging consensus, Lissitzky offered an obliquely epistolary architecture with an object lesson encoded in its sender’s signature. Lissitzky’s decision to serialize the Wolkenbügel, perhaps its most 114

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significant transformation in the run-­up to publication, shifted his project from the orbit of the monument onto the trajectory of Le Corbusier’s plan for a contemporary city of three million inhabitants. After the design was published, at least one critic pointed out that its principles “recall the ideas of Le Corbusier.”32 Of course, many positions on the planning of Moscow were inflected by the model city Le Corbusier had exhibited at the 1922 Salon d’Automne, reworked for the 1925 Exposition of Decorative Arts in Paris, and published that same year as a book, Urbanisme. Le Corbusier’s contention that a network of uniform skyscrapers in parklike settings would reduce congestion while increasing density, circulation, and green space fueled years of debate in the Soviet press, in part because the 1925 plan, financed by the automaker Voisin, proposed razing a large area of central Paris (fig. 4.8).33 Evidence of the Wolkenbügel’s transformation from a single building into a series is scant, but we know that Lissitzky obtained a copy of Le Corbusier’s book a few weeks after his return to Moscow, around the time it was decided that Izvestiia ASNOVA would be “devoted to the problem of the skyscraper.”34 The article about the Wolkenbügel therefore provided Lissitzky with an opportunity to differentiate his position from an architect toward whom he was already sympathetic. While Le Corbusier’s plan for the wholesale demolition and reconstruction of central Paris proceeded from the apparently objective criteria of engineering and statistics, his proposed rectilinear street grid betrayed his aesthetic principles. Le Corbusier justified his preferences by arguing that the grid transforms the city into a machine: “the consequence of geometrical plans is Repetition and Mass-­production,” he stressed, “and as a consequence of repetition, the standard is created and so perfection (the creation of types).”35 In his essay on the Wolkenbügel, Lissitzky directly rebuts these conclusions. He agrees with Le Corbusier that “we live in cities that . . . do not satisfy the needs and pace of our day,” but points out rather sensibly that “we cannot clear them overnight and build T y p o g r a p h i c a l A r c h i t ec t u r e

Figure 4.8 Le Corbusier, Plan Voisin, districts proposed for demolition (to scale), from Urbanisme, 1925.

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them again ‘correctly.’ It is impossible to change their structure or type immediately.”36 If Lissitzky shared Le Corbusier’s desire to modernize design and construction through standardization, he objected to the false syllogism that would make this process a consequence of urban morphology. This argument, he saw, threatened to undercut the architect’s stated goal of establishing new types. Lissitzky’s opposition to Le Corbusier’s way of thinking is rooted not only in the Wolkenbügel’s implicit acceptance of the New Moscow plan but in a different reading of the Swiss architect’s sources. The provocative treatment of central Paris in Urbanisme belongs to Le Corbusier alone, but the rudiments of his argument were borrowed from Peter Behrens, who in 1914 advocated that “in contrast to the medieval principle of irregular, winding streets and idyllic squares, new construction of a city or district has to be done according to well-­defined, generous plans with wide, straight thoroughfares.”37 Although Behrens recognized the Baroque precedent for this vision, he found the meaning of the straight line and regular plan in the rhythms of modern life. These he saw expressed most clearly in urban rapid transit, which precluded the leisurely contemplation of detailed ornament but amplified the effects of simplification and repetition. If architects embrace these rhythms, Behrens maintained, “not only the individual house will take on a typical gestalt, but the districts and cities themselves.”38 Behrens’s views were probably inspired by those of Dutch architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage, but they became ubiquitous thanks to his prominence in the German Werkbund.39 The Werkbund Jahrbuch of 1914 was devoted to the problem of transit and included essays by Behrens, Walter Gropius, Fritz Hoeber, and others elaborating the basic tenets of this position. Lissitzky’s own reliance on these arguments is first suggested by an unpublished booklet of 1921, The Overthrow of Art, which he wrote before returning to Germany. The text includes a schematic historical sketch of urban typologies based on the relationship of infrastructures to modes of transit. The first natural settlements, Lissitzky proposes, were shaped by the course of rivers and the motility of the human body. There followed the invention of the wheel and artificial road, which he links to the power of domesticated animals; the railroad, to steam; and a new era of flight dominated by the propeller and “the screw,” to electricity and gasoline.40 In 1923 a simplified version of this historical schema appeared in Lissitzky’s article “Wheel–­Propeller and What Follows,” in the second issue of G, prefaced by the explicit claim that “our formation [gestaltung] is a function of our system of movement.”41 Here, three systems taken from the earlier text—­the discontinuous stride, rolling wheel, and turning screw—­are linked to a history of built form spanning the pyramids at Giza, the Roman aqueducts, the Pullman railcar, and the Nauen transmitter station. In each case, Lissitzky’s history follows Fritz Hoeber—­a close associate and biographer of Behrens—­in contrasting different ve116

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hicular technologies with “the architectural image of the past, whose real substrate is pedestrian traffic.”42 Lissitzky’s telling of this history contains several distinctive features. Behrens had identified the rhythmic basis of urban form as an expression of the Kunstwollen and, following Aloïs Riegl, attributed it to a purely psychological cause.43 Le Corbusier, meanwhile, presented the grid as a rational, transhistorical norm evident in Khorsabad, Beijing, and countless Roman colonies. In Lissitzky’s view, the rational urban products of Le Corbusier and the psychological core of Behrens have a historical foundation. In The Overthrow of Art, Lissitzky took pains to distinguish the various grid plans that Le Corbusier equates; for him, there was no possible link between the Roman camp and “the checkerboard [plans] of the new era of book-­keeping,” beyond the fact that “in each of them, the ruling class expressed itself.”44 In addition to affirming the socioeconomic basis of urban morphology, Lissitzky insisted on a much more concrete, material relation between pattern of movement and resulting form than did either Behrens or Le Corbusier. Lissitzky found support for his concern with the specificities of movement in studies of machine technology. Two differences between The Overthrow of Art and “Wheel–­Propeller and What Follows” are relevant here: where the earlier manuscript treats the city as an organism, the short essay of 1923 introduces a distinction between “moving force” and “moving apparatus”; also, the four-­stage schema of the earlier presentation is reduced to three stages in the later presentation, with the “continuous rolling” of the wheel encompassing a greater range the historical examples.45 Both of these changes point to the theory of kinematics, a systematic account of machine transmissions formalized by Franz Reuleaux in the 1870s. Lissitzky’s 1923 article echoes Reuleaux’s lapidary motto, “Everything rolls,” and his fundamental claim that machine linkages, or what he calls kinematic chains, are always composed of paired elements: one fixed and one mobile. Although it is difficult to say for certain when Lissitzky encountered Reuleaux, we can locate his sources. Ernst Kapp, an author Lissitzky made a point of reading, had devoted an entire chapter of his Elements of a Philosophy of Technology to Reuleaux, laying particular stress on the way he analyzed the “causes . . . [and] fixtures that determine the reciprocal movements in the machine, insofar as these movements are changes of place.”46 For Lissitzky, as for others of his generation, architecture was experienced as both the stable background to the endless waves of traffic in the modern city and, increasingly, as the habitable spaces of vehicles themselves. In his 1923 article, he envisions an epochal shift from an era of “moveable architecture” governed by the “system of connecting-­ rod, cylinder, etc. of the machine” to “a new system of movement . . . not based on friction, which offers the possibility of floating in space and remaining at rest.”47 This transition is perhaps best understood as an T y p o g r a p h i c a l A r c h i t ec t u r e

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end to the epoch of “plane kinematics,” such as Helmut Müller-­Sievers has analyzed. According to Müller-­Sievers, an era of machines ruled by the cylinder, which distinguishes motion along and about its axis and thus accounts for all mechanical movements on the basis of a Cartesian grid, was effectively brought to an end when the theory of screw dynamics resolved these two kinds of motion into a single force, the “wrench.”48 Without wishing to overdetermine Lissitzky’s appeal to the newfound importance of the screw in the era of flight, we might take his cryptic claim that “the flying human being is at the limit” to express a disjunction between the curves that the airplane carves through space and the Cartesian coordinates of its machine engine. However utopian Lissitzky’s schema might seem today, his conviction that flight would change the basis of architecture was far from unusual. The mythology of high-­speed air travel later criticized by Roland Barthes, in which an “excess of speed turns into repose,” affected architectural thought long before it became a reality.49 Already in 1909, Behrens’s AEG factories prompted Fritz Wichert, a student of Heinrich Wöllflin who later coedited Das neue Frankfurt, to conclude that “when we move our imaginary streets from the earth into the sky . . . the concepts of top and bottom are of little consequence. The roofs and horizontal planes in general have the status of façades.”50 A decade and a half later, the view from above that air travel disclosed—­the so-­called fifth façade—­could be counted among the criteria by which Lissitzky judged the efforts of recent Soviet architecture: “The open, bodies which arise from movement, from traffic and in traffic. New constructions. Consideration of the fifth view (from above).”51 Le Corbusier’s aestheticization of the grid owed something to this realization as well; he readily pictured air-­taxis navigating among his cruciform towers.52 Lissitzky’s approach to the novel design problems of the fifth façade can be discerned in a rebuslike montage that conjugates WB1 with his typographical symbol (fig. 4.9, plate 1). From one perspective, the segmented linear massing of WB1 adapts a traditional courtyard structure used to maximize the penetration of natural light into a building’s interior. But the contiguity of WB1 and Lissitzky’s letterhead also reveals the architect’s reflection on the relative recognizability of his design, considered as a sort of logotype. The uncanny resemblance of these two forms, which lie together on the plane like two characters of an unknown protolanguage, reminds us again that there is no single documented origin of WB1. The form of the building’s fifth façade is conventionally traced to a Proun, as if to confirm Lissitzky’s pronouncements that the Proun is a “changing station between painting and architecture.”53 But the relation is far from direct. The picture most often cited as a source for WB1 is Proun 88, a collage in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, Halle, which poses various flat, dark rectangular forms against recessed axonometric planes 118

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Figure 4.9 El Lissitzky, Wolkenbügel, 1925. Collage and ink on paper, 9 × 6.1 in. (22.8 × 15.5 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

in middle tones (fig. 4.10).54 But the reversed axonometric “L” of Proun 88 became, not the Wolkenbügel but Lissitzky’s typographical symbol, a near-­monogram he began sketching on the header of his correspondence in May 1924 and had professionally printed by the year’s end. In Lissitzky’s montage, the differences between the juxtaposed forms only bind them together more securely. The typed inscription, “The Wolkenbügel, for Moscow,” transfers the name and address of the building onto his letterhead, while the Wolkenbügel itself floats free of urban context, like a character on a blank sheet of paper. Even if we consider the relation between these two forms merely sugT y p o g r a p h i c a l A r c h i t ec t u r e

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Figure 4.10 El Lissitzky, Proun 88, ca. 1923. Collage on paper, 16.6 × 25.5 in. (49.9 × 64.7 cm). Galerie Moritzburg, Halle.

gestive, we must admit that Lissitzky repeatedly suggests it. In his essay for Izvestiia ASNOVA, he printed six sets of black bars in different configurations alongside the perspective and axonometric projections of WB1 (fig. 4.1). These simple typographical marks, he claimed, demonstrate that the building is “characterized unambiguously” from six distinct views, including those from above and below; in much the same way, he had isolated the constituents of typographical marks in his 1924 essay “Typographical Facts” as evidence that “clear shapes . . . can only be assembled from unambiguous elements.”55 As in the montage, our best evidence suggests that Lissitzky was adapting a principle previously worked out in his typography to new architectural ends. Turning back to his writings, we find a number of passages that attempt to formulate the relation between transit and media as a clear problematic. Whereas “Wheel–­Propeller and What Follows” had posited a narrow kinematic link between transit and architecture, Toward the Overthrow of Art related contemporary urban developments to new communications media. In an age of steamships and zeppelins, Lissitzky notes, “the city (in the sense of its content) is increasingly untethered from its place and set in motion”; at the same time, “while in motion [it stays] connected via radio to the whole world.”56 In the 1920 text “Su-

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prematism of World-­Building,” he similarly framed “the task of the city” in relation to the radio tower, which showed him not only that mankind has “overcome the fettered foundation of the earth” but also that “we are capable at each moment of embedding the whole city into each plan.”57 In his view, the novelty of this free, informal technical linkage made the morphology of urban form a matter a secondary importance, and even put into question the traditional notion of the city as a discrete entity. Toward the Overthrow of Art concludes, then, by presenting the Soviet artist with a world historical choice: either work “to transform the whole earthly globe into a city-­ensemble [edinogorod]” or “disintegrate” the city once and for all.58 Although these more expansive questions disappeared from “Wheel–­ Propeller and What Follows,” they reemerged in Lissitzky’s major statement on typography in the mid-­1920s, “Our Book.” Here, alongside the systems of movement from “Wheel–­Propeller,” Lissitzky proposes an analogous kinematics of “thought traffic.” inventions in the field of thought-­t raffic

inventions in the field of traffic in general

Articulated speech

Upright walk

Writing

Wheel

Gutenberg’s letterpress

Carriage drawn by animal force

?

Automobile

?

Airplane59

Along with Reuleaux, this treatment of historical communications media relies on Joseph Lux, a former Werkbund member who in 1910 published the most complete analysis to date of the emerging “engineer aesthetic.” In the new iron constructions that replaced cut-­and-­dressed stone, Lux discerned “the principle of dematerialization, the highest law of which is to span the greatest space with the slightest means.”60 In “Our Book,” Lissitzky adapts Lux’s account of dematerialization to contrast the book’s continuing existence as a “hand-­held object” with the new technologies that give day-­to-­day communications an ever-­greater scope. This trend appeared to him as a series of contractions: “The amount of paper consumed in writing swells, then the telephone relieves the strain. Then the wiring system grows, and the radio relieves the strain.”61 At the limit, this system would reach the same inflection point in the dialectic of integration and disintegration that Lissitzky had seen in the city itself. From the perspective of a radically dematerialized radio-­architecture, Lissitzky’s recourse to typography is surprisingly concrete. Indeed, for an essay treating the impact of telephone, radio, and film on the dematerialization of print, his hesitancy to assign any of these devices to the blank spaces in his schema might alert us that equally significant devices have been omitted. The rotary press is surely an obvious counterpart to T y p o g r a p h i c a l A r c h i t ec t u r e

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the train, an absence in “Our Book” made more conspicuous by its inclusion in the 1921 pamphlet The Overthrow of Art.62 Moreover, Lissitzky’s montage would suggest that the form of writing most closely correlated to air travel was the business letter composed on a typewriter, as all of his correspondence had been since he purchased one to match his new stationery. Not radio, in other words, but airmail. This retreat from speculative antinomies into the concreteness of existing mechanical systems is likely attributable to Reuleaux’s impact on Lissitzky’s thought. In the table in “Our Book,” after all, the “thought traffic” column is dominated by questions, while the parallel advances of “traffic in general” are unproblematic. In WB1, we can likewise read the elevated horizontal corpus as a practical concession to the insuperably earth-­bound conditions of movement in general. As Christoph Asendorf has pointed out, one particularly notable aspect of the Wolkenbügel is the way the dream of the fifth façade is brought back to earth by the sixth—­the view from below.63 In a historical perspective, the urbanism that WB1 proposes is also forthright in its lateness, arising as it does from Lissitzky’s acknowledgement that “until the possibility of a perfectly free hovering has been invented, it is most appropriate for us to move horizontally.”64 In the end, his curious description of the Wolkenbügel’s elevated corpus as “a train car placed on a stand” makes it a monument to the circulatory system of underground rail lines and vertical lifts that animates the structure from within. This system would incorporate the building into the city through a “continuous rolling” that is at once modern and strangely archaic. From a future in the air, the planned series of Wolkenbügels might therefore be seen as boundary markers of an indefinitely delayed historical transition: the signature of an era impatient to consolidate its urban form—­or perhaps shed it at last. This image of the city in transition also condenses Lissitzky’s major differences with Le Corbusier. If the Swiss architect’s vision of the contemporary city was premised upon the enjoyment of complete contemporaneity, then Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel recognizes the nonsynchronicity of past and future as a permanent binding constraint.

Orientation and the Mobile Viewer

To insert a building into an aerial network represented an unusual challenge for Lissitzky. The fixed axes on which the Wolkenbügel could be reached by bus or rail relied on a relationship of kinematic “closure” between vehicle and track (or street) that flight would uncouple. Then again, from the perspective of mechanics, the human element is always imperfectly paired with its housing, insofar as the built environment relies on its users’ conscious efforts to keep traffic on designated routes. Constructivist architects, led by Moisei Ginzburg, tried to optimize goal-­ 122

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oriented activity within their buildings using the diagrams perfected by Gastev’s scientific organization of labor.65 Within the broader framework of the city, the same problem occupied the architects of ASNOVA, who regarded the building envelope as a matter of organized perception. Once Lissitzky returned to the USSR, his approach to this question bolstered ASNOVA’s position, but he had arrived at his solution independently while in Europe. Among Lissitzky’s notes from the mid-­1920s, we find a short, sloganlike phrase, “not world-­knowledge, but orientation in the world,” which appears to revise the title of his 1920 Proun essay, “Not Worldvision—­but Worldreality.”66 As Peter Nisbet has pointed out, Lissitzky jotted down this fragment alongside several passages from Raoul Francé, an author he read with renewed attention while in Switzerland.67 Lissitzky was clearly compelled by Francé’s claim that the intellect “is not used for knowledge of the world, but only for orientation in the world.”68 Adapting the critical empiricism of Ernst Mach, the biologist criticized the notion that thought is a power to dominate things by penetrating into their depths. Instead, he adopted an approach that flattened the hierarchy between human and animal cognition to argue that all organisms, or “machines with autonomous teleology,” are animated by “signal combinations for the sole purpose of fostering life.” Francé highlighted the isomorphism of an incredible variety of natural and artificial mechanisms, but he admitted that the function of vital signals “currently cannot be imitated other than to bring this teleology from outside, e.g. to the locomotive, which has no orientation” without a conductor.69 (The combination of conductor and locomotive—­a teleological machine with a supplementary body—­he simply saw as “a new type of organism.”) Before Lissitzky embraced Francé’s views on signal processing and spatial orientation, he would have encountered the same problematic in Raoul Hausmann’s essay “Optophonetics.” In keeping with his interest in the translatability of optical and acoustic signals, Hausmann claimed that the structure of a bee’s eye allows it to orient itself in space with something closer to sonar than sight. According to Hausmann, an equivalent production of spatial consciousness in humans is shown by the fact that blindfolded persons instructed to cross Venice’s Piazza San Marco by walking in a straight line can do so only with the aid of an audible signal.70 In this example, not only the urban setting but the sensory prosthetic had practical significance. As Hausmann probably knew, a British inventor had patented an optophone as a mobility aid for the blind before World War I.71 For Lissitzky, Behrens and other Werkbund theorists revealed how rapid urban transit had created a conditional blindness to traditional architectural features like ornament, which once mediated between the human body and the built environment. “Highly intricate compositional patterns are fairly common” in the façades of modern buildings, T y p o g r a p h i c a l A r c h i t ec t u r e

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Lissitzky noted in 1925, “but modern man, travelling by tram, road, or railway, goes past without even noticing them. Large masses, clear and unequivocal, serve as key-­points for finding one’s bearings inside a city.”72 As a response to these new conditions, the marked asymmetry of WB1’s horizontal corpus could function as a “schema of form” that “makes orientation in the city by this structure perfectly clear.”73 Here again, Lissitzky’s treatment of WB1 relates to typographical practice. As Megan Luke has shown, Kurt Schwitters developed a distinction between “orienting” and “promotional” forms of typography from the “basic directions of the surface” that Lissitzky included in his 1924 “axioms of typography.”74 Advertisements benefit from the dynamism of oblique layouts, Schwitters averred, while formats that facilitate organization, like letterhead and receipts, demand stable, easily recognized forms. As Jan Tschichold pointed out, orienting devices are a necessity for any printed matter at risk of disappearing in a vertical file.75 Among the accumulated bric-­a-­brac of the old city center, the heightened recognizability of the Wolkenbügel’s monogram-­like form more than remediates the diminished vision of the transit user. With two arms extending out toward the city’s periphery and one in toward its center, WB1 sets pedestrians, passengers, and pilots in relation to the symbolic center of the city, the Kremlin. As Lissitzky knew from his many encounters with foreign visitors to Moscow in 1921, the task of orientation was increasingly important for a city that functioned as the capital of the communist world. Perhaps more than Muscovites, WB1 is meant for travelers who are unable to read the city, whether arriving from the countryside or from abroad. To understand how it might have fulfilled this brief, consider the testimony of Walter Benjamin, the literary critic and occasional translator for G, who visited Moscow in 1926. Utterly disoriented and without access to the language, Benjamin realized that “you have to have approached a place from all four cardinal points if you want to take it in, and what’s more, you also have to have left it from all these points. Otherwise it will quite unexpectedly cross your path three or four times before you are prepared to discover it. One stage further, and you seek it out, you orient yourself by it.”76 Endlessly circling the environs of Red Square, the disoriented Benjamin seized upon the picture language of urban signage as his only navigational aid. But on foot, he could only see the random sequence of these signs—­an arrow, the image of boots or laundry—­as a sort of mute combat among purveyors of services. After boarding a tram, he understood “how this running battle continues up along the various stories and finally reaches its decisive pitch on the roofs. Only the strongest, most venerable slogans or commercial signboards manage to survive at this height and it is only from the air that one can survey the industrial elite of the town.”77 These are not only the perspectives that the Wolkenbügel courts but its very reasons for doing so. 124

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To supplement a massing conceived with the traveler in mind, Lissitzky had also begun to consider color as a navigational aid. “In the modern city,” he wrote in ABC, “color can fulfill the function of a direction-­ indicator; all streets running the same direction are given the same color (on the upper stories, for example).”78 A series of sketches in colored pencil and gouache show that he saw a potential application of this idea to WB1 (plate 8). Here, the red and blue stripes that punctuate the building’s uniform horizontal glazing represent the exposed concrete slabs of each floor, which could be painted or clad in colored material. In his essay on WB1, Lissitzky entertains the idea that this application of color could be further varied for each of the eight proposed towers since, “with the installation of the whole series, the introduction of color for marking each skyscraper individually will serve to strengthen their orientating qualities.”79 In this way, the towers could visually code eight separate districts of the urban core—­a number that doubles when we include the distinction between center and periphery encoded in WB1’s asymmetrical form. Lissitzky’s statements on this matter are best understood as a contribution to the problem of nonpictorial color design that we first encountered in chapter 2. His position implicitly responds to Theo van Doesburg’s 1923 essay on “The Significance of Color for Interior and Exterior Architecture,” which distinguishes between decorative, constructive-­ functional, and monumental architectures by their use of color. Here, van Doesburg dismisses decorative color for its antagonism to structure and criticizes constructive-­functional architecture for its “completely neutral paint.” At the highest level, in monumental architecture, he finds that “color serves not only to orientate . . . but even more to satisfy a need for the visualization of mutual relationships in proportion, scale and direction.”80 A slight but significant qualification in van Doesburg’s definition, which supplements orientation with “direction,” corresponds to a “constructive-­functional” use of color that remains latent in his definition of monumental architecture. This purely functional orientation “in reference to space and the objects it contains” describes the level at which Lissitzky situated the color of the Wolkenbügel.81 For van Doesburg, however, this approach could never lead to monumental art, because it orients without consciously restating pure plastic relationships. The tension between orientation and direction in van Doesburg’s definition of monumental architecture also appears in the counterconstructions of the maison particulière he designed with Cornelis van Eesteren during these years (fig. 4.11). In a series of axonometric projections drawn by van Eesteren, the structure of the house is progressively abstracted into a set of infinitely thin screens. These reveal purely architectonic factors like the relationship “between wall and space,” which are void of any reference to the outside world.82 Together with their lack of a determined viewpoint, the diagrammatic clarity of these axonometries T y p o g r a p h i c a l A r c h i t ec t u r e

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Figure 4.11 Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren, Hôtel particulier (contre-­ construction), from L’Architecture vivante, 1925.

allows the counterconstructions to visualize a “more or less hovering aspect” of the design that, in van Doesburg’s view, gives “a completely new plastic expression in open space to the dimensions of width, height, depth, and time.”83 Over the course of the series, the entire structure is turned over and the viewer implicitly reoriented again and again, so that the concepts of top and bottom entirely lose their significance. Printed as lithographs, some of which were hand-­colored by van Doesburg, the counterconstructions freed the architectural subject from functional orientation in space in order to achieve a pure, disembodied reflection on its formal architectonics.

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Lissitzky’s second Wolkenbügel variant explores a monumental form that transcends the functional approach to orientation. As we saw earlier in this chapter, WB2 retains a formal trace of the debates begun by Tatlin’s Monument by preserving the emphatic diagonal of Chashnik’s and Tatlin’s designs. But its exoskeletal structure relies even more explicitly on the torqued triangular prism of Karl Ioganson’s Spatial Construction (fig. 4.12). This design, the most original of the “cold structures” Ioganson exhibited at the second spring exhibition of the Society of Young Artists (OBMOKhU) in 1921, had proved the constructivist’s abilities as a sui generis engineer.84 By translating this relatively modest structure into a monumental form, Lissitzky’s WB2 suggests that the originality of Ioganson’s invention still needed an architect to put its latent artistry to use. Here, the geometry borrowed from Ioganson’s Spatial Construction turns the supported corpus of WB2 into an enormous screw and, by the same measure, converts the mechanistic rotation of Tatlin’s Monument into pure tectonics, obliquely marking the end of an era defined by plane kinematics. What was the purpose of a such a belated comment on the earliest developments of constructivism? ASNOVA had initially taken shape in opposition to an idea explored by many constructivists in the early 1920s, which held that engineering could serve as an adequate replacement for the visual arts. Even after signing the joint declaration to enter production in November 1921, ASNOVA’s leading theorist, Nikolai Ladovsky, criticized the shortcomings of this productivist program. During the INKhUK debates of 1921–­1922, Ladovsky openly derided the notion that an “artist aspires to engineering” without a compelling answer to the question, “what does he bring there? . . . don’t answer that I bring engineering to engineering.”85 Partly by insisting on the specificity of disciplinary knowledge, ASNOVA won control of the basic course in “Space” at VKhUTEMAS while Lissitzky was still abroad. But the immediate result of their institutional power, Ladovsky reported, was that “Brik, Rodchenko, Lavinsky, Vesnin and Popova . . . are leading an attack on the second division of the architectural department of VKhUTEMAS, the basic course and the managing body, where ASNOVA has strengthened its position.”86 With the support of the constructivist faculty, student advocates of utilitarian production architecture accused ASNOVA of teaching only the “pictorial-­aesthetic savoring of angles, volumes, and space.”87 Lissitzky’s return to Ioganson in WB2, it would seem, neutralized this charge by recalling that the most promising early experiments of the constructivists had never found a use of their own. If WB2 testifies to Lissitzky’s renewed partisanship in the debates between constructivist and rationalist architects, WB1 shows us where his affinity for ASNOVA lay. In an essay that shares the page with the Wolkenbügel, Ladovsky clarified that what the architect can bring to engineering is the knowledge of motifs that “serve man’s sovereign techniT y p o g r a p h i c a l A r c h i t ec t u r e

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Figure 4.12 Karl Ioganson, Spatial Construction, 1921 (lost); reconstruction by Viacheslav Koleichuk, 1991. Tubular steel and wire, dimensions unknown.

cal demand to orient himself in space.”88 According to Ladovsky, architecture has two ways of providing these orienting motifs to the viewer. In most cases, with site conditions and budgetary constraints limiting the application of the theory, “the architectural construction (element-­ signals) is created through relief articulation of the form’s surface, as the most technically simple and economical medium of execution.”89 128

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Its regulative ideal, however, inscribes the higher technicity of the sign into the building’s structure. One reason WB1 accomplished this task with such apparent ease is that it relied on a model of the architectural subject that ASNOVA had also embraced. Ladovsky held that a design could best fulfill its orienting function if the project incorporated the real conditions of viewing, which increasingly demanded a mobile perspective. As an example of the conditions to be observed in such an exercise, he stipulated a viewpoint 1.6 meters off the ground at a distance of 30 meters, moving at a speed no faster than 15 meters per second (about 33 miles per hour). A viewer, in other words, who is the driver or passenger of a bus or tram. The demands that this model of the architectural subject placed on designers motivated Ladovsky to propose a “Psychotechnical Laboratory of Architecture” within VKhUTEMAS. This initiative sought to place at the service of architecture the new science of psychotechnics, which, as Ladovsky explained, was already being exploited by “representatives of the mass industrial and commercial enterprises of America for the selection of office employees, merchants in the field of advertising, and pedagogues in the registration and determination of their students’ abilities.”90 Later in the decade, this proposal would be realized in a series of optical instruments that Ladovsky himself devised to measure architectural perception empirically. These instruments framed the object of architecture by screening for disciplinary aptitudes defined in advance as subjective. But the project’s initial appeal lay in its promise of a rigorous scientific approach to fields that were already being explored by the avant-­garde in a haphazard way—­advertising and film, most of all. Before Ladovsky’s custom instruments were designed, the potential of a psychotechnical laboratory at VKhUTEMAS could be demonstrated by film. The promise of this new medium was apparently suggested by the work of the recently deceased filmmaker Viking Eggeling, a eulogy to whom Lissitzky printed in the margins of Ladovsky’s proposal for a psychotechnical laboratory. This short, unsigned notice states that “the late Eggeling’s work . . . opened the way to a whole series of new possibilities, even in the field of architectural education.”91 His animated abstract films are described as investigations of movement and spatial articulation with a general tectonic significance. In the eyes of an architect, their sequences of rhythmically pulsating forms suggest how a mobile viewer might encounter the onrushing city from a position stabilized by a photogenic façade. This reasoning probably lay behind Lissitzky’s desire “to buy a small movie camera and crank some architecture” during his travels that summer.92 Unlike the static representations produced by drawing and photography, the motion picture camera could effortlessly demonstrate the flickering life of the architectural image on the city streets. Lissitzky’s interest in the tectonic analogy between the perception of T y p o g r a p h i c a l A r c h i t ec t u r e

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Figure 4.13 El Lissitzky, Raum für konstruktive Kunst, Dresden, 1926. Gelatin silver print. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (950076).

the moving image and the mobile subject of architecture outlasted his work on the Wolkenbügel projects. In spring 1926, he designed a temporary exhibition hall for the Dresden International Exhibition that has been aptly characterized as “para-­cinematic” by Maria Gough.93 Regularly spaced vertical slats clad the wall, generating, unexpectedly, the optical flicker of a slow cinematic tracking shot powered by the viewer’s stride (fig. 4.13). Black on one side, white on the other, these vertical bands dissolve the abstract unity of the wall-­plane into concrete, phenomenologically differentiated gradients extending outward from the viewer’s body. Reviewing a second, permanent installation of Lissitzky’s design several years later, Sigfried Giedion pointed out that these vertical slats “dematerialize the wall to the point where it seems to dissolve completely,” leaving the spectator face to face with an “irrational surface.”94 In this sense, Lissitzky’s experiments with photography and film had finally replaced the typographical devices he employed in his 1923 room of typo-­lithography and raised to monumental proportions in WB1.

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Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel designs sum up a great deal of what he tried to accomplish between 1920 and 1926. While WB2 replayed the earliest salvos of the constructivist debates, WB1 neatly diagrammed the interdependence of building and city that Lissitzky sketched in his first writings about the Prouns. His work on the Wolkenbügel projects is linked to investigations as distinct as those of Ladovsky and Le Corbusier by concerns about the suitability of the quintessentially American type of tall building for European cities. In place of the spectacular concentration of capital in skyscraper form, WB1 proposed a new sign system for Moscow, treating the city’s historic center as a palimpsest to be rewritten by working class. The frankly discursive character of this untimely gesture, which abandoned the airborne poetry of the fifth façade for the earthbound prose of the sixth, also gave the Wolkenbügel its critical valence. The building affirmed the last residue of aesthetic perception as sheer recognizability, a quality that was not to be admired by a contemplative subject but made functional for a disoriented one. The use value of attraction, which could have no economic justification at the monumental scale of the Wolkenbügel, instead found its outlet in the temporary exhibition space.

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5 Toward an Agitation-­ Environment As the hybrid free-­market experiment of the New Economic Policy drew to a close, Lissitzky designed two major trade fairs devoted to print media: the All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition, in Moscow (1927), and the Soviet pavilion for the International Press Exhibition, known as Pressa, in Cologne (1928).1 Each allowed Lissitzky to pursue an uncommon range of activities: in addition to serving on the organizing committees, he designed floor plans, exhibition stands, catalogues, and signage. He also exhibited his own work and wrote an essay for the catalogue of the All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition. In many respects, these shows are mirror images of one another; Pressa demonstrated the function of the Soviet press to a foreign audience, and the All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition offered the Soviet public a showcase for the latest printing equipment from abroad. Of the two exhibitions, Pressa has received the lion’s share of attention. Long considered a turning point in the field of exhibition design, Lissitzky’s Soviet pavilion marked a shift in the techniques and tenor of trade shows, propaganda displays, and, ultimately, exhibitions of fine art.2 Pressa attracted a large audience, to be sure—­upward of five million visitors—­but the buzz surrounding the show was (and is) partly due to its status as pure media spectacle.3 The All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition drew a far smaller audience—­t wo months after it opened, Pravda estimated its attendance at just over eighteen thousand—­and garnered little attention in the press.4 This disparity in visibility owes partly to the publics the two exhibitions addressed. Pressa attracted the professional class empowered to publish its views in Europe, while the Moscow show primarily drew members of printers’ unions from throughout the Soviet Union.5 Pressa sustained a high level of excitement by presenting a relentlessly ideological portrait of press activity, while the Polygraphics Exhibition soberly acknowledged the shortcomings of the Soviet industry in hopes of raising the general quality of its products to the international level. Examining the two shows together therefore grants us an ideal opportunity to isolate changes in Lissitzky’s work in multiple fields amid the large-­scale T o w a r d a n A g i t a t i o n - ­E n v i r o n me n t

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transformations of the press that took place as Stalin consolidated his political power.

Compromise Formations: The All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition

Even after he returned to the USSR in 1925, Lissitzky’s work maintained its international orientation. His exhibition design in Dresden in 1926 showed his continuing desire to reach German audiences, and the corresponding feeling of constraint he experienced in the USSR. After a poor showing in a string of architectural competitions squelched the idea of working as an architect, he wrote to Sophie Küppers, “This is not free art, my dear,” and took a job on the woodworking faculty at VKhUTEMAS to make ends meet.6 In November 1926, he showed a combination of photographs and Wolkenbügel studies at an exhibition of the Four Arts Society, an inclusive but eclectic group founded the previous year by Vladimir Favorsky, Petr Miturich, and Vladimir Lebedev, among others. This selection of his works made him look “like a Martian amongst all the setting and rising suns,” he told Ilya Chashnik at the time.7 Even if he was an odd fit, the Four Arts Society allowed Lissitzky to integrate his new professional role with his existing artistic pursuits, while working toward the avant-­garde’s long-­desired integration of art and industry. These prospects converged rather unexpectedly in February 1927, when Four Arts and the Moscow printers’ union commenced work on a graphic arts exhibition to mark the tenth anniversary of the revolution.8 As one of the original members of the exhibition committee, Lissitzky was charged with designing the exhibition’s displays and co-­organizing the division of photography and photomechanics.9 What began as an exhibit of ten years of work by graphic artists and printers in Moscow soon assumed a much grander scale. Within three weeks of the exhibition committee’s first meetings, the plan for a show that would demonstrate artistic and technical processes of polygraphic production had grown to include divisions devoted to the history of writing and printing, the instruments and materials of printing (paper, ink, metals, etc.), and the professional training of press workers and designers. Raising its sights even higher, the committee planned to invite eleven publishing enterprises from Moscow and Leningrad to participate in the show—­a decision that required it to apply for All-­Union status through the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy (VSNKh)—­and to petition the State Trade Commission (GOSTORG) to facilitate the import of the latest press equipment from abroad.10 Despite their initial hopes for a May opening, the planners’ ambitions pushed the opening date of the main exhibits to August 19 and the foreign engineering section into September. 134

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As one might expect, the show’s dramatic growth made the designer’s task considerably more complex. Already in February, the exhibition committee expected the exhibition to be too large for the spaces available to it in central Moscow. Instead, it looked to the vacant pavilions of the 1923 All-­Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV), whose Krymsky Val address offered abundant square footage.11 Lissitzky was asked to measure the premises of the main pavilion on February 12 and probably sketched a ground plan on the basis of his notes shortly after. A drawing now in the collection of the Sprengel Museum is the only surviving document of his design process (fig. 5.1). Here, Lissitzky began to sketch in the stands he was devising for the display of printed matter, working out preliminary arrangements for the first two halls of the pavilion. Some but not all of the configurations depicted were carried over into the realized design, but the unfinished drawing betrays a longer list of problems than T o w a r d a n A g i t a t i o n - ­E n v i r o n me n t

Figure 5.1 El Lissitzky, plan of the All-­Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV), 1926. Pencil on paper, 15.6 × 17.2 in. (39.5 × 43.7 cm). Sprengel Museum, Hanover. Photo: Herling/ Gwose/Werner.

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solutions. Lissitzky’s report on his design, prepared in early May and delivered to the exhibition committee two weeks later, resulted in a formal request that each exhibition department reduce its claim to floor space; in the meantime, he asked to be relieved of his responsibilities to the photomechanics section and asked permission to employ an assistant.12 Even in its incomplete state, Lissitzky’s drawing of the main VSKhV pavilion shows that he hoped to transform the given space.13 The 1923 exhibition grounds were laid out according to classical precedent by Aleksei Shchusev and Ivan Zholtovsky. Fellow modernists Aleksandra Ekster and Konstantin Melnikov had built adventurous constructivist designs on the VSKhV grounds, but the Polygraphics Exhibition was to occupy its main pavilion, designed by Zholtovsky himself in a neo-­Renaissance style.14 To disguise Zholtovsky’s conservative compositional principles, Lissitzky transformed the staggered rhythm of the three main halls along Krymsky Val into a nervy proliferation of zigzagging stands and pathways. In the first hall, which eventually contained the displays on the history of writing and the production graphics section, a series of stands woven between posts in the center of the hall doubles back and connects to the south wall, creating a cul-­de-­sac that slows and redirects circulation back through the hall. The next room, home to the displays of the printing enterprises, is divided by three sets of screens, sketched in with zigzag lines, like notations in the diagram of an electrical circuit. Between screens, three pairs of displays—­growing progressively larger along one side of the hall, correspondingly smaller on the other—­create diagonal aisles. This ensemble, repeated in its entirety, embodies the principles of modularity and rhythmic repetition that Lissitzky outlined in a report on the standardization of furniture he submitted to VSNKh the following year.15 Lissitzky used seriality to advance the reinvention of the exhibition form initiated by the International Faction of Constructivists. His stands foreground the optical and tactile life of every printed sheet, approximating both tabletop and bulletin board by incorporating horizontal and vertical surfaces to which unframed printed materials could be fastened. The almost sculptural quality of the exhibition equipment is communicated by a set of photographs of the newly installed stands in dramatic raking light, which appeared in the exhibition bulletin (fig. 5.2). By drawing attention to this aspect of his work, Lissitzky invites comparison of his display equipment to similar designs by Friedrich Kiesler. Kiesler, who Lissitzky met in Berlin when the hope for a constructivist International was at its height, had designed two standard displays for the 1924 Exhibition of New Theater Techniques in Vienna (fig. 5.3). Having shown his work at the exhibition, Lissitzky probably took note of the short article in De Stijl, in which Kiesler proposed “lowering the production costs for large exhibitions through the reduction of equipment to two types whose parts are standardized.”16 Lissitzky’s integration of horizontal and vertical display surfaces echoes Kiesler’s “L-­t ype” stands, 136

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but his own design eliminated the functionless beams that suggest the extension of the three-­dimensional grid beyond the stands’ physical limits. Clearly, Lissitzky’s displays are less indebted to the aesthetic ideology of De Stijl. Accommodating an exhibition checklist that was greater than Kiesler’s by several orders of magnitude, they were also subject to a much stricter economic regime. When the Polygraphics Exhibition finally opened, it was immense. Although seventy-­five graphic artists participated, the show had ballooned to a scale that dwarfed any individual contribution: the number of participating enterprises grew to almost seventy and the exhibition checklist ran to the tens of thousands. Add to this the series of lectures and demonstrations by German press specialists sponsored by the show’s foreign engineering section, and the result was truly a popular spectacle.17 A commentator in Izvestiia noted that the exhibition generated interest among “all the working masses. You have to see the liveliness with which the different details of the machine exhibits are discussed, always with the share of skepticism proper to a person not working directly at the press.”18 Yet critical praise for the exhibition’s survey of contemporary graphic arts and its review of a decade of Soviet printing was faint. The so-­called review turned out to represent only the past two years’ production, an archival failure rooted in “the atomization of the productive units of the T o w a r d a n A g i t a t i o n - ­E n v i r o n me n t

Figure 5.2 El Lissitzky, bulletin of the All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition, 1927. Letterpress, 11.2 × 16.6 in. (28.5 × 42.4 cm). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (930030).

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Figure 5.3 Friedrich Kiesler, Leger System, Exhibition of New Theater Techniques, 1924. Gelatin silver print. Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Foundation, Vienna.

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polygraphics industry, the facilities of which are not only under the control of VSNKh, but numerous other institutions.” And while the Izvestiia critic highlighted the improvements in the printed matter on view rather than its relatively low quality, he also realized that “the engineers and technicians who arrived at the organization of the foreign section are aware of it.”19 The real attraction thus lay with the printing processes demonstrated in the foreign section, particularly the new offset, linotype, and intaglio techniques that promised to increase both output and quality. Whether because of their asceticism or because of the bewildering accumulation of materials they supported, Lissitzky’s displays also failed to make a strong impression. To be sure, they were received positively, but the terms of praise were rather different than Lissitzky might have hoped. On opening day, Izvestiia noted that Lissitzky brought “originality and freshness” to the design, a verdict that the critic Yakov Tugendkhold seconded several weeks later, when he praised the design as “constructive and slightly Japanese.”20 Although Petr Neznamov roundly mocked Tugendkhold’s comments in Novyi lef, hoping to reclaim the show’s productivist core from the critic’s facile aestheticizing, there was nevertheless a grain of truth to them.21 When Zholtovsky designed the exhibition hall in 1923, he left its wooden structure exposed. As the architect himself stated, his decision was not just a cost-­saving measure; it was an attempt forge a compromise with the avant-­garde. “A generation of architects will study [the pavilion]” he said at the time. “The genuine beauty of form and idea of constructivism embedded in it reflects its living bond with modernity, rejecting the dead forms of ‘pure’ aestheticism of the past.”22 Some of Lissitzky’s displays were freestanding constructions, but the majority were bolted directly to the exposed structure of the building. This approach was probably designed to conserve materials, but in grafting themselves onto Zholtovsky’s classical structure, Lissitzky’s exhibition design also participated in its aesthetic compromises. Something similar might be said of Lissitzky’s design for the exhibichapter five

tion catalogue. The book is a variation on the artist’s 1923 design for Mayakovsky’s For the Voice, with pamphlets coded by size and color substituted for the Suprematist thumb-­tabs (fig. 5.4). But its stapled binding is too thick and its type too small to facilitate comfortable use (to say nothing of the extraneous vertical flap extending from its back cover, which transforms the supposedly functional book into a bewildering maze). Of course, Lissitzky had been able to devote his whole attention to For the Voice, while the Polygraphics Exhibition catalogue was tacked onto the end of an already long list of tasks. In fact, the design was originally assigned to Nikolai Piskarev, not to Lissitzky, who assumed responsibility late in the process and enlisted his student Solomon Telingater as typographer.23 What is most striking about Lissitzky’s participation in the All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition is not the compromises of his individual contributions, but the sheer range of tasks he completed and the sense of unity he imparted to an otherwise unwieldy show. After fulfilling his responsibilities as architect and catalogue designer, Lissitzky also served as a member of the jury and designed the diploma awarded to exhibitors whose works met the highest standard.24 One of these diplomas was awarded to Gustav Klutsis for his outstanding work in the field of photomontage.25 Lissitzky received two certificates: one for his service on the jury and another for his design of the exhibition (plate 9). Finally, despite having relinquished his responsibility for the photography and photomechanics section in April, Lissitzky wrote its catalogue essay. There, he argued that the typography and photomontage championed by himself and Klutsis, respectively, though necessary in the first decade of the revolution, had now become outmoded. Indeed, he went so far as to claim that “what is presented at the exhibition, in its productive essence, belongs to an epoch of the polygraphic industry that already finds itself at an end.”26 From this perspective, the recycled design of the show’s catalogue made perfect sense.

Figure 5.4 El Lissitzky, catalogue of the All-­ Union Polygraphics Exhibition, 1927. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (930030).

Archaism as Renewal: Photo-­Painting

The works Lissitzky contributed to the exhibition’s department of production graphics were intended to survey a decade of his own activity while also gesturing toward the future of print. He showed eight lithoT o w a r d a n A g i t a t i o n - ­E n v i r o n me n t

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Figure 5.5 Unknown photographer, production graphics section of the All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition, 1927. Gelatin silver print. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (950076).

graphs (including his civil war–­era poster Beat the Whites and selections from his various portfolios) and nine photographic works, several of which are visible in an installation shot taken for the catalogue (fig. 5.5). Seen at a distance on his spare but elegant stands, some of the works can be positively identified: a large print of his portrait of Arp, his self-­portrait, a double portrait with Vilmos Huszár, an alternative cover design for his Victory over the Sun portfolio, and a new work called Record are all recognizable. In addition to these, the exhibition catalogue lists Lissitzky’s portrait of Schwitters and several unidentified works: two photograms entitled Architect’s Equipment, Typesetter’s Equipment, and another unknown experiment called Negative-­Positive.27 All of these works are listed under the term fotopis’, a neologism Lissitzky created by combining the Latin word for light with the Slavic root of a verb that means both “to write” and “to paint.” The semantic indeterminacy of Lissitzky’s neologism has led to several different readings. When Peter Nisbet translated Lissitzky’s essay “Fotopis’” in 1990, he opted for the most neutral English word, “photography,” with the original term untranslated in brackets.28 By contrast, Margarita Tupitsyn and Maria Gough have chosen to stress the term’s painterly connotation. As we now know, thanks to a print of Lissitzky’s 1924 self-­portrait in the collection of the Van Abbemuseum, labeled Photomalerei by the artist himself, Lissitzky understood the term in the latter respect.29 But visitors to the exhibition could be forgiven for linking the neologism with writing. Russian speakers of the 1920s would have readily

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associated fotopis’ with the slightly old-­fashioned Slavic calque svetopis’, a word roughly equivalent to heliography. Moreover, Lissitzky’s photographs (along with the entire production graphics section) were located in the same hall as the exhibits on the history of writing, one goal of which, the catalogue explains, was to show how “certain devices of primeval ideographic writing are preserved even in modernity . . . where the powers of abbreviation of conventional and written language are extraordinarily useful.”30 Here, visitors would have passed from examples of hieroglyphs and medieval heraldry to contemporary union emblems and scientific formulae before they encountered Klutsis’s photomontages and Lissitzky’s experimental photographs. Several of Lissitzky’s images would have encouraged a writerly interpretation as well. As representations of the trades, his photograms of architects’ and typesetters’ tools probably looked like updated union emblems to some members of the public. So does the photogram of an engraver’s burin and linoleum cutting tools he made as an advertisement for the show, which was printed in a duplex halftone process (fig. 5.6). Lissitzky clearly relished the way this image suggests that manual processes were being obviated—­literally dematerialized—­by a supple chemically treated recording surface, but he wanted nonetheless to foreground the “painterly value of the discovery” made by Man Ray: namely, that in the photogram “light is stripped to the point of perversity.”31 That this denuded light should have value for painters was itself perverse, for here light was laid bare as physical inscription rather than pictorial illuT o w a r d a n A g i t a t i o n - ­E n v i r o n me n t

Figure 5.6 El Lissitzky, Untitled (Vystavka poligrafii), 1927. Duplex halftone print, 6.1 × 8 in. (15.6 × 20.2 cm). Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

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sion. What was most painterly about it was not its appearance but, in a specifically modern sense, its violence toward painting’s conventional self-­regard. Of course, by 1927 any appeal to painting was bound to have a revanchist flavor, especially when speaking of photography. The previous year, Osip Brik had argued in Sovetskoe foto (Soviet Photo) that photography could be enlisted in the struggle to end painting, a productivist project whose prospects Boris Arvatov reassessed in the first number of Novyi lef with an essay bluntly titled “Why the Easel Picture Didn’t Die.”32 As Arvatov’s essay shows, the resurgence of realist easel painting in the hands of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR) was unnerving for partisans of Lef. But it was not an issue for them alone, and its persistence was due not only to the continued existence of markets, as Arvatov suggested. In a February 1926 letter to Stalin, members of the Four Arts Society and several other groups had already complained that “exceptional attention on the part of the government was manifested toward AKhRR, through a major subsidy of 75,000 rubles,” noting that this action explicitly contravened “the well-­known resolution” of the Central Committee on the necessity of diverse forms and tendencies for the growth of artistic culture. Furthermore, it did so to support a group in which “artistic mastery . . . is significantly lower than in several other groups, not only objectively, but also, if you like, at the admission of the Association itself.”33 Indeed, state participation in the Polygraphics Exhibition was celebrated by Four Arts less because it affirmed the group’s productivist bona fides (however much Lissitzky might have relished this idea) than because it signaled the state’s continuing investment in the Four Arts program: quality, irrespective of style. Lissitzky’s catalogue essay, “The Artist in Production,” was in turn intended as a rejoinder to the Lef line on photography, as his title suggests. Contrary to what one might expect, this was a fairly broad target. Even within Lef there were murmurs that the group’s newfound enthusiasm for the documentary value of photography and film “reeks of provocation and speculation.”34 Lef championed the work of Rodchenko and Vertov, but it remained divided over the criteria by which they could be judged.35 A strictly factographic approach could hardly account for Vertov’s debt to the cinematic tradition of Méliès, and struggled to explain the visual interest of a given photographic frame even with a technique as rulebound as Rodchenko’s. What’s worse, the binary opposition of the easel painting and the snapshot suggested by Brik defined mimesis as naturalistic representation and, to the degree that it took this determination for granted, tended to reify it. Indeed, as Lissitzky noted, If artists demonstrated only technical devices, their situation before the productivists would be extremely critical. Of course, the strength of the [production

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graphics] department lies on another plane: in form and in the interaction that defines form: in the use of material . . . what we see is the diversity of devices worked out by contemporary artists for the construction of artistic discourse.36

Lissitzky did not want to circumscribe future developments in photography by privileging a single technique, be it photogram, snapshot, or montage. Instead, he thought the practice of photo-­painting should comprise images obtained “with a negative received by means of a camera or by the immediate action of a ray of light encountering things of varying transparency on its way to the paper.”37 A greater variety of techniques and ways of working with material (in the dual sense of medium and motif) would contribute to the development of photographic discourse, he hoped. Such a broad designation would allow the revaluation, or perversion, of the values of painting in and by photography. Brik himself admitted that this process had begun with painting’s hyperbolic embrace of color and increasingly subjective distortion of reality, but he could see no use for photography beyond its referential function. Arvatov, meanwhile, stubbornly viewed all photographic experimentation as “slavishly mimicking” painting, even as he acknowledged its manifest role in the “de-­easelization” of art.38 Beginning from the counterintuitive thesis that photography’s “painterly value” was the product of inherently photographic processes, Lissitzky saw photography cultivating the same discursive terrain that it had opened to painting. On this model, photo-­painting might be understood as analogous to blank verse or metered prose, the apparently contradictory but universally recognized literary phenomena whose systemic interdependence was noted by Yuri Tynianov in his groundbreaking study of literary evolution the following year.39 As Tynianov argues, such phenomena arise when a mutation in the value system governing a field shifts previously dominant values into a secondary position (as, for example, when the definition of a poem loses the requirement of meter). Pace Brik, there was no necessary relation between the resurgence of representational painting and a representational countermovement in photography. Instead, the relative conservatism of painting could open photography to all the possibilities of artifice that emerge from its own techniques and materials. At the Polygraphics Exhibition, Lissitzky’s latest work, Record, thematized transparency as the material condition of photography by combining the basic cutting procedure of photomontage with multiple-­exposure and negative-­sandwich techniques (fig. 5.7). While the cut visible around the sprinter’s right calf registers the material thickness of paper, it stands at odds with the porosity of the figure it bounds, whose body is everywhere permeated by the confusion of the scene. Here, the cut eliminates optical noise from the image so that it may operate more effectively T o w a r d a n A g i t a t i o n - ­E n v i r o n me n t

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Figure 5.7 El Lissitzky, Record, 1926. Gelatin silver print, 10.5 × 8.8 in. (26.7 × 22.4 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

on a thematic level in the double exposure by Knud Lonberg-­Holm that serves as its background.40 Like Lissitzky’s Swiss experiments, the discrete steps of the shooting and printing processes and the intervals between them come into view in Record, particularly in the disjunction between the seeming opacity of the hurdler’s shadow, which belongs entirely to one system, and the translucency of his body, which traverses the border of another. These two orders within the image may be grasped simultaneously, but their components occupy independent spaces, even as they appear to touch. But Record also signified something more. As it shifted photography away from the aesthetic criteria of nineteenth-­c entury naturalism into which it was born, photo-­painting reoriented photographic experimentation toward a longer history of painting by reviving an architectural designation the easel picture had long since forfeited. Record was probably the image Lissitzky showed at the Four Arts exhibition in November 1926 under the title Experiment for a Fresco for a Sports Club, where its theme of photographic transparency engaged quite a different reference to painting’s material support.41 Architecturally, the easel picture is defined negatively as an aperture, a window onto an outer reality. By contrast, the photo-­fresco directs our attention to the wall-­plane, which it treats as a screen capable of receiving multiple projections. This shift also changes our perception of the camera’s architecture: from the closed chamber with its view onto the world, we enter the open, illuminated space of image manipulation, for which not even a darkroom is necessary. In this way, Lissitzky avoided the return to “easel photography” that Rodchenko advocated the following year as a corrective to mere photographic documentation, much to the consternation of his comrades at Lef.42

International Review: Pressa, Politics, and the End of NEP

Although no single piece of evidence directly links the two, we can be reasonably certain that Lissitzky’s work for the All-­Union Polygraphics 144

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Exhibition secured him the commission for the Soviet pavilion at Pressa, the 1928 International Press Exhibition in Cologne. There is, in any case, a clear convergence in the material of the exhibits, which Lissitzky exploited in order to realize his new ideas in a variety of formats. His designs for Pressa—­comprising its bulletin, catalogue, ground plan, central star installation, transmission belts, and photo-­frieze—­have been ranked among his most important works by his fellow artists and by art historians. The “much talked about photo-­frieze,” which won begrudging praise from an envious Klutsis, was hailed by Benjamin Buchloh half a century later for transforming the governing criteria of modernism, insofar as it overturns “the traditional limitations of the avant-­garde practice of photomontage and reconstitutes it within the necessary conditions of simultaneous collective reception.”43 Leah Dickerman saw in these conditions “a new kind of transparency of a public order . . . unhindered access to and distribution of information,” an optimistically liberal appraisal at odds with T. J. Clark’s view of Pressa as “unabashedly propaganda about propaganda, meant to confirm the West’s worst fears.”44 Of course, the particular admixture of aesthetics and politics in Pressa cannot be attributed to Lissitzky alone. Just as the organizing bodies of the All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition determined its structure and aims, so Pressa emerged from a matrix of political and institutional interests that the artist had to mediate. Where the Polygraphics Exhibition’s emphasis on quality located the horizon of vanguard print production in foreign technology and a highly refined photographic technique, the Pressa pavilion would locate that horizon in the sociopolitical role of the Soviet press, the technological stagnation of which it was at pains to conceal. Some of the contradictions in Pressa’s reception issue from the Bolshevik regime’s own structure, in which “(modern) elements of publicity are enmeshed with and subordinated to (charismatic-­traditional) elements of secrecy,” according to political theorist Kenneth Jowitt.45 If Pressa offered more “propaganda about propaganda” than “unhindered access to and distribution of information,” it was nevertheless intended to evoke the latter response in the West. The same is true of the show’s aesthetic appeal. Lissitzky’s photo-­frieze may have transformed the conditions of photomontage’s reception, but it did so for purely ideological reasons, making use of a technique that the artist himself considered outmoded. The goals of the exhibition’s organizational sponsor, the All-­Union Society for Foreign Cultural Relations, VOKS (Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo kul’turnykh sviazi s zagranitsei), reveal the complexity of the Soviet Pressa pavilion’s ideological task. As a bridge between the hybrid public of the USSR and the liberal bourgeois public spheres of the West, VOKS registered the tensions between the two systems more acutely than other institutions, down to its very form: as one of the few nongovernmental organizations in the USSR, VOKS was modeled on the foreign Friends’ Societies that cropped up in England and Germany to facilitate diploT o w a r d a n A g i t a t i o n - ­E n v i r o n me n t

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matic recognition of the new Soviet state after the revolution. Devoted to strengthening international exchanges between cultural and scientific lights and thus dealing primarily with the intelligentsia, VOKS assumed an “externally public [obshchestvennyi] character,” in the words of its founder, Olga Kameneva, favoring the party-­state’s progressive aspect by reflecting the public form of its bourgeois counterparts.46 By Kameneva’s count, the society was in continuous contact with 2,657 correspondents in 604 offices in 62 countries in 1928.47 As such, it was the primary channel through which the foreign intelligentsia experienced the USSR. To cite only the most proximate example, it was at VOKS that Lissitzky met Alfred Barr, on January 3, 1928—­just a few days after he was awarded the Pressa commission.48 Planning for the Soviet Pressa pavilion had, however, begun five months before Lissitzky was brought on board. The exhibition committee included Kameneva; the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky; the head of the State Publishing House (GIZ), Artem Khalatov; and the editor of Krasnaia Pechat’ (Red Press), Mikhail Gus, among others.49 In July 1927, the group had agreed that the exhibition should provide a history of the press in Russia while also highlighting Soviet innovations like wall newspapers and the worker-­correspondents’ movement. After VOKS enlisted the Soviet trade delegation in Berlin to help negotiate a lease for the new exhibition halls on the eastern banks of the Rhine, the Berlin office began to offer guidance on the expectations of the German public. Between September and November, Berlin communicated with growing urgency that the exhibition planners should focus primarily on the decade of Soviet rule, reduce their reliance on Russian-­ language press materials, and incorporate more of the nonprint media that attracted Western audiences: a small film projector, a loudspeaker playing Soviet radio, and phonograph recordings in multiple languages.50 The contours of the Pressa commission were thus clearly established by the time Lissitzky received it at the end of December. The first task of Lissitzky’s design was to represent a movement that historian Matthew Lenoe calls “mass journalism.”51 A press strategy designed to stimulate industrial production by reporting on socialist competition and publishing factory production reviews, mass journalism was developed in the NEP years by provincial journalists and worker correspondents who wrote for small factory circulars and single-­sheet wall newspapers. Highlighting this phenomenon was one of the original aims of the Soviet Pressa committee, but its importance undoubtedly grew after October 1927, when a Central Committee resolution endorsed the practices of mass journalism as a model for the Soviet press as a whole. Editors at central press organs were now directed to focus less on policy or financial and economic news than on ideology and the party line. Soviet publications rapidly shifted from information to exhortation, abandoning the enlightenment function of the bourgeois press in order 146

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to prepare for the mass denunciation of bureaucrats and factory bosses in the party’s self-­criticism campaign the following spring.52 The handicraft character of the single-­sheet wall newspapers in which mass journalism developed made them an unlikely counterpart to the second component of Lissitzky’s brief, the promotion of Soviet film. Upon joining the exhibition team, one of Lissitzky’s first responsibilities was to serve as a liaison to Sovkino and as de facto film curator for the exhibits suggested by Berlin.53 Instructed to submit a film program to Sovkino on short notice, he compiled a list that included dramatic films about the press, such as the 1925 Sevzapkino production Mikrob kommunizma (The Microbe of Communism) and the 1926 VUFKU film Dymovka, which portrayed the 1924 murder of peasant-­correspondent and whistle-­blower Grigory Malinovsky in a Ukrainian village. But Lissitzky’s program mainly consists of a list of themes “that can be cut together from various fragments [that] should be discussed in a combined meeting of ideologically and theoretically competent individuals, film directors, and artists.” In this, the document stays true to the spirit of its first proposal: to screen “the best cuts of Soviet film-­chronicles,” especially those of Dziga Vertov.54 Despite the provisional character of the list, it was approved by VOKS and discussed with studio representatives at Sovkino and Mezhrabpom-­Rus ten days later. The exhibition’s filmic component, which freely combined dramatizations with documentary material, was therefore in place by the beginning of February, when Lissitzky set off for Cologne to prepare a preliminary design.55 While Lissitzky attended to the needs of the German public abroad, VOKS was subject to the requirements of its own public at home, undergoing a review by the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate (Rabkrin) in February that would recommend Kameneva’s removal.56 To the staff at VOKS, this could hardly have come as a shock. Kameneva’s proximity to the leaders of the United Opposition—­Lev Trotsky was her brother and Lev Kamenev her husband—­inevitably subjected her to political scrutiny. Both Trotsky and Kamenev had been removed from the Politburo in July 1926 in the wake of their public opposition to Stalin’s manipulation of the powers of the Party Secretariat, and by mid-­1927 their rhetoric had reached a fever pitch, alleging “the most extreme usurpation of the supreme rights of the party.”57 Kameneva found herself in similar straits, facing dwindling state support and proposing at public meetings that VOKS “must switch over to the public [obshchestvennost’] and in the full sense of the word become a civil [obshchestvennuiu] organization.”58 With Trotsky’s expulsion from the Central Committee and the capitulation of the opposition at the Fifteenth Party Congress in December, Kameneva’s cozy relationship to the intelligentsia made VOKS extremely vulnerable to criticism. It is hard to imagine that these circumstances escaped Lissitzky’s attention when he returned from Cologne at the end of February. While T o w a r d a n A g i t a t i o n - ­E n v i r o n me n t

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living in Switzerland, he had instructed Hans Richter to forward copies of an open letter intended for G to Lunacharsky and Trotsky; and later, on taking up his post at VKhUTEMAS, he paired Trotsky’s example with the Bauhaus slogan coined by Walter Gropius, writing to Sophie Küppers that “here we must live up to everything like Trotsky: if necessary—­war, and if necessary—­economy. Thus: ‘Art and Technology: A New Unity.’”59 Even if they do not reveal a Trotskyist in the political sense that the term was quickly acquiring, these statements betray a familiarity with Trotsky’s position in the arts and an admiration for his organizational acumen. To understand the motivations of this attitude, we need look no further than the commitment to internationalism that led UNOVIS to portray the closure of Soviet borders as “a serious threat to our revolutionary movement in art.”60 The same impulse led Lissitzky to stress his ongoing relationship with the Bauhaus to Alfred Barr in January.61 Indeed, it is possible that Lissitzky saw Pressa and its association with VOKS as the best way to maintain an international presence, since, when faced with the increasing difficulty of international travel prior to his installation of his exhibition space in Dresden in 1926, it was to Kameneva that he turned.62 Even as Lissitzky registered the changing political situation at home, he was forced to focus on completing his designs before Pressa’s May opening. On February 27, in his first report to VOKS since his return, he pointed out that some countries were spending huge sums on the construction of their exhibits and recommended doubling the current design budget for the Soviet pavilion. Recounting a conversation with the supervisory committee in Cologne, Lissitzky noted that while the Germans were unable to agree on a plan for the building’s exterior that would respect the architecture, he himself had immediate success. Now he proposed designing “something on the outside of our pavilion that will stand out . . . It will be necessary to use our cinema extensively even here, for the external side of our pavilion.”63 Two detailed elevations for the pavilion’s external signage—­they are less drawings than montages, worked up from a variety of colored papers and foil, precisely cut and glued into place—­suggest that Lissitzky followed through on his proposal. His elevation of the building’s south façade, currently in the collection of the Museum Ludwig, includes a small square cut from a photograph of a night scene documenting the previous year’s celebration of the revolution’s tenth anniversary. Perched atop the building between a small red square and a towering flag stand, this montage element stands in for the cinema screen. In Lissitzky’s western elevation, the same element is represented by a photograph of a group of readers cut into a parallelogram, tilting forward to loom over spectators on the ground (plate 10). By contrast, Lissitzky’s designs for the internal exhibits focused on the experience of the wall newspaper. In a study of his “transmission 148

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belts,” he envisioned a corridor strung with a zigzagging banner attached to enormous spools of newsprint, stretching from floor to ceiling, which would familiarize the vertical reading experience of the wall newspaper by fashioning a theatrically oversize approximation of an offset press (fig. 5.8). Raised on a low platform behind a custom-­built railing and topped with signs indicating their intended readership (“Workers,” “Peasants,” and “Komsomol” are legible at left), the transmission belts create an illusion of immediacy by granting the spectator access to production in advance of distribution. A solitary reader pasted into the scene, fashionably dressed in a topcoat (with hat, cane, and white gloves to boot) confronts the technology of mass production as if it were a direct, purely local experience like the one offered by a wall newspaper; behind him, a worker in a cap peruses a map of the entire Soviet Union. Contrary to the artist’s hopes, even an expanded budget would not allow the construction of these ambitious designs. Writing to Küppers after he departed for Cologne to complete the final installation, Lissitzky complained that the German vendors are “all crazy and think we’re swimming in money. I got an offer for the external construction (flag stands, USSR and main frontage)—­49,000M. That’s no typo. For the transmissions—­ 10,210M. I almost have to make new designs. I have to haggle and make deals.”64 Economizing, Lissitzky cut the cost of the transmission belts by almost half while reducing their number by just a third.65 In their final realization, a shared central overhead axle eliminated the corridor created by the two rows of transmission belts, substantially weakening the architectural resonance of the design. The series of belts no longer created an ersatz colonnade, but it fared better than Lissitzky’s monumental external flag stand, which had to be abandoned completely. The revised transmission belts maintained a central place in Lissitzky’s overall design, which, in a marked departure from his plan for the All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition, was structured in irregular zones.66 This new strategy not only responded to the demands of the pavilion’s T o w a r d a n A g i t a t i o n - ­E n v i r o n me n t

Figure 5.8 El Lissitzky, Soviet pavilion of the International Press Exhibition, Pressa, Cologne, 1928. Graphite, colored pencil, and collage on paper, 27.8 × 20.7 in. (70.6 × 52.5 cm). Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

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Figure 5.9 El Lissitzky, plan of the Soviet pavilion of the International Press Exhibition, Pressa, in Katalog des Sowjet-­ Pavillons auf der Internationalen Presse-­ Austellung, Köln 1928. Letterpress, 8.1 × 5.1 in. (20.7 × 13 cm). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (88-­ B26405).

open, asymmetrical floor plan but enthusiastically exploited new possibilities (fig. 5.9). Visitors entering from the south could meander through the belts, past Lissitzky’s central star exhibit and a map showing the location of every press in the USSR. From the north, they could follow the same course in reverse and proceed from the pavilion’s Lenin corner to the exhibits on the various Soviet republics located on a mezzanine level or, alternatively, to the small cinema housed beneath it. The orienting nucleus of Lissitzky’s central star, a radiant cacophony of slogans in electric light that attracted and repelled all comers, found its reflective counterpart in the pavilion’s small library and reading room, where visitors could rest at a grand ring-­shaped table strewn with printed matter. Faced with the need to rework his designs on short notice, Lissitzky delegated the execution of his design for a monumental photo-­frieze to Sergei Senkin.67 The frieze, which suspended a large-­scale photomontage on a net of strings before a slogan-­covered wall, realized Lissitzky’s earlier proposal for a photo-­fresco while departing from it in key respects. As

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installation shots of the completed frieze demonstrate (and as the term itself suggests), the use of shallow relief was central to the design (fig. 5.10). Two distinct layers of the composition are given in its site: a small but notable span between the plane abutting the hall’s exposed beams and that of wall itself opens a space partly concealed by an angled soffit, which allows the planes of text and image to interact. The network of images, both silhouetted and full-­frame, creates an illusionistic continuation of the surface between the beams that is further reinforced by triangular banners anchored to the photo-­frieze itself, rather than the wall behind it. For a viewer in motion, the gap between the suspended plane of images and that of the wall would offer shifting glimpses of the colored paper slogans affixed to the rear wall. Such fortuitous circumstances allowed Lissitzky to approximate the transparent multiplanarity of Record with physical means. Although Lissitzky criticized photomontage in “The Artist in Production,” we need not consider the style of the photo-­frieze as evidence of Senkin’s creative control, as Margarita Tupitsyn has suggested.68 To be sure, Senkin probably arranged (and might even have selected) the images in the montage, but there is reason to believe Lissitzky dictated the technique. On the one hand, the use of photomontage separated T o w a r d a n A g i t a t i o n - ­E n v i r o n me n t

Figure 5.10 Unknown photographer, photo-­ frieze by El Lissitzky and Sergei Senkin (The Education of the Masses Is the Main Task of the Press in the Transition from Capitalism to Communism), 1928. Gelatin silver print. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (950076).

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Figure 5.11 Fotoglaz, from Sovetskoe foto, no. 7 (1927).

the design from previous efforts at mural-­scale photography, which had relied on the purely optical naturalism of the panorama.69 On the other, precisely those handicraft qualities of photomontage that Lissitzky considered outmoded made it well suited to the commission. He himself noted in “The Artist in Production” that “the force of [photomontage’s] expressivity infected workers’ and Komsomol art circles and exerted a great influence on wall newspapers.”70 Given their central role in the pavilion, an example of a wall newspaper executed in the photomontage technique, like the organ Fotoglaz (Photo-­Eye), would have provided an appropriate model for the frieze (fig. 5.11). The rhythmic juxtaposition of image and text in Photo-­Eye does indeed resemble that of the photo-­frieze, to say nothing of its Vertovian resonance. Furthermore, the cinematic analogy could conceal the handicraft character of the wall newspaper beneath a veneer of technological progress. A similar logic probably lay behind Lissitzky’s design of the exhibition catalogue. Even though he saw the pavilion’s exhibits as “basically theatrical décor,” he exploited their staginess in a “typographical kino-­ show”—­an eighteen-­page concertina photomontage inserted into the catalogue (fig. 5.12).71 Where For the Voice and the All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition catalogue played with the possibility of nonsequential reading inherent in the form of the index, Lissitzky’s Pressa catalogue fairly enforces it. Relegating the course of Russian press history traversed by

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the pavilion’s 226 exhibits to the back of the book, Lissitzky ensures that they too become an index. As in the photo-­frieze, the process of reading must be interspersed with careful inspection of the montage insert, the visual logic of which usurps the text’s expository privilege. Each photographic fragment of the kino-­show is tagged with a red number that indicates the exhibit’s place in the sequence of the index. But they unfold higgledy-­piggledy from left to right—­164, 116a, 116, 70, 114, 126, 125, and so on—­in defiance of traditional reading order. Who reads like this? A mass subject might, especially one enervated by the resistance of bureaucracy. The pages that preface Lissitzky’s kino-­ show boast that the USSR’s fifty thousand wall newspapers and four hundred thousand worker and peasant correspondents act as a “safeguard against bureaucratic degeneracy.”72 Through its catalogue, Pressa’s Western audience was privy to a revolutionary reading experience recounted by Lissitzky in his essay “Our Book,” where he described how “the traditional book was torn into separate pages, enlarged a hundred times, enhanced with color, and brought into the street as a poster . . . to be read out and elucidated from close up.”73 The concertina insert, whose folds can be turned like individual pages or loosed from their binding in a grand cascade, dramatizes this process again and again. As Pressa opened its doors to the public, the model of media spectacle and militancy toward bureaucratic malfeasance that it propagandized unfolded in the Soviet press, where the Shakhty wreckers’ trial made headlines throughout the summer.74 The trial, in which fifty Russian engineers and three German specialists stood accused of industrial sabotage and collusion with the exiled former owners of a Caucasian mining operation, produced convictions for forty-­nine defendants, including one German. The politics of the affair, if not the particulars of its outT o w a r d a n A g i t a t i o n - ­E n v i r o n me n t

Figure 5.12 El Lissitzky, catalogue of the Soviet pavilion of the International Press Exhibition, Pressa, 1928. Letterpress. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (88-­ B26405).

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come, were determined before the trial began, when Stalin declared that “classes exist, international capital exists, and it cannot calmly watch the development of the country which is building socialism . . . it is trying, and will try in the future to weaken our economic power by means of invisible economic intervention.”75 Together with the Party’s spring self-­criticism campaign, for which it provided ample fodder, the Shakhty affair inaugurated the period of intensified class struggle that Sheila Fitzpatrick has called the “cultural revolution.” As the party mobilized against the “wavering” of its right wing, the utility of the intelligentsia’s political neutrality evaporated, and with it the NEP era’s liberal cultural policies.76 Politically and aesthetically, Pressa was a harbinger of the coming Five-­Year Plan.

Neither Pressa nor the All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition can be fully understood within the narrow purview of Lissitzky’s individual artistic development, even if they must be considered as contributions to it. As large trade shows organized by bodies with diverse and competing interests, these exhibitions disclose different aspects to us depending on how we situate them historically. They present clear affinities when viewed in the series of large-­scale exhibitions beginning with the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, just as they do in the narrower category of trade shows devoted to print. In the history of politics and propaganda, they hardly occupy the same universe. Despite their considerable differences, Lissitzky used these commissions to implement his ideas about exhibition planning, book design, and photography. In the first category, Pressa represented an unequivocal advance in the accommodation of large crowd flows.77 In the others, matters are more ambiguous. By breaking from the pattern of the All-­ Union Polygraphics Exhibition catalogue, with its four-­year-­old model, Lissitzky’s Pressa catalogue became one of his most enduring designs. Yet it relied on a photographic technique from which the artist took pains to distance himself. The same is true of Pressa’s photo-­frieze. In this respect, institutional and political factors may be seen as producing aesthetic effects. Lissitzky’s advocacy for an experimental photography would then reflect the narrowly professional concerns of the Polygraphics Exhibition and his exploitation of political photomontage the vicissitudes of his Pressa brief. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to conclude that the artist’s brief directly determined the look of his exhibition designs. Indeed, subsequent years saw the survival and recombination of both modes. At the 1929 International Werkbund Exhibition in Stuttgart, Film und Foto, Lissitzky installed full-­frame enlargements, including his own experiments in cameraless photography, on a frieze constructed from a sim154

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ple wooden grid. For Dresden’s 1930 International Hygiene Exhibition, he executed a large photo-­fresco mounted on lightweight stanchions of tubular steel. The sequence of photo-­paintings proceeding from a large curved screen at the Dresden exhibition’s entrance suggests a series of filmic lap dissolves, as if space and time had entered a dreamlike confusion, flowing both forward and back (fig. 5.13). As Lissitzky’s subsequent work in the field of exhibition design shows, photo-­painting could take on a political brief without remaining a purely experimental style or displacing photomontage completely. Instead, the two techniques could work side by side, with hard cuts offsetting multiple exposures and each heightening the artifice of the other. In the same way, the accomplishments of the All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition and Pressa complement, rather than oppose, one another. Their significance springs neither from a progression from one style to another, nor a closed dialectical opposition, but from the analytic clarity with which they introduce a series of new techniques that can be combined at will. Taken together, the two exhibitions are rightly seen as founding texts of the twentieth-­century discourse of exhibition design.78

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Figure 5.13 Unknown photographer, entrance to the Soviet pavilion of the International Hygiene Exhibition, Dresden, 1930. Gelatin silver print. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (950076).

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6 The Image Complex Reviewing his recent accomplishments in a 1928 letter to the Dutch architect J. J. P. Oud, Lissitzky sounded a note of self-­criticism that was to echo through his work for years to come. “In [my] work there are still too many planetary tasks (then they remain on paper). Now I’d like to do something smaller, but terrestrial, i.e. immediately accomplished.”1 Lissitzky confided to Oud that he would like to design a workers’ club, but circumstances would provide him with an opportunity better suited to his experience in publishing and print media, which was now quite extensive. Early in 1930, he was hired to design the new printing works for the photo-­illustrated periodical Ogonek (Little Flame), his sole architectural commission to date. Amid the building boom of the first Five-­Year Plan, which generated many high-­profile construction projects, Lissitzky’s work for Ogonek was easy to lose sight of. When the centralization of the presses started to place more and more demand on Ogonek’s production facilities, the most compelling design features of Lissitzky’s printing plant were eliminated, and his final design, handed over to the architect Mikhail Barshch, was never completed according to plan. If the architects around Lissitzky were unlikely to praise the results of his work for the press, those with a background in journalism would have understood immediately the appeal of the commission. For the duration of the twentieth century, the Ogonek name was synonymous with photojournalism in Russia. Introduced in 1899 as a weekly supplement to a St. Petersburg daily, Ogonek’s combination of editorial wit and visual plenty endeared it to an estimated six million weekly readers by the outbreak of World War I. Almost a decade later, the indefatigable Soviet journalist Mikhail Koltsov—­a childhood friend of Dziga Vertov who shepherded his old schoolmate into the filmmaking profession—­ revived the paper in Moscow by publishing a Mayakovsky poem under its unreconstructed prewar masthead.2 This canny NEP-­era marketing strategy brought immediate success, and by 1926 the press had expanded its offerings with the first issue of Sovetskoe foto (Soviet Photo), a trade journal for amateur photographers. Ogonek’s contributions to the photographic culture of the USSR were foundational to a great many Soviet artists and writers, not least the arT h e Im a g e C o mp l e x

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chitect of its new printing plant. By the early 1930s, Lissitzky’s own interest in photography extended to photojournalism, a practice he valorized for its potential to radically reshape press activity in the coming years. In April 1931, he outlined his views on the future organization of the press in a public forum at the new Moscow Polygraphics Institute. At the time, his theses reflected possible developments rather than prevailing norms, but they predicted his own subsequent activity as a periodical designer to a remarkable degree. It was not by chance that Lissitzky’s opportunity to put his program into action came from another Ogonek brainchild, the large-­format photo-­illustrated magazine USSR in Construction, where he freelanced as a designer and layout artist from 1932 until his death in 1941. USSR in Construction not only offered Lissitzky the chance to prove that the illustrated press harbored narrative possibilities equivalent to those of film. As the Soviet Union’s largest publisher of architectural photography, it allowed him to transform this demonstration into a spectacular display of engaged avant-­garde architecture. The resulting parallelism condenses for us the whole of Lissitzky’s career trajectory. At the end of the first Five-­Year Plan, he appeared as both architect to the picture press and print designer to his architect colleagues. Yet somehow, in this curious game of hide-­and-­seek, the work of the architect disappeared completely.

The Ogonek Printing Works: A Structure in Flux

The history of Lissitzky’s Ogonek commission is marked by obscurity, even today. His design of a building located at nos. 17–­19 1st Samotechnyi lane was discovered by chance in 2007, in the course of a routine historical evaluation required of all real estate developments in Moscow.3 The sudden and relatively widespread recognition of the building in the wake of this discovery stands in stark contrast to the historical oblivion in which it languished for seventy years, and which continues to impede our understanding of it. As a first step toward reversing this condition, we shall examine the three sets of drawings Lissitzky executed between March and December 1930, along with related records from the Moscow Province Directorate of Building Administration (Moskovskoe gubernskoe upravlenie stroitel’nogo kontrolia) and documents from the papers of the Ogonek Joint-­Stock Company. Taken together, these sources can tell us a great deal, though by no means all we wish to know about Lissitzky’s commission. Amid the recent windfall of public visibility, it has also become clear that the Ogonek plant’s place within Lissitzky’s oeuvre was marked out in advance by a design for another printing plant executed almost simultaneously. Early in 1930, he was invited to submit a project to a closed competition for the new headquarters of the Bolsheviks’ central news158

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Figure 6.1 El Lissitzky, Pravda headquarters, Stroitel’stvo Moskvy 7, no. 5 (1930). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (85-­ S957).

paper, Pravda, located in the Yamskoe Pole region beyond Moscow’s Garden Ring. Lissitzky’s was the only single-­authored entry in a field comprised otherwise of two-­man design teams.4 Surviving photographs of his model, along with a perspective and plan published in Stroitel’stvo Moskvy (Construction of Moscow) in May, show formal decisions that also set him apart from the field (fig. 6.1). Lissitzky conceived the Pravda complex as a campus. Whereas all of the other proposals envisioned a single, massive structure, his housed the production facilities in a building separate from the editorial and publishing operations. In Lissitzky’s design, the literary functions of the press are located in a dynamic street-­facing complex of five hemicylindrical hulls, each recalling the power station of Erich Mendelsohn’s Krasnoe znamia textile works in Leningrad. Eight elevated corridors connect these striking masses to the production facilities that they completely conceal from the street. This distinctive and rather intricate organizational system did not work in Lissitzky’s favor, however. Critics saw his architectural expression of the division of labor as both unnecessary and contrary to the architect’s stated desire to unify disparate functions in the press.5 For jurists, there was evidently enough merit to these criticisms to rule out Lissitzky’s design. The surprising coincidence of Lissitzky’s Pravda project and his Ogonek commission was, it turns out, no coincidence at all. Pravda was the most visible and prestigious newspaper in the market for a new base of operations in 1930, but it was by no means the only one. In the frenzy of construction brought on the by first Five-­Year Plan, a number of publications found themselves courting the limited pool of architects whose T h e Im a g e C o mp l e x

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work for the Pravda competition had shown an adequate understanding of the industry’s needs. The managing board at Ogonek solicited designs from both Lissitzky and a younger VKhUTEMAS-­educated architect, Sergei Leontovich, who had collaborated with Mikhail Modorov on a competition project for Pravda.6 Modorov, in turn, was hired by the journal of the Commissariat of Heavy Industry, Za industrializatsiia (For Industrialization), to design its new headquarters in 1931, leaving his erstwhile partner Leontovich the odd man out. In Lissitzky’s case, the congruity of the two projects not only helped him secure the job at Ogonek; it also appears to bear some responsibility for his design’s being forgotten: when Sophie Lissitzky-­Küppers published her account of Lissitzky’s career in the late 1960s, the Ogonek and Pravda designs were treated as a single project.7 By then, the only document in her possession was a formal letter of invitation from Ogonek, all relevant design documents having been filed with the municipal authorities prior to construction.8 After the disappointment of the Pravda competition, Lissitzky must have been delighted by the Ogonek project’s swift advance toward construction. For Ogonek, he pared down and reassembled the elements of his Pravda design into a single three-­story building in a more strictly functional style, which clearly subordinated expressive geometry to the whole. The imperative to simplify now came not from Lissitzky’s critics but from his patrons, who were themselves under orders to unify their production, storage, distribution, and editorial operations following an audit by the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate (Rabkrin) in 1929. Ogonek had succeeded in implementing the auditors’ recommendations on the introduction of labor discipline and the rationalization of its various operations, which resulted in a leaner operation and, even more importantly, one better positioned to exploit the projected centralization of press production under the first Five-­Year Plan. These factors contributed to the unmistakable sense of urgency in Ogonek’s construction plans. So fast was the press’s growth that it had proposed an addition to its editorial offices on Strastnoi boulevard at the same time it sought a new printing plant. But the promise of a 30,000-­cubic-­meter building on 1st Samotechnyi lane, which would finally unite the different aspects of the press’s operations at a single location, put an end to further work on existing facilities. A rush of planning at the close of 1929, followed by inevitable lags in obtaining construction materials and permits the next spring, gave the building process a halting start.9 Even though work was optimistically slated for completion by November 1930, it would continue into the middle of the decade, outlasting Lissitzky’s tenure on the project.10 Whether the parameters of the brief were ill-­defined or simply unstable, they left the Ogonek printing works in flux. Lissitzky submitted his 160

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initial proposal in March 1930 and a second, more ambitious design in May; by September, a third version of the design was adopted, but it was never fully constructed (fig. 6.2). Each phase of the design process saw the facilities grow larger in anticipation of the press’s achievable capacity. In March, the building consisted of a three-­story, T-­shaped corpus in the center of no. 17 1st Samotechnyi lane, parallel to the street. At its base, perpendicular to the street and set back from it slightly, Lissitzky placed a one-­story production facility constructed of exposed Vierendeel trusses, and let the glazed hemicylindrical staircase of the main building serve as a simple, attractive frontage. With the site expanded to nos. 17–­19, the May variant shifted the central axis of the main building closer to the street and added some inventive gambits of Lissitzky’s own (fig. 6.3). Reviving the more expressive volumes of his Pravda design, he appended an additional low-­lying structure: a two-­story extended half-­c ylinder containing showers, lockers, and a canteen, topped by an observation deck. From the latter, press workers could overlook a lightweight enclosure suspended from a set of four thirteen-­meter ferroconcrete arches, which was intended to house press’s offset machines. This remarkable feature of Lissitzky’s May Ogonek design echoes several contemporaneous designs. Most direct is its resonance with the interior of a Vesnin brothers competition design for a Kyiv train station published a few years earlier (fig. 6.4). The production facilities of Lissitzky’s Ogonek plant effectively turn the structure of the Vesnins’ railway T h e Im a g e C o mp l e x

Figure 6.2 Ogonek printing plant, nos. 17–­19 1st Samotechnyi lane. Diagram by Mitesh Dixit.

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Figure 6.3 El Lissitzky, Ogonek printing plant, May 1930. Ink on vellum. Central Archive of Scientific-­Technical Documentation of Moscow

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Figure 6.4 Aleksandr, Viktor, and Leonid Vesnin, competition project for a train station in Kyiv, 1928, from Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 3 (1928). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (85-­ S1352).

Figure 6.5 Le Corbusier, Palace of the Soviets, 1931. Pencil, red pencil, and China ink on paper, 28 × 43.3 in. (71 × 110 cm). Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris.

station inside out, and in doing so, they suggest a key difference in the architects’ source material and interpretation. Where the Vesnins’ hall looks to the grand reinforced concrete arches of the Perret brothers, like those of the Esders Clothing Factory of 1919–­1920, Lissitzky’s approach recalls suspension bridges, like Eugène Freyssinet’s 1923 bridge at Saint-­ Pierre du Vauvray. Jean-­Louis Cohen has proposed Freyssinet’s bridge as a source for Le Corbusier’s competition design for the Palace of Soviets, executed in 1931, which supports the roof of its main auditorium in a similar fashion (fig. 6.5), but the coincidence with Lissitzky’s Ogonek design suggests that a broader range of references might have been in play.11 Whether Lissitzky drew his inspiration from a common source or discovered by chance the device that Le Corbusier would soon use to such great effect, he gave the feature a new metaphorical charge. Instead of a dramatic, airy interior sheltering a continuous flow of travelers at the railway station, or deliberating delegates at the USSR’s new political heart, Lissitzky’s supporting arches traverse a stream of textual production. Just as importantly, he invites workers at the plant to observe the spectacle of this frenetic churn from the calm of the opposing terrace, much as a traveler might contemplate a sublime natural feature. T h e Im a g e C o mp l e x

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As Lissitzky’s daring treatment of the structure implicitly acknowledges, the offset machines it would house were among the most significant motives for the building. The Ogonek printing works was initially conceived as a way to update and expand production under the planned economy (and to replace existing facilities that management derided as “exceptionally lousy”), but it soon became an urgently needed home for the first of the press’s new offset machines, which had been ordered from abroad despite an industry-­wide cap on imports. Once this exceptional purchase was permitted, the press could use it as leverage to force the Commissariat of Labor’s Committee on Press Affairs to express support for the project before the party’s Central Committee and the relevant regional authorities. It should be evident to all, the reasoning went, that “the building has to be readied if only for this machine,” which was scheduled to arrive in January 1931.12 But the most consequential factor in the Ogonek commission—­and the ultimate justification for the acquisition of the new offset machines—­ was the projected transformation of Ogonek’s printing facilities into the central base for mass illustrated-­periodical publication for the entire Soviet Union. Early in February 1930, the Committee on Press Affairs proposed that production of technical and popular-­scientific mass literature should be concentrated within Ogonek’s facilities. This proposal was a testament to the continuous growth of the press, which, in addition to its flagship illustrated newspaper, published popular titles ranging from Zhenskii zhurnal (Women’s Journal), Za rulem (Behind the Wheel), Zhurnalist (Journalist), and Izobretatel’ (Inventor), to Sovetskoe foto (Soviet Photo), the latter accompanied by a book series whose recent titles included a Russian translation of László Moholy-­Nagy’s Painting Photography Film.13 But if the Committee on Press Affairs wanted to gang a series of new journals into the press’s already successful stable of products, it would also be forced to recognize how overextended Ogonek was: half of the press’s products were printed elsewhere in 1929, and its director, Mikhail Koltsov, had already reported to the Economic Council of the RSFSR that a new printing plant with up-­to-­date offset machines would be required just to meet current demand. In a risky maneuver, the management of the press resolved to “take energetic measures toward the transfer of new mass journals to Ogonek,” even if lack of action by the Committee on Press Affairs meant that “we cannot really count on swift fulfillment of the concentration [of production].”14 At the very least, Ogonek wagered, the relevant authorities would be more amenable to updating the press’s facilities and equipment if it doubled down on its own growth. When the concentration of illustrated periodical production within Ogonek finally occurred, it completely reshaped the architect’s brief. At the end of July, a rather distraught Lissitzky, apparently kept in the dark about the press’s plans, discovered that “the whole program has been changed, actually, for it’s now going to be a printing works for twenty-­ 164

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Figure 6.6 El Lissitzky, Ogonek printing plant, March 1930, from Literaturnaia gazeta, August 1930.

four periodicals. So in fact, a new design has to be made, but the foundations have already been started on. Maybe I will have to write to the newspaper—­‘Please do not accuse me of the death of my design.’”15 Lissitzky was wrong about the number of periodicals the plant would be producing (the final tally was thirty), but he was right about the fate of his May design. The timing could not have been worse. Not only had work on the building’s foundations already begun, but construction was finally approved by the Directorate of Building Administration just a week after Lissitzky learned that a new program was imminent.16 Exemplifying the confusion in the wake of the press’s sudden expansion is an August write-­up in Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary Gazette), which promoted the building as the USSR’s future base of mass illustrated-­periodical production, projected to issue 1.5 billion page-­impressions per year. Despite its late-­summer publication date, the article was illustrated by a perspective of Lissitzky’s initial March proposal (fig. 6.6).17 Such was the enthusiasm of the plan period. With construction on the building already under way, any changes to its design would necessarily be limited. An enlarged but greatly simplified design based on the May variant’s foundations was approved before the end of the calendar year, eliminating most of the design’s formal play but correcting certain obvious oversights.18 The pressure to adopt a less adventurous design would have been magnified by an August memo from an internal commission on distribution that condemned the condition of the press’s current warehouse, which ruined a great deal of paper by exposing it to the elements, and the management’s willful T h e Im a g e C o mp l e x

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Figure 6.7 El Lissitzky, Ogonek printing plant, September 1930. Above: diazo print, Central Archive of Scientific-­ Technical Documentation of Moscow. Below: elevation by Mitesh Dixit.

ignorance of such waste.19 In addition to its expanded production facilities, the revised design included a cargo bay—­inexplicably absent from the previous design, despite its obvious necessity in distributing large masses of printed matter. More visibly, the September variant reduced the building’s prominent horizontal glazing, replaced its flat roof with a shallow gable, and downgraded its adventurous appendages to simple production sheds with gambrel roofs (fig. 6.7). The final design’s porthole windows distantly recall the fluvial metaphors of the May variant, but the building’s open reflection on its own plasticity has disappeared. Instead of an interplay of structure and flow, the building has been reimagined as a sturdy craft, giving shelter from the elements. Even this much more mundane building would not be completed as planned. For reasons that are still unclear, sometime between the end of 1930 and 1933, when Mikhail Barshch became chief architect on the project, the entire design was truncated, leaving half of its main corpus unbuilt (fig. 6.2). Lissitzky might never have offered his protest against the death of his design in writing, but he was keenly aware of its fate. His complaint surfaced indirectly in other forums.

The Printer’s View

By August 1930, readers of Literaturnaia gazeta might be forgiven for overlooking the proposal by Artem Khalatov, head of the Union of State Book and Magazine Publishers, to transform the organization into the “Headquarters of the Cultural Revolution.” Ever since the Shakhty affair two years earlier, the call for cultural revolution had served as the battle cry in the Bolsheviks’ campaign to eliminate what little power the bour166

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geois intelligentsia still enjoyed. By the following year, when the USSR embarked on the first Five-­Year Plan’s ambitious program of industrialization and forcible collectivization of agriculture, members of the intelligentsia were everywhere regarded as potential saboteurs. Opposite them, upwardly mobile workers were seen emerging from the mass to become “red specialists.”20 These grand dynamics played out somewhat belatedly on the smaller stage of the publishing industry. Heralding the “forcible development of paper and polygraphic production” in 1931, Khalatov estimated that “only half of the [current] editorial cadres are suitable for the formidable work before the State Press.”21 Cultural revolution naturally demanded a press of and for the masses. What was surprising was the late date of this proposed transformation. Lissitzky would probably have read Khalatov’s article in Literaturnaia gazeta with some interest. He had worked for Khalatov at Pressa and his misadventures at Ogonek would undoubtedly have taught him to follow broader developments in the industry more closely. The expansion and large-­scale reorganization of the presses had complicated his Ogonek brief, yet it also brought into focus the real conditions of Soviet publishing. As Lissitzky’s public statements indicate, he understood quite clearly that the printing works should not only produce the instruments of cultural revolution in the form of books and periodicals; it should be the scene of that revolution as well. In April 1931, Lissitzky was invited to speak at a conference on press techniques, paper, and polygraphic production at the Moscow Polygraphics Institute, an event co-­organized by the Moscow House of the Press and the paper mill workers’ and printers’ unions. Over the course of several evenings, lectures on newspaper, journal, and book design were delivered by speakers representing the views of traditional newspaper and book publishing and vanguard practices (in addition to Lissitzky, Aleksei Gan and Solomon Telingater appeared). Lissitzky’s chief topic was book design, but his talk ranged widely. He made frequent reference to illustrated periodicals, offered comments on the division of labor in the field, and remarked on the emergence of a mass readership habituated to the conventions of cinema. The relevance of the discussions at the conference can be judged by the fact that a summary of its proceedings was included in the April 1931 issue of the journal Brigada khudozhnikov (Artists’ Brigade), for which Lissitzky also designed the cover.22 More enlightening than the published précis, however, is the stenographic record of Lissitzky’s presentation preserved in the archives of Nikolai Khardzhiev, which includes a transcript of the spirited—­and at times heated—­debate that followed the artist’s talk. With construction on the Ogonek plant under way, Lissitzky proposed to his audience of papermakers, typesetters, printers, designers, and students that the newly opened Moscow Polygraphics Institute should include an experimental design center organized around the idea that T h e Im a g e C o mp l e x

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“we now make a book that we construct, like a film.”23 For Lissitzky, this was an enduring theme, with consequences that were as much social as aesthetic. In his 1927 essay for the Gutenberg Jahrbuch, “Our Book,” he had recognized that the “the cinema and the illustrated weekly have triumphed” over traditional book production in part because “it is the great masses, the semi-­literate masses who have become the audience.”24 Familiar as Lissitzky’s thesis might have been, it was also newly relevant. The Moscow Polygraphics Institute had opened only the previous year and, as a surviving fragment of the recently shuttered VKhUTEIN (itself the successor to VKhUTEMAS, where Lissitzky had been an instructor), its institutional identity was not yet fully defined.25 Severed from VKhUTEIN’s propaedeutics, the Institute was potentially more akin to the many new colleges and technical schools—­between seven and ten of them—­that were projected to open in 1931 as part of what Khalatov called a “radical break in the preparation and organization of authorial and editorial-­publishing cadres.”26 Lissitzky’s speech was therefore something more than a review of past achievements. It made a case for the continuation of avant-­garde practice and pedagogy, turning the crisis conditions of the publishing industry into an advantage. Lissitzky’s wide-­ranging lecture came to a head in two closely related theses. The first aimed to define the image-­based semiliteracy to which he had referred in “Our Book.” The second rooted this hybrid reading in a gap created by the existing division of labor in publishing. Reading the illustrated press, he asserted, is much closer to watching a film than to reading a book, a literary fact that had already changed the way books en masse were regarded. Likewise, he saw assembling an illustrated periodical as more akin to film production (with its characteristic division between directing, shooting, and editing) than to the preparation of a manuscript for publication. With the book increasingly imitating the illustrated press, Lissitzky claims, authorship converges with design and editorial activities: Formerly, the book—­if I may put it this way—­was built for reading, for the ear; in the very beginning the book was a rarity, and indeed, people were semi-­literate and a book was usually read aloud. Now this situation has changed, and the process of hearing the book has turned into a process of scanning the book, that is, the book has become a unity of acoustics and optics. Registration of this fact leads to the construction of a book in which the author must be a polygraphist, that is, when he sees the book as it will look in the printer’s view; and contrariwise, the technical editor must be an author, i.e., he can present the material with which the book’s author wanted to relate a particular thing so that the reader receives a determined impression. And from this we get a new book. More and more, one meets with examples of what I’m talking about in illustrated journals. Often in the weeklies a caption becomes, as it were, the illustration of the image. . . . This is the presentation of a certain kind of content, as the sum of image and caption.27

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By this reckoning, the semiliterate audience grasps the meaning of a layout by shuttling between image and caption, reconfiguring the divided labor of the press as a social text. The montage has a dual role, which at once reveals the effect of the existing relations of production and serves as a means to transform them. Lissitzky’s ideas on this subject can be set in dialogue with those of Sergei Tretiakov, who believed that “collectivizing the labor of the book is a progressive process” that entails restructuring the publishing industry.28 This transformation of the relations of production can be accomplished, Lissitzky suggests, by merging the skills of the author and the technical (or layout) editor, while empowering the still-­marginal figure of the photo-­reporter. “Amateur production is not just a slogan, but has deep content,” he insists: A specialist is great for workflow but moves an outside person to the fore. If I may introduce one more example: contemporary photography. In the last three to four years, photography has made a great stride forward, and all of this was created not by specialists but by amateur photographers. In the field of book design . . . it can be shown how in polygraphic development the achievements of separate individuals, perceived externally, have been distorted, [and] at the same time, how invention from below will always essentially be the labor of a certain field; but this is possible only when everything that is made on this plane is actually approached with daring and revolutionary verve.29

These claims will have a familiar ring to many readers. They predict the celebrated call by Walter Benjamin, in a formulation influenced by Tretiakov, for a photographer who has “the ability to give his picture a caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary use value”—­a photographer who is also a writer, in other words.30 Lissitzky would surely have agreed with Benjamin’s claim that “only by transcending specialization in the process of intellectual production—­a specialization that, in the bourgeois view, constitutes its order—­can one make this production politically useful.”31 But the Western intellectual, borrowing the rhetoric of his Soviet comrades, strips it of its proximate target. By contrast, Lissitzky’s antispecialist position is historically concrete. Ever since the conviction of forty-­nine bourgeois specialists of industrial sabotage in the Shakhty trial of 1928, one of the chief aims of the Bolshevik party had been to cultivate its own “red specialists,” who could replace the bourgeois specialists who ran Soviet enterprises at the behest of unskilled Bolshevik managers. As Stalin put it in his February 4, 1931, address to the All-­Union Congress of Factory Managers, “It’s time for Bolsheviks themselves to become specialists. Technology in the period of reconstruction decides everything. And a manager who doesn’t want to learn technology, who doesn’t want to master technology—­this is a joke, T h e Im a g e C o mp l e x

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not a manager.”32 By contrasting the “outside” specialist with the labor of invention from below, Lissitzky adapts the new party line to the conditions of the publishing industry and aligns the type of hybrid author-­ editor he thinks could be trained within an experimental branch of the Moscow Polygraphics Institute with the ideal type of the red specialist. The subtext of Lissitzky’s reference to the new Soviet managerial policy was made even clearer by Solomon Telingater, his former student and most sympathetic respondent. Where Lissitzky contrasts workers’ creativity with specialists’ efficiency, Telingater openly derides the latter. The memory of rationalization campaigns (like those at Ogonek in 1929) was still strong among press workers, but the growing demand for labor, embodied in the numerous technical institutes set to open in 1931, had suddenly empowered skilled workers. And because the printing industry was subject to two competing planning boards—­the Committee on Press Affairs at the Commissariat of Labor and the Printing Committee at VSNKh—­union representatives could portray both as essentially arbitrary disciplinary bodies.33 In the printers’ view, Soviet managers could be conflated with their bourgeois counterparts, right down to their taste for formalism. Telingater therefore proposes that the graphic artist’s “work in the field of organization of effects” should not be confused with the “so-­called hygiene of the eye” outlined in Moholy-­Nagy’s recently translated Painting Photography Film—­an approach, he intimates, which is favored at “VSNKh, where certain comrades have tried to propose a design standard.”34 To show how standard formats weaken the effect of a text on its audience, Telingater recounts an anecdote that he says “those comrades who are involved with political circles have often observed.” He tells of a worker who is simultaneously educated in basic literacy and in the tenets of Marxism, who can understand but not summarize a sentence from a political primer. “Obviously too much attention was expended on the mechanics of reading, while he failed to penetrate the content,” Telingater concludes. Here, he suggests, the technical editor can intervene. “Have no doubt: if the necessary places in that sentence had been activated, he could have engraved it in his memory.”35 If this interpretation of press work promised empowerment and creative control, those same possibilities stoked the audience’s anxiety. Lissitzky’s rhetoric of “invention from below” was technically in line with official discourse, but Telingater’s more forceful interjection led some members of the audience to object that the presumed equality of authorial and editorial roles could not apply in all situations. The immediate source of anxiety was, as one audience member pointed out, the Resolution on Poster Agitation and Propaganda issued by the Central Committee on March 11, 1931. Following the discovery that anti-­Soviet posters had been printed on the state’s own presses, all poster production was to be directly overseen by the Central Committee 170

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itself.36 To some in the audience, Lissitzky’s call for experimentation, whether affirmative or not, would put printers on a slippery slope to dissidence. To others, the radically horizontal model of the proposal conflicted with the reality of hierarchy. “If [a technical editor] is designing [a text by] Stalin,” one audience member reasoned, “then he must be of the same stature as Stalin, and once he accentuates the important places in the book, he must answer for that accentuation. Who among you would presume to activate Stalin?” This comment triggered a murmur in the auditorium, to which an unnamed speaker—­perhaps Lissitzky—­replies, “Really, I proposed something else.”37 Indeed, Lissitzky had spoken only of invention from below, in which new design standards are attained by a creative encounter with recently developed means of production. When Lissitzky designed the cover for the issue of Brigada khudozhnikov in which the conference proceedings appeared, he took pains to avoid this sort of misinterpretation by openly affirming the authority of the Five-­Year Plan (fig. 6.8). Compositionally, Lissitzky’s cover is very simple, yet it succeeds in activating the viewer through gesture and sign. The image consists of three elements: a team of workers labors in the distance, while a pair of clasped hands emblazoned with the numbers 518 and 1040 occupies the immediate foreground. Inscrutable today, these numbers would have been immediately intelligible to almost every Soviet citizen as the plan’s third-­year targets for factories and machine-­tractor stations.38 The hands to which these plan targets correspond, left and right of one body, interpellate the viewer’s own body as the support for the “arms” of the plan in a potent demonstration of the total content of image and caption, much as Lissitzky described in his lecture. By joining the abstract plan targets into an embodied unity, the double signification of the hands activates the foreground-­background relation of the image, enlisting the viewer in a gesture that cheers the workers who fulfill the targets. Or, read the other way around, it is the targets themselves that applaud the labor that fulfills them. This praise of planning can also be understood in terms of the experimental authorship Lissitzky advocated in his remarks. The background of the cover design is not an image of labor plain and simple, but a still from Dziga Vertov’s 1928 film The Eleventh Year, and its approbative gesture is an endorsement of Vertov’s filmmaking practice.39 For Vertov, a research-­based shooting plan had become the principal means of circumventing the narrativizing tendencies of the film script. A practice that garnered little attention in the filmmaker’s short newsreels sparked controversy as he moved onto the uncharted territory of the feature-­ length nonfiction film. After a quarrel with the head of the motion picture studio Sovkino over what were seen as excessive shooting costs, Vertov refused to submit a script for his Man with a Movie Camera project and was promptly fired from the studio. The Eleventh Year signaled the filmmaker’s success in working on his own terms outside of Sovkino, at T h e Im a g e C o mp l e x

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Figure 6.8 El Lissitzky, cover of Brigada khudozhnikov no. 4 (1931). Letterpress, 11.1 × 8.3 in. (28.2 × 21.2 cm). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (85-­ S419).

the All-­Ukrainian Photo-­Film Directorate, VUFKU, where he would not submit a script until 1933. This he finally did with the caveat that the script forced him to “renounce visuals, sound, the mutual interaction of montage phrases with one another, tonal and rhythmic combinations . . . that all develop visually and aurally, organically linking together into an idea without the help of intertitles and words.”40 For Lissitzky, who was close to Vertov and had helped promote his work abroad, the nonverbal characteristics of the filmmaker’s work would have made it a paradigmatic example of the search for a bond with a semiliterate mass audience.41 But none of this operated outside of the framework of the plan: not only do the hands of Lissitzky’s montage belong to a cinemagoer cheering the screen, they also show the plan-­ 172

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targets of the revolution’s fourteenth year celebrating the accumulated labor of the eleventh—­Vertov’s included. This recuperation of Vertov’s authorial production within the framework of the plan is not without significance. Lissitzky was almost certainly aware of the role the script had played in Sovkino’s attempts to control costs on Vertov’s films. He knew that experimentation was expensive but felt strongly that funding it was not wasteful, for without it a new audience could not be reached. It is on this note that he ends his lecture at the Moscow Polygraphics Institute, reminding his audience that in order to produce the world’s cheapest automobile, Henry Ford was willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on tests. Such an approach is necessary, Lissitzky insists, because “no invention in any field is worth anything when it is only described on paper. When it is made, then it can be judged. The same can be said for polygraphics. I think it would be necessary to set aside a special printing works, where every experimental proposal would be carried out.”42 Lissitzky had expressed this sentiment on many occasions, but in 1931 it could pass as an allusion to Stalin’s address to the All-­Union Congress of Factory Managers, which upbraided those who think “that to lead means to sign papers” without entering into the minutiae of day-­to-­day operations.43 Of course, where Stalin was calling for greater managerial oversight and intervention in Soviet industry, Lissitzky was imagining a zone of limitless experimentation at the center of rationalized production. It was this inflection of the Stalinist text that inspired such hand-­wringing among his audience. Lissitzky’s call for an experimental printing works could not have been more at odds with the realities of the moment. Indeed, the thought of an exemption from the exigencies of the economy, of a center immune to the effects of centralization, must have been born of the situation he faced at Ogonek. When his printing plant appeared again in the back pages of Literaturnaia gazeta in the fall of 1931, a photograph of the construction site had replaced the perspective drawing of 1930. But, inspiring though it may have been, this document of construction also served as a reminder that his most ambitious plans would not be carried out. The architect’s proposal for amateur-­led experimentation within the press was also increasingly improbable. The article accompanying the photograph, which informed readers of Ogonek’s reincorporation as the Journal-­and-­Newspapers Union, Zhurgaz, closed with an acknowledgment that the press would work hard to observe the August 15, 1931, Central Committee Resolution on the Work of the Presses. The text of the new resolution, published in full on the paper’s front page, decried the redundancy and low quality of the USSR’s illustrated periodicals, promising to “review a network of journals, diminish their number, and improve the structure of their editorial staff.” To facilitate this restructuring, the Central Committee now deemed it “necessary to differentiate [the scale of] remuneration and institute a system of honoraria that would stimuT h e Im a g e C o mp l e x

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late the advancement of the more talented authors.”44 After nearly three years of persecution, the status of the intelligentsia was being restored.

Converting Currents: Dneprostroi in Pictures

In 1932, the design and layout of photo-­based illustrated periodicals became Lissitzky’s chief occupation. That April he signed contracts for two high-­profile print designs celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution: a photobook, eventually titled The USSR Is Building Socialism, and a special issue of the large-­format photo-­illustrated monthly USSR in Construction devoted to the completion of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station (Dneprostroi)—­the first of nineteen issues he designed for the magazine during the final decade of his life (fig. 6.9). Thanks to the Central Committee’s approval of a graduated pay scale in the publishing industry, the transition required no financial sacrifice. The USSR Is Building Socialism paid Lissitzky four thousand rubles and USSR in Construction half that.45 In other words, the book earned him only slightly less than a large-­scale exhibition design, and the journal slightly more than his Ogonek building. The money from these two jobs, which Lissitzky completed in a matter of months, exceeded the annual income of most unskilled workers by a factor of four.46 But still it did not go far. Stalin’s twin policies of forced collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization had plunged the Soviet economy into free fall: mass arrests of kulaks and widespread peasant resistance decimated food production, while excessive investment in never-­to-­be-­completed construction projects tied up already-­scarce resources and inflated production costs. In response, the state issued a torrent of paper currency, which depleted the value of the ruble and caused hoarding and speculation in silver coinage.47 Of course, for Lissitzky the appeal of these projects went beyond strictly economic factors, significant as these might have been. USSR in Construction offered him a unique opportunity to explore new design possibilities in the illustrated press and to shape the perception of Soviet architecture before the largest possible audience. Since its launch in December 1929, the magazine had delivered velvety rotogravure images printed on the finest presses available to Russian-­, German-­, French-­, and English-­speaking audiences around the globe. Like almost any Soviet photographer, writer, or architect, Lissitzky was already familiar with the publication. True, he probably did not know that USSR in Construction originated within Ogonek before being transferred to the State Publishing House (GIZ), due to Ogonek’s overwhelming burdens.48 But he would have been keenly aware of the magazine as a major purveyor of architectural photography. Testifying to this role is a photograph of a teaching aid used in the basic course at VKhUTEIN, which 174

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pairs English offprints of USSR in Construction with photographs clipped from the domestic and foreign architectural press showing high-­profile designs from Konstantin Melnikov and Le Corbusier, among others (fig. 6.10). Moreover, Lissitzky was already using large, high-­quality photographs from USSR in Construction in his work as an exhibition designer. In 1930, he had repurposed a photograph of a chugging smokestack by Dmitry Debabov, published as the frontispiece of the magazine’s inaugural issue, for a montage installed on the curved photomural of the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden (fig. 5.15).49 From a literary standpoint, the key factor in Lissitzky’s decision to seek employment with USSR in Construction was the level of creative freedom that talent could now be granted in the Soviet press. After almost two years of publication, a shift in USSR in Construction’s editorial stance T h e Im a g e C o mp l e x

Figure 6.9 El Lissitzky, cover of USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1932). Rotogravure, 16.5 × 11.6 in. (42 × 29.5 cm). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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Figure 6.10 Unknown photographer, view of photographs and illustrated pages pinned to presentation boards, used for didactic purposes by professors of the Basic Course at the VKhUTEIN, 1930. Gelatin silver print, approx. 4.3 × 5.6 in. (10.9 × 14.1 cm). Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

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had given its designers and photojournalists greater control over their product. The January 1932 issue of the magazine featured a single, long-­ form photo essay coauthored by the photojournalist Max Alpert—­an experiment authorized by the December 1931 issue designed by the celebrated German photomonteur John Heartfield, whose work Soviet critics called exemplary.50 Lissitzky’s hiring confirmed the magazine’s embrace of this new model of authorship with a contract guaranteeing him coauthorship of its plan and full control over its forty-­eight pages of montage. This status is privileged in the issue too, as evidenced by the inclusion of three signed photomontages between its covers. Up to this point, the magazine had followed standard industry practice, giving photographers a credit line just beneath their images, but Lissitzky’s montages are signed within the frame, and he is credited as “artist” in the issue’s back matter—­a traditional mode of attribution that was a first for the magazine.51 This unprecedented creative control confirmed that the experimental authorship Lissitzky had championed the previous spring was possible in the pages of the very illustrated magazines that inspired it. At the same time, artistic freedom within the frame did nothing to change the frame’s function. The Dneprostroi issue’s October publication date was scheduled to coincide with the official opening of the chapter six

Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, celebrating the completed construction of the dam as the fulfillment of Lenin’s electrification plan, GOELRO. Not surprisingly, this project was the subject of a great many communications during the first Five-­Year Plan.52 Working in tandem with Alpert, Lissitzky traveled to the site, created a narrative and storyboard, and populated it with photographs, charts, and photomontages. Lissitzky and Alpert chose to frame the dam’s completion as a rebuke to H. G. Wells’s public skepticism toward GOELRO, a resonant farewell to the science fictions of the avant-­garde’s futurist years, which we examined in chapter 1. But as illuminating as this line of interpretation may be, it cannot be attributed to a private authorial decision, since the narrative template was already circulating in the press.53 If the site visit with Alpert gave Lissitzky a better grasp of the photojournalist’s process, it also offered him the chance for some architectural tourism. The importance of large infrastructure projects for the Soviet architectural imaginary is evident in the teaching aid shown in figure 6.10, which culled several pages from the March 1930 issue of USSR in Construction focusing on district power plants. But compared to these smaller installations, the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station garnered far more of the press’s attention. Since the NEP era, when its planning commission was headed by Lev Trotsky, the project was given detailed coverage in specialist publications like the engineering monthly Stroitel’naia promyshlennost’ (Building Industry). Soon it migrated into the architectural press. In 1929 the autumn issue of Sovremennaia arkhitektura (Contemporary Architecture), originally intended to focus on production and administrative structures, was dedicated to Dneprostroi alone. Lissitzky himself included two drawings of the project in his 1930 book Russia: The Reconstruction of Architecture in the Soviet Union.54 By this time, he had certainly heard firsthand accounts of the immense construction site, which must have piqued his curiosity. Not only was he acquainted with the lead architect of the hydroelectric station and its auxiliary structures, Viktor Vesnin, but the construction of the dam had been featured in his friend Vertov’s The Eleventh Year, a film whose photography he esteemed highly and likely wished to emulate in USSR in Construction. Both aspects emerge in the text of the Dneprostroi issue, which must have been outlined with Lissitzky and Alpert, as their contract specified, even though it was written by Boris Agapov. In a repetition of a familiar motif, we read that “fifteen tons of paper had been spent on various plans for the subjugation of the Dniepr [since the time of the Tsars] . . . but only the Working Class Government showed itself capable” of meeting the challenge.55 State planning and commissioning of monumental architecture is a prominent subtheme of the issue’s narrative, but it is the ability to execute these plans that valorizes the presence of the photojournalist. In the text, the construction site is treated as an enormous sepulcher. “The pipes are invisible,” we are reminded. “Those tremenT h e Im a g e C o mp l e x

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dous steel snails will never again be photographed, they are forever buried in the concrete.” The internal apparatus of the dam is figured here as the discarded shell of the molluscan supraorganism of human labor—­a literary conceit, to be sure, but one rooted in fact. The Dneprostroi site was also the scene of the archeological excavation of an ancient Scythian skeleton, partially exhumed by chance, an event thematized to great eschatological effect in Vertov’s The Eleventh Year and continued in Lissitzky and Alpert’s treatment. The image of the entombed skeleton, with its evocation of pride, fate, and ruination, transposes the labor of construction to a melodramatic key, but the hydroelectric dam provides an effective image in other respects too. Here, labor is depicted as a flow on par with the movement of water and electricity through the structure. This relationship can be seen in a signed montage published in The USSR Is Building Socialism (the only signed image in the book) that was probably intended for USSR in Construction. A bronze statue of Lenin by V. V. Kozlov, buoyed by a cheering mass and backed by billowing clouds, points to a map of the GOELRO electrification plan atop the dam (fig. 6.11). Lenin’s slogan “Communism Is Soviet Power plus Electrification of the Whole Country!” links his mouth to an immense power line behind the map. Reworking a motif from a 1930 poster by Gustav Klutsis (fig. 6.12), Lissitzky depicts the masses as a countercurrent surging into the dam and transmuting the absent river into the electrical installation above. The tone of the montage, which approaches a hysterical fervor of self-­abandon not present in its source, typifies the mood of the cultural revolution period more than its immediate aftermath, making it ill-­suited to USSR in Construction. Indeed, while Stalin’s regime wanted to dramatize both its public works and its fealty to Lenin, it was no longer interested in depicting Figure 6.11 El Lissitzky, “Communism Is Soviet Power Plus the Electrification of the Whole Country,” The USSR Is Building Socialism, 1933. Letterpress. Russian State Library, Moscow.

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labor as a potent, seething mass. The more desirable approach, under current circumstances, would be to present it as an equivalent to the placid waters of the completed dam’s reservoir, so that it might coolly meet the flow of capital, present in the magazine in the form of American construction equipment. As Erika Wolf has shown, capital also served as the magazine’s final cause. The preferred subscribers of USSR in Construction were foreign banks, industrial joint stock organizations, foreign politicians, literary figures, and foreign workers, in that order. Its chief editor, Giorgy Piatakov, simultaneously served as both deputy to the Commissar of Heavy Industry and head of the Soviet State Bank, as if to confirm Allan Sekula’s polemical claim that photography, insofar as it wants to become a universal equivalent like money, inevitably documents the triumph of exchange value.56 In a revised form, the compositional elements of figure 6.11 served as the visual framework of the published Dneprostroi issue. The first and last montages of the issue use the visual structure theorized in Lissitzky’s address to the Moscow Polygraphics Institute to translate the violent surges of the earlier montage into a more placid Stalinist idiom. The first montage of the Dneprostroi issue shows an enormous banner mounted on the dam, which frames a cropped image of hands at a control panel (fig. 6.13). By breaking this frame in two places—­with a knob above and the knuckle of a hand below—­the montage visually subordinates it to the haptic workspace it bounds. The scale and apparent three-­dimensionality of these hands echo the readers’ own hands holding the magazine, evoking the assured command of the technical intelligentsia rather than the heroic struggle of labor. Much like the montage from The USSR Is Building Socialism, the last page of the Dneprostroi issue suggests the transformation of labor-­ power into electrical current by raising a series of power lines above a densely packed crowd, here interspersed with banners (fig. 6.14). Using two cropped images of banners that bear the slogan from Stalin’s 1931 T h e Im a g e C o mp l e x

Figure 6.12 Gustav Klutsis, NEP Russia Will Become Socialist Russia, 1930. Lithograph, 40.4 × 28.3 in. (102.7 × 72 cm). Tate, London, David King Collection; presented to Tate Archive by David King 2016.

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Figure 6.13 El Lissitzky, “Dneprostroi Will Become a Great Monument of Lenin’s Electrification of the USSR,” USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1932). Rotogravure, 16.5 × 11.6 in. (42 × 29.5 cm). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

speech to Bolshevik factory managers, “There Are No Fortresses That the Bolsheviks Could Not Take,” Lissitzky creates a mise en abyme of party discourse. A single word from the slogan, “Bolsheviks,” appears to hold aloft an image of a banner emblazoned with the entire slogan—­ itself a detail enlarged from the crowd below, as we discover upon closer examination. This repetition reveals the parallelism that structures the montage. By treating the word “Bolsheviks” as a stand-­in for the masses below, Lissitzky positions the party as the mediator between the planned industrial development and the reserve army of labor depicted in the upper and lower levels of the image, respectively. These two montages bookend a bevy of photographs, charts, and diagrams documenting the construction of the dam and mapping the flow 180

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Figure 6.14 El Lissitzky, “There Is No Fortress That the Bolsheviks Cannot Take,” USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1932). Rotogravure, 16.5 × 11.6 in. (42 × 29.5 cm). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

of its power to nearby industrial installations. The most unusual among these is a two-­page spread signed by Lissitzky that includes a large portrait of Stalin—­his first appearance within the pages of the magazine (fig. 6.15).57 Here, floodlights trace a diagonal line from the dam behind Stalin to a hand engaging its power switch. The hand itself is partly reflected in the steel plate, the polished surface of which bathes Stalin in a soft reflected light (the material basis of this reflection, steel—­stal’ in Russian—­offers an occasion for a subtle iconography of the party leader’s pseudonym). At the formal level, the montage has dispensed almost entirely with hard-­edged cuts. Instead, it masks them with the illusion of a freely circulating light that instantaneously sutures all components of the image into a single complex associative space. Although it is easy to T h e Im a g e C o mp l e x

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Figure 6.15 El Lissitzky, “The Current Is Switched On,” USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1932). Rotogravure, 16.5 × 23.2 in. (42 × 59 cm). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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miss, the center of the image is its light source, Vesnin’s power station, whose façade is so brilliantly illuminated by the electricity it generates that it all but disappears amid the nearby lens flares. In many respects Lissitzky’s first job for USSR in Construction followed the script of his 1931 lecture at the Moscow Polygraphics Institute, but the situation in the presses had changed in the intervening year. In spring 1933, Khalatov summarized an editorial meeting that assessed Lissitzky’s first two designs for the magazine. “According to the general opinion of the editorial board,” he reported, “their design is, without argument, successful, but we declared it necessary not to overuse photomontage, in order that the magazine not lose its simplicity and naturalness.”58 Before signing on at USSR in Construction, Lissitzky had championed photomontage as the principal technique of a potentially transformative type of authorship, but it entered the journal’s lexicon without altering its power structure. Instead, the technique was treated as a spectacular extravagance, acceptable only insofar as it rendered the magazine’s programmatic realism artless. Lissitzky could be forgiven for not grasping this dynamic very clearly. Writing to Jan Tschichold after submitting his final mockup, he confessed, “I am snowed under with work, so that by the time I finish something (and it all has to be done in a tearing hurry) I am unable to see what is there. We fought against ‘art,’ we spat on its altar—­and we got what we wanted.”59 The facts of the case, however, suggest the opposite chapter six

conclusion. Believe as he might that he had finally overcome the historical limits of the artist’s cloistered existence, Lissitzky was busy enough to overlook the fact that precisely his status as an artist (and the modicum of fame he had achieved abroad) was being instrumentalized in his work for the regime.

Regular readers of USSR in Construction undoubtedly recognized a false modesty in the magazine’s stated editorial goal of providing interested observers around the globe with straightforward visual evidence of Soviet construction. Its manifest aims were probably better expressed by the editors of the magazine Building Industry, when they recognized that the “method of international politics characteristic of our era is the creation of engineering structures, often colossal in scope, which constitute the real political and economic nodes of world politics.”60 As this statement suggests, the canals, rail lines, and power plants that regularly appeared in the pages of USSR in Construction were emblems of internal economic development and, as such, instruments of international politics. For architects like Lissitzky, these images represented the potentially global significance of their chosen profession. And while Lissitzky had foresworn such “planetary tasks” for his own work in 1928, his inaugural design for USSR in Construction shows that Dneprostroi could still be admired as a model of architecture’s ability to reorganize human affairs at the largest possible scale. Of course, the magazine itself, in the material fact of its circulation, also testifies to the comparable international import of the Soviet press, even if it relied on a more modest infrastructure. Lissitzky’s Ogonek plant should be understood as a political instrument in this sense. In diagramming the material forces that shaped both the original commission and the operations of the plant, we discover an architect subject to the shifting currents of the Soviet economy, which reached him through the demands of his patrons. This mediated relationship to the economy can, in turn, be correlated to the persistent, unfulfilled desire for both control and unlimited experiment that Lissitzky expressed in his statements on press organization in 1931. If his own efforts confirmed the possibility of these progressive reforms, his final embrace of mass-­media design was partly the result of financial trade-­offs. In the midst of the first Five-­Year Plan, ruthless class war unexpectedly gave way to economic incentives for those segments of the intelligentsia whose willing participation the Soviet state required. Producing high-­quality content for the Stalinist press was, it turned out, a flourishing trade.

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Afterword This book has argued that the immense productivity of El Lissitzky’s career was driven by his desire to effect a shift from one system of the arts to another, which would replace the culminating importance of the book with a renewed public role for architecture. Again and again, it finds Lissitzky poised between two roles governed by competing ideas about what kind of artist could best meet the demands of the moment. Adapting an idiom Lissitzky himself used to describe his work and that of his peers, we may say that print designs like For the Voice betray the architect’s impatience with the anachronism of the book, or that the Wolkenbügel projects the printer’s certainties into the world beyond the page. To the extent that the preceding chapters have elucidated his work in these terms, they have offered an apology for the artist’s career. My argument departs from Lissitzky’s own testimony where it proposes a historical and developmental narrative for these roles. Instead of progressing toward a goal, I have presented this tortuous decade and a half of activity within a stable framework that nevertheless underwent periodic rearticulations. My approach to these rearticulations, which change the significance of the elements in the work without changing the elements themselves, remains rooted in Lissitzky’s own claim that what the artist does “is only part of the realization of the creative act.”1 But where Lissitzky viewed that process as driven by historical necessity, this book has discovered only contingencies, failures, and unexpected realignments. At these critical junctures, the imbrication of Lissitzky’s career with both technological and political factors is set in relief. For much of the period since his death, Lissitzky has functioned as the proverbial exception that proves the rule in writing on the Soviet avant-­garde. The proper name of that rule is Constructivism, and because Lissitzky’s association with the term has so often been a source of disagreement, I have used it advisedly in this book—­as a common noun. By promoting constructivism in Europe, Lissitzky helped make it something that the West could recognize (or perhaps misrecognize) as a style appropriate to the young Soviet Union. At the same time, he joined ASNOVA to strengthen its “literary forces” against the attacks of the constructivists at Lef.2 In my view, which I hope the preceding chapters have Afterword

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persuasively supported, Lissitzky’s constructivism was neither a contradiction in terms nor an act of bad faith, but a consequence of the axiom he stated in a 1921 lecture: “a sign is born, later gets its name, and later still its meaning is discovered.”3 His conviction that meaning appears only at a remove allowed him to participate in the formation of constructivism with as much legitimacy as the other factions that claimed the mantle for themselves (Moscow had three in 1924, unbeknownst to Lissitzky).4 But just as important to his ability to develop a certain strain of constructivism were the aspects of the UNOVIS group’s creative endeavors that predate and to a certain degree predict the problematics that scholars have for too long associated with constructivism alone. In the formative years of the early 1920s, these three names—­UNOVIS, Constructivism, and ASNOVA—­articulated Lissitzky’s position differently without, however, fully encompassing it. Because of this disparity, most previous scholarship on Lissitzky has treated the neologism “Proun” as a reliable index of his difference from the broader field. As a corrective to this tendency, which unjustly favors the artist’s creative individuality over his protean collaborative streak, the preceding chapters have highlighted the limited and transitory status of that designation. In doing so, they have tried to untether the term Proun from the teleology Lissitzky assigned it—­or at least to loosen that tether—­in order to explore the pictorial surplus that fed his photographs and his most impractical architectural fantasies with equal potency. Lissitzky’s recognition that this surplus had an immanent organizational function is a fundamental feature of his position, which he developed in friendly and sometimes combative relationships with artists and critics at home and abroad. By unearthing the sources of that conviction, I hope to have restored a measure of dialogical complexity not just to Lissitzky’s thinking but to that of his interlocutors. More illuminating than the shell game of art world nomenclature is Lissitzky’s attempt to come to grips with the photomechanical processes that transformed print, a prolonged struggle that represents the most compelling (if not the only) continuity in the artist’s career. Much of this book has been devoted to way this encounter shaped Lissitzky’s artistic practice. Although he initially associated his photographic experiments with constructivism and the dematerialization of sculpture, they are revealed in equally significant respects by the new term he introduced in 1926–­1927, photo-­painting. Where factographic approaches to photography sought to index the moment of production, photo-­painting exploited gelatin silver paper’s ability to accumulate traces of factual reality in no discernable order, making it as amenable to the false needs of consumer capitalism as it was to the fever dreams of Soviet industry. Although Lissitzky found some buyers for these irrationally asynchronous images on both sides of the economic divide, it was his fluency in photomontage and constructivist typography, two styles that he considered exhausted 186

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by the mid-­1920s, that helped him secure an income in production. In certain key respects, a more narrowly technical and economic account of Lissitzky’s embrace of photography and photomechanical reproduction over the obsolescent (and increasingly artisanal) techniques of letterpress and lithography tells us more about the politics of his art than a study of its political iconography. Accordingly, this book neither discovers a meaningful break in Lissitzky’s work after Stalin’s rise to power nor frames the search for one as a productive avenue for future research. To be sure, the look and much of the content of Soviet culture under Stalin is identifiably different from what came before, but the techniques by which Lissitzky created his most effective images of the Stalinist system were elaborated long before the system had been imagined. That system did, however, provide him with the commissions—­and ever-­scarce materials—­that made it possible to realize his designs. His continuing experimentation with the equipment of the exhibition space, first as a support for his own print designs and eventually for those of the whole Soviet press, enabled his integration into the state propaganda system at the same pace that Stalin gained control of it. As a proven designer of large-­scale exhibitions, Lissitzky could win commissions as an architect, but only as a leading light of experimental photography did his exhibitions command attention. His design of the Ogonek printing works, I argue, confirms this sequence in spectacular fashion. There is nothing Stalinist about Lissitzky’s lifelong impatience with untried experiments that only exist on paper, but the pragmatism of that attitude could not prevent him from participating in the Stalinist system. To frame the question of his participation in absolute terms is precisely to impose upon the artist a measure which he did not possess, which of course we may benefit from doing. But to insist absolutely upon such a framing threatens to obscure significant differences within Lissitzky’s late work that may help us illuminate those ethical gray areas that Soviet subjects were made to inhabit for several decades. The (contingent) fact that Lissitzky succeeded in establishing an architectural career after Stalin’s rise to power finds renewed confirmation in the surprising discoveries of his later work at Moscow’s Central Park of Culture and Leisure (named for Maxim Gorky in 1932) and the Exhibition of Achievements of the Domestic Economy (VDNKh), about which we still know too little.5 Further research into such forgotten episodes in the career of Lissitzky and his contemporaries may well prove more valuable in the long term than the eternal return to what he called “the ecstatic period of the revolution.”6 For the time being, thanks to that perpetual gesture of retrieval, the work of Lissitzky and his peers remains an elementary precondition for the intelligibility of our own era’s art and architecture.

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Acknowledgments This book took shape over many years. My work on the subject began under the supervision of Maria Gough, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Robin Kelsey, three scholars whose views have influenced every word of the present study. To Maria, whose love of Lissitzky infected me in my very first graduate seminar at Stanford University, I owe an especially deep debt of gratitude. After following her to Harvard in 2009, my understanding of Lissitzky benefited from the passionately defended views of my fellow graduate students Matt Jolly, Claire Grace, Megan Sullivan, Hyewon Yoon, Kevin Lotery, Trevor Stark, Jordan Troeller, Taylor Walsh, David Sadighian, and Olivia Crough. I was able to conduct additional research and rethink my approach to Lissitzky while a fellow at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, I benefited from the steadfast support of Rebecca Rabinow, the friendly mentoring of Randall Griffey, and the many, many stimulating conversations I had with my fellow fellows, Trevor Stark, Anna Jozefacka, Verane Tasseau, Maria Castro, Rachel Boate, Rosalind McKever, Emmelyn Butterfield-­Rosen, Joshua Cohen, and Solveig Nelson. When this book entered production, the Lauder Center generously provided additional funds to offset the cost of images. Like a great deal of scholarship in the humanities today, my research is poised between the tax-­deductible donations of the very very rich and the labor of the many dedicated individuals who maintain museum and archive collections. The scholarly contribution of this book was made possible by the staff at the Getty Research Institute, the Berlin State Library, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, State Archive of the Russian Federation, and Central Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation of the City of Moscow, where I conducted research during the last decade. In addition to the individuals at these institutions whose names I never learned, I thank Brit Meyer and Julia Friedrich at the Museum Ludwig; Isabel Schulz, Karin Orchard, and Ria Heine at the Sprengel Museum; Michiel Nijhoff and Rolf Kat at the Stedelijk Museum; and Nina Belokhvostova and Tatiana Goriacheva at the State Tretyakov Gallery. In Moscow, I received a warm and generous welcome from Elena 188

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Olshanskaia and Marianna Evstratova, whose courage and tireless efforts brought Lissitzky’s Ogonek printing plant to the attention of the world and ensured its continued existence. The arguments advanced in this book have been greatly improved by colleagues who were gracious enough to share their views on a work in progress. At various points in my research, James Graham, Isabel Stockholm, Masha Chlenova, Tom McDonough, and Bojan Karanakov invited me to present portions of the arguments offered here. I am indebted to them for the opportunity to express my muddled thoughts, and to the audience members who helped me clarify the substance of my views. At the University of Chicago Press, I benefited from the seasoned editorial eye of Susan Bielstein and the work of the anonymous reviewers whose exacting criticisms made the manuscript measurably better. I also owe a special thanks to Erika Wolf, who provided timely eleventh-­hour assistance to get this book through its final prepublication challenges. In the end, however, I owe the greatest debt to my friends and loved ones, without whom I would not have been able to carry this project to completion. My parents, Ted Johnson and Elizabeth Hannafin-­Johnson, taught me to love language, learning, and the arts and to persevere in the most challenging circumstances. My sister Rennie and my late brother Adam helped me keep my feet on the ground in countless ways, as have Matt Neubert, Matt Torbenson, Neil Weir, Eddie Vazquez, Iliana Cepero, Kevin Lotery, Trevor Stark, and, since I arrived in Syracuse, Mitesh Dixit. To the singularly supportive and loving Maggie Innes, my light and rain, teacher and comrade, I owe more than I could say here, in mere words.

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Notes The following abbreviations refer to archives located in Moscow: GARF State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii) RGAE Russian State Archive of the Economy (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki) RGALI Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva) TsANTDM Central Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation of Moscow (Tsentral’nyi arkhiv nauchno-­tekhnicheskoi dokumentatsii Moskvy)

The location of documents in these archives is cited using the conventional system of fond (archive number), opis’ (inventory number), delo (file number), and list (page number).

Introduction 1

Notable exhibition-­related publications on Lissitzky’s work include El Lissitzky (Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1976); El Lissitzky: Maler, Architekt, Typograf, Fotograf (Halle: Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, 1982); El Lissitzky, 1890–­1941: Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer (Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1990); Lazar’ Markovich Lisitskii, 1890–­1941: vystavka proizvedeniia k stoletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia (Moscow: State Tret’iakov Gallery, 1990); Margarita Tupitsyn, El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet: Photography, Design, Collaboration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed, eds., Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003); and El Lissitzky, ed. Tatiana Goriacheva (Moscow: State Tret’iakov Gallery and Jewish Museum, 2017). The most widely used resource for readers of English and German is the compendium of texts by and about Lissitzky, supplemented with a biography by his widow and former dealer, Sophie Lissitzky-­ Küppers, El Lissitzky: Maler, Architekt, Typograf, Fotograf. Erinnerungen, Briefe, Schriften (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1967); English translation, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittal (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1968). note to page 1

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Clement Greenberg, “The Pasted-­Paper Revolution,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 61–­66. As Lisa Gitelman argues, even the digital media that claim to free us from paper continue to rely on it. Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 111–­35. In 1928, Alfred Barr called Lissitzky’s work “the most frankly paper architecture I have seen.” Barr, “Russian Diary, 1927–­28,” October, no. 7 (Winter 1978), 19. Except as noted, this summary of Lissitzky’s life draws from Lissitzky-­ Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, and Aleksandr Kantsedikas, El Lissitzky: The Jewish Period (London: Unicorn, 2017). El Lissitzky, “Anketa dlia entsikslovariia” (1929), RGALI fond 3145, op. 1., d. 555, l. 2. El Lissitzky, “Anketa dlia entsikslovariia” (1929), RGALI fond 3145, op. 1., d. 555, l. 2. Nathaniel Deutsch compares the study of folk art in the Pale by assimilated Jews to the “double consciousness” described by W. E. B. DuBois. Deutsch, The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 10. On Lissitzky’s collaboration with Broderzon, see Kenneth Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 58. El Lissitzky, untitled lecture, April 8, 1931, Nikolai Khardzhiev archive, inventory no. 726, sheet 12, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Aleksandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art, trans. Katherine Foshko Tsan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 65–­68. El Lissitzky, Hans Richter, and Theo van Doesburg, “Erklärung,” De Stijl 5, no. 4 (1922): 64. Lissitzky later recalled that Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, and Gunta Stölzl were most receptive. El Lissitzky, “Anketa dlia entsikslovariia” (1929), RGALI fond 3145, op. 1., d. 555, l. 4. S. O. Khan-­Magomedov, Lazar’ Lisitskii (Moscow: Gordeev, 2011), 7–­14. These remarks restate a position outlined in his earlier essay, “A New Style,” in El Lissitzky (Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1990), 35–­45. Peter Nisbet, El Lissitzky, 1890–­1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 1987); Yve-­Alain Bois, “El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility,” Art in America 76, no. 4 (April 1988): 166–­81. Peter Nisbet, “El Lissitzky in the Proun Years: A Study of His Work and Thought” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995). Although he did not offer any overarching explanations of Lissitzky’s work after this date, Nisbet continued to research the entirety of the artist’s oeuvre. His work remains foundational for much subsequent scholarship, including my own. Khan-­Magomedov, Lazar’ Lisitskii, 97–­111, 265. El Lissitzky, “Novaia Kul’tura,” Shkola i revoliutsiia, nos. 24–­25 (August 16, 1919), 11; English translation, “The New Culture,” trans. Peter Nisbet, Eksperiment/Experiment, no. 1 (1995): 261 (translation modified). El Lissitzky, “Die Architektur des Stahl-­und Stahlbetonrahmens” (1926), in El Lissitzky: Proun und Wolkenbügel: Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, ed. Jen Lissitzky and Sophie Lissitzky-­Küppers (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977),

notes to pages 2–5

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78–­79; Lissitzky, “Topographie der Typographie,” Merz, no. 4 (July 1923): 47. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (London: Penguin, 2002), 223. Nikolai Berdiaev, Krizis iskusstva. Sbornik statei (Moscow: G. A. Leman and S. I. Sakharov, 1918), 14–­19; Berdiaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, trans. Donald A. Lourie (London: Gollancz, 1955), 241–­50; Viacheslav Ivanov, “On the Crisis of Humanism: Toward a Morphology of Modern Culture and the Psychology of Modernity” (1919), in Selected Essays, ed. Michael Wachtel, trans. Robert Bird (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 163–­74; Alexander Blok, “The Collapse of Humanism” (1919), trans. Isaiah Berlin, Oxford Outlook 11, no. 55 (June 1931): 89–­112. Joseph Lux, Ingeniuer-­Aesthetic (Munich: Gustav Lammers, 1910), 20. For a historical discussion, see Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-­Concrete, trans. J. Duncan Berry (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995), esp. the very informative introduction by Sokratis Georgiadis, 1–­78. Lux, Ingeniuer-­Aesthetic, 22–­23. Berdiaev, Meaning of the Creative Act, 249. El Lissitzky, “Proun” (1921), RGALI fond 3145, op. 1, d. 542, l. 13. Berdiaev, Meaning of the Creative Act, 249. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 517–­29. On a somewhat different basis, Clement Greenberg argued that the modernist notion of artistic purity was derived from music, which he saw as a nonrepresentational art of pure form. Greenberg, “Toward a Newer Laocoön,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–­1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 23–­37. Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book as Spiritual Instrument,” in Divigations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 226–­27. El Lissitzky, “Our Book,” in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 357. F. T. Marinetti, “Destruction of Syntax—­Radio Imagination—­Words-­in-­ Freedom” in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 146–­47; Mallarmé, Divigations, 3. Lissitzky cites Marinetti in his essay on the dematerialization of print, “Unser Buch,” Gutenberg Jahrbuch (1927): 174. Due to Marinetti’s fascism, this reference was suppressed when the essay was anthologized in the DDR-­published monograph by Sophie Lissitzky-­Küppers and in its English translation, “Our Book,” in Life, Letters, Texts, 357–­58. For an argument that puts Marinetti in the tradition of Marx, see Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestoes, and the Avant-­Gardes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). El Lissitzky, “Ne mirovidenie—­no miroreal’nost’” (1921), RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 25, l. 13. El Lissitzky, “Khudozhnik v proizvodstve,” in Vsesoiuznaia poligraficheskaia vystavka, putevoditel’ (Moscow: Mospoligraf, 1927), 5. Roman Jakobson, “The Dominant,” in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/ Belknap, 1987), 45. n o t e s t o pa g e s 6 –7

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Jakobson and Yuri Tynianov, “Questions of Literary Theory,” in Language in Literature, 49; Tynianov, “On Literary Evolution,” in Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film, trans. and ed. Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 276–­80. Lucien Febvre and Henri-­Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–­1800, trans. David Gerard (London: Verso, 1997); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (London: Verso, 2006). Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory, trans. Sarah Benson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Hyungmin Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). On the architectural image in the nineteenth-­century press, see Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch, eds., The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture, and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). “If it is our destiny and if it is possible for us to achieve real hegemony, it will be exclusively by means of a political newspaper (reinforced by a scientific organ).” V. I. Lenin to G. V. Plekhanov, January 30, 1901, in Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 34, 4th ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 56. Lenin’s most widely cited remarks about the newspaper as a collective organizer were formulated in his 1901 article “Where to Begin?” and developed in What Is to Be Done? (1902; New York: International Publishers, 1929), 150–­51. Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–­1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Brian Kassof, “Glavlit, Ideological Censorship, and Russian-­Language Book Publishing, 1922–­38,” Russian Review 74, no. 1 (January 2015): 69–­96; Stuart Finkel, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). Whereas Yiddish was seen as a popular language, the organs of “elite” Hebrew literature were denied paper as early as 1918–­1919. Moss, Jewish Renaissance, 226. For an explanation of the socialist content of Soviet nationalities policy, see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–­1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). Nina Gurianova, Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-­Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 211–­31. Craig Brandist, The Dimensions of Hegemony: Language, Culture, and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 35–­49. Boris Arvatov, “Veshch’,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 7 (September–­October 1922): 342. Aleksandr Bogdanov, Philosophy of Living Experience: Popular Outlines (1913), trans. David. G. Rowley (Brill: Leiden, 2016), 157.

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Boris Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question),” trans. Christina Kiaer, October, no. 81 (Summer 1997): 125–­26; Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 34, passim; Brandist, Dimensions of Hegemony, 95. Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 121. On developments in painting, see Matthew Cullerne Bown, Art under Stalin (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991), 35–­69. For a concise overview of developments in the architectural press, see Richard Anderson and Kristin Romberg, eds., Architecture in Print: Design and Debate in the Soviet Union, 1919–­1935 (New York: Wallach Art Gallery, 2005). For a more detailed blow-­by-­blow, see Hugh D. Hudson, Blueprints and Blood: The Stalinization of Soviet Architecture, 1917–­1937 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Central Committee resolution “On Restructuring Literary and Arts Organizations” (1932), in Russian Art of the Avant-­Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–­1934, trans. and ed. John E. Bowlt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 288–­89. Erika Wolf, “When Photographs Speak, To Whom Do They Talk? The Origins and Audience of SSSR na stroike,” Left History 6, no. 2 (1999): 53–­82. Lissitzky, “Architektur des Stahl-­und Stahlbetonrahmens” (1926), 78–­79. Lissitzky, “The Mohilev Synagogue, Reminiscences” (1923), in Nisbet, El Lissitzky, 1890–1941, 58. Lissitzky, “New Culture” (1919), 261.

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Lissitzky’s appointment as head of the Section of Artistic Labor for the Vitebsk Department of People’s Education and Professor of the Studios of Applied Arts (Masterskie prikladnykh iskusstv) in the People’s School is dated May 26, 1919. RGALI fond 3145, op. 1, d. 576, l. 1. Lissitzky himself used the title “Studios of Graphic Arts and Architecture” in his essay, “Novaia kul’tura,” Shkola i revoliutsiia, nos. 24–­25 (August 16, 1919), 11; English translation, “The New Culture,” trans. Peter Nisbet, Eksperiment/Experiment, no. 1 (1995): 260–­61. Kazimir Malevich, “Suprematism. 34 Drawings” (1920), in Essays on Art, 1915–­1933, vol. 1, ed. Troels Anderson, trans. Xenia Glowacki-­Prus and Arnold McMillin (London: Rapp & Whiting, 1969), 127–­28. El Lissitzky, “Kommunizm truda i Suprematizm tvorchestva” (1920), in UNOVIS No. 1: Prilozheniie k faksimil’nomu izdaniiu, ed. Tatiana Goriacheva (Moscow: Izd. Skanrus/State Tretyakov Gallery, 2003), 69–­70. Aleksandr Bogdanov, “The Proletarian and Art” (1918), in Russian Art of the Avant-­Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–­1934, trans. and ed. John E. Bowlt (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 177. Andrey Bely, “The Emblematics of Meaning” (1909), in Selected Essays of not es to pages 9 –14

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Andrey Bely, trans. Steven Cassedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 139. Bely, “Emblematics of Meaning,” 139; Malevich, “Suprematism. 34 Drawings,” 1:124. Andrey Bely, “The Magic of Words” (1909), in Selected Essays, 109. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 80–­83. Velimir Khlebnikov, “The Tables of Destiny” (1922), in Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, vol. 1, Letters and Theoretical Writings, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 418–­19. For Khlebnikov’s prediction, see, in the same volume, “Teacher and Student,” 284. On the December festival decorations, see Aleksandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art, trans. Catherine Foskho-­Tsan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 80–­87. Tatiana Goriacheva, “L’Ounovis, le parti de Malevitch,” in Artistes et partis: Esthétique et politique (1900–­1945), ed. Maria Stavrinaki and Maddelena Carli (Paris: Les presses du reel, 2012), 99–­120. El Lissitzky, “UNOVIS. Partiia v iskusstve,” in Arkhiv N. I. Khardzhieva: Russkii avangard: materialy i dokumenty iz sobraniia RGALI, vol. 1, ed. Ekaterina Borbinskaia et al. (Moscow: Defi, 2017), 253. “Doklad sobraniiu khudozhnikov gor. Vitebska ob organizatsii Soveta utverzhdeniia novykh form iskusstva pri Vitebskom Gubernskom Otdele narodnogo Obrazovaniia,” in UNOVIS No. 1, 100–­103; English translation by Alexander Lieven, in Larissa Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 317. “Izdaniia UNOVISa,” in UNOVIS No. 1, 105. Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 85. “Doklad sobraniiu khudozhnikov,” in UNOVIS No. 1, 102; Zhadova, Malevich, 317. El Lissitzky, “‘Sdelat’ 6 takikh poloten . . .’ Zadaniia uchenikam Vitebskogo Khudozhestvennogo uchilishcha po oformleniiu dekoratsii,” December 11, 1919, Nikolai Khardzhiev archive, inventory no. 715, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. “What is referred to as ‘artistic labor’ has on the vast majority of occasions nothing whatever to do with creative effort.” El Lissitzky, “Suprematizm mirostroitel’stva” (1920), in UNOVIS No. 1, 72; English translation, “Suprematism in World Reconstruction,” in Sophie Lissitzky-­Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittal (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 327. Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Deklaratsiia slova kak takovogo,” in UNOVIS No. 1, 74; English translation in Words in Revolution: Russian Futurist Manifestoes, 1912–­1928, ed. and trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Washington, DC: New Academia, 2004), 67. Bely, “Magic of Words,” 95. Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 21. Boris Eikhenbaum, “Leskov and Contemporary Prose,” trans. Martin P.

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Rice, Russian Literature Triquarterly 11 (Winter 1975): 223. Boris Eikhenbaum, “The Illusion of Skaz,” trans. Martin P. Rice, Russian Literature Triquarterly 12 (Spring 1978): 233–­35. Eikhenbaum, “Leskov and Contemporary Prose,” 223. Craig Brandist, The Dimensions of Hegemony: Language, Culture, and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 80, 92–­93. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–­39 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 6. Dan Ben-­Amos, Dov Noy, and Ellen Frankel, eds., Folktales of the Jews, vol. 2, Tales from Eastern Europe (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2007), 197–­98. Ruth Apter-­Gabriel, “El Lissitzky’s Jewish Works,” in Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-­Garde Art, 1912–­1928, ed. Ruth Apter-­Gabriel (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1987), 101–­25. Kenneth Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 53–­54, 228. Moss, Jewish Renaissance, 232–­34. As Moss points out, however, these left-­wing criticisms of the Kultur-­Lige were ignored by the Bolsheviks, who rather pragmatically appointed high-­level Kultur-­Lige activists to the Jewish Sections of the All-­Ukrainian Central Publishing House and the Committee for Plastic Arts. This account stands as a helpful corrective to Victor Margolin’s characterization of this episode as an instance of “Bolshevik attempts to suppress the culture of all national minorities,” in The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-­Nagy, 1917–­1946 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 28. El Lissitzky, “Proletariat un Kunst” (April 1919); English translation in Aleksandr Kantsedikas, El Lissitzky: The Jewish Period (London: Unicorn, 2017), 142–­44. Moss, Jewish Renaissance, 234. Scholarship has increasingly acknowledged that Lissitzky’s involvement with the movement for Jewish national culture continued until 1923. See, for instance, Christina Lodder, “Ideology and Identity: El Lissitzky in Berlin,” in The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917–­1937 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 339–­64. It should be noted, however, that after 1919 Lissitzky worked only with organizations promoting secular national culture under Bolshevik stewardship. Kazimir Malevich, “O ‘Ia’ i kollektive” (1919), in UNOVIS No. 1, 61. Malevich, “O ‘Ia’ i kollektive,” 61. El Lissitzky to Pavel Ettinger, April 4, 1920, English translation by Kenneth MacInnes, in In Malevich’s Circle: Confederates, Students, Followers in Russia, 1920s–­1950s, ed. Irina Karasik (Moscow: Palace Editions, 2000), 52. Kazimir Malevich to Mikhail Gershenzon, April 11, 1920, trans. Antonina Bouis, in Kazimir Malevich: Letters and Documents, vol. 1, ed. Irina Vakar and Tatiana Mikhienko (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), 129. Kazimir Malevich to Mikhail Gershenzon, April 11, 1920, in Malevich: Letters and Documents, 129. Malevich, “On Poetry” (1919), in Essays on Art, 1915–­1933, 1:78. Viktor Shklovsky similarly used Khlebnikov’s words to remind his futurist comrades that their interests were distinct from the political goals of the n ot es to pag es 1 8 –2 2

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Bolsheviks. Shklovsky, “Ullya, Ullya, Martians,” in Knight’s Move (1923), trans. Richard Sheldon (London: Dalkey Archive, 2005), 21–­24. Kazimir Malevich, “Unom 1” (1920), in UNOVIS No. 1, 67. El Lissitzky to Kazimir Malevich, June 1, 1924, in Pis’ma Kazimira Malevicha El’ Lisitskomu i Nikolaiu Puninu, ed. Aleksandra Shatskikh (Moscow: Pinakoteka, 2000), 7. Kazimir Malevich to El Lissitzky, August 14, 1924, in Malevich: Letters and Documents, 1:171. Viacheslav Ivanov, “On the Crisis of Humanism: Toward a Morphology of Modern Culture and the Psychology of Modernity” (1919), in Selected Essays, ed. Michael Wachtel, trans. Robert Bird (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 172. Ivanov’s May 1919 proposal to Narkompros is quoted in Robert Bird, The Russian Prospero: The Creative Universe of Viacheslav Ivanov (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 33. Algirdas Julien Greimas, “Toward a Theory of Modalities,” in On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 123–­28; Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 111. Eikhenbaum, “Illusion of Skaz,” 234. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 238, passim. El Lissitzky to Kazimir Malevich, December 21, 1920, in In Malevich’s Circle, 53. The comment comes from David Shterenberg, head of IZO Narkompros. This call for global influence concludes an article that recounts the founding of UNOVIS’s first auxiliary chapter in Smolensk. “UNOVIS i ego obshchestvennoe tvorchestvo” (1920), in UNOVIS No. 1, 87. Shatskikh, Vitebsk, 151. “K programme” (1920), in UNOVIS No. 1, 92. Moscow’s First and Second Free Studios replaced the Stroganov School of Industrial Arts and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, respectively. Anna Bokov, Avant-­Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920–­1930 (Zurich: Park Books, 2020), 86. Shatskikh, Vitebsk, 151. Narkompros approved Lissitzky to travel to Orenburg as a delegate of the teachers’ conference on June 28, 1920. In addition to helping Ivan Kudriashov organize an UNOVIS branch, Lissitzky and Malevich enjoyed a rest cure in a resort just outside of the town for the whole of August. RGALI fond 3145, op. 1, d. 576, ll. 2–­3. Igor Smekalov, UNOVIS v Orenburge: k istorii khudozhestvennoi zhizni rossiskoi provintsii, 1919–­1921 (Orenburg: Orenburg knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 2011), 65. Shatskikh, Vitebsk, 151. Lissitzky, “Kommunizm truda i Suprematizm tvorchestva,” 69. Lissitzky, “Kommunizm truda i Suprematizm tvorchestva,” 69. Dmitrii Kozlov, Klinom krasnym bei belykh: geometricheskaia simvolika v iskusstve avangarda (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet, 2016), 14–­18.

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Kazimir Malevich, “God Is Not Cast Down” (1922), in Essays on Art, 1915–­ 1933, 1:202–­3, 217. Lissitzky, “Kommunizm truda i Suprematizm tvorchestva,” 69–­70. The fourth section of the UNOVIS “Program of the Single Auditorium of Painting” proceeds from the pure dynamism of color through the volumetric expression of Suprematism in architecture to “the development of natural construction in itself” (ibid., 93). Here, “natural” translates the neologism prirodoestestvo, which has a sense close to natura naturans, nature in its active essence. Lissitzky, “Kommunizm truda i Suprematizm tvorchestva,” 70; Kazimir Malevich, “On New Systems in Art” (1919), in Essays on Art, 1915–­1933, 1:91. Lissitzky, “Kommunizm truda i Suprematizm tvorchestva,” 70. Velimir Khlebnikov, “The Trumpet of the Martians,” in Lawton and Eagle, Words in Revolution, 103. Lissitzky, “Podpisi,” in UNOVIS No. 1, 73; Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–­1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 515. Mark B. Adams, “‘Red Star’ Another Look at Aleksandr Bogdanov,” Slavic Review 48, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 9. Red Star was first published in 1908 and Engineer Menni in 1913; the books were immensely popular, seeing six editions and at least one stage adaptation by the mid-­1920s. Aleksandr Bogdanov, Philosophy of Living Experience: Popular Outlines (1913), trans. David G. Rowley (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 233–­35. Lissitzky, “Kommunizm truda i Suprematizm tvorchestva,” 69; Aleksandr Bogdanov, “Paths of Proletarian Creation” (1920), in Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-­Garde, 179. El Lissitzky, “Suprematizm stroitel’stva mira (k podmaster’iam v godovshchinu shkoly)” (January 1920), in Arkhiv N. I. Khardzhieva, 1:247. Membership estimates are provided in “Brat’iam proletariiam vsekh stran,” Proletarskaia kul’tura, nos. 17–­19 (August–­December 1920): 2. The international bureau was founded in August 1920. Lenin, quoted in Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–­ 1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 179. Discussion of “the major positions in the art and culture of Russia connected with the Resolutions of the Congress of Proletkults” is reported in “Rost UNOVISa (khronika),” UNOVIS listok Vitebskogo tvorkoma (November 20, 1920): 1. Fitzpatrick, Commissariat of Enlightenment, 186–­87. Fitzpatrick, Commissariat of Enlightenment, 194. Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 112. El Lissitzky to Kazimir Malevich, December 21, 1920, in In Malevich’s Circle, 53. Tatlin had apparently been accused of profit-­seeking in an UNOVIS circular that was burned in protest. It is no longer extant. El Lissitzky to Kazimir Malevich, January 10, 1921, in In Malevich’s Circle, 54. El Lissitzky to Kazimir Malevich, January 22, 1921, in In Malevich’s Circle, 55.

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El Lissitzky, “Katastrofa arkhitektury,” IZO: Vestnik otdela izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv N.K.P., no. 1 (March 10, 1921): 2–­3; English translation, “Catastrophe of Architecture,” in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 367. “Ot redaktsii,” IZO: Vestnik otdela izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv N.K.P., no. 1 (March 10, 1921): 4. No subsequent issues of the bulletin were published. Lissitzky, “Katastrofa arkhitektury,” 2–­3. Selim Khan-­Magomedov, Vkhutemas: Moscou, 1920–­1930, vol. 1 (Paris: Editions du Regard, 1990), 225. El Lissitzky to Kazimir Malevich, January 22, 1921, in In Malevich’s Circle, 55. L. Kliatskina, “Doklad o novom iskusstve v 5i sovetskoi trudovoi shkole II stepeni,” in UNOVIS No. 1, 95. Ot UNOVISa; English translation in Larissa A. Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art, 1910–­1930, trans. Alexander Lieven (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 299. El Lissitzky to Kazimir Malevich, January 10, 1921, in In Malevich’s Circle, 54. Lissitzky wrote a review of the exhibition but never published it. Lissitzky, “Zhivopisets + skul’ptor + arkhitektor = sintez” (1920), in Arkhiv N. I. Khardzhieva, 1:259–­65. El Lissitzky to Kazimir Malevich, December 21, 1920, in In Malevich’s Circle, 52. El Lissitzky to Kazimir Malevich, January 22, 1921, in In Malevich’s Circle, 55. Anonymous, “10 Marta 1921 g.,” IZO: Vestnik otdela izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv N.K.P., no. 1 (March 10, 1921): 2. Peter Nisbet, “Some Facts on the Organizational History of the van Diemen Exhibition,” in The First Russian Show (London: Annely Juda Fine Arts, 1983), 67–­72. Malevich expected Lissitzky to return to Moscow by July or August 1920. Kazimir Malevich to Vera Ermolaeva, May 7, 1921, in Malevich: Letters and Documents, 1:146. El Lissitzky, “Doklad o tekushchem momente” (October 27, 1920), Khardzhiev archive, inventory no. 716, sheet 2, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. El Lissitzky, “Ne mirovidenie—­no miroreal’nost’,” typescript, RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 25, ll. 13–­14; “Proun,” typescript with artist’s notations, RGALI fond 3145, op. 1, d. 541, ll. 1–­14; El Lissitzky, “Preodolenie iskusstva” (1921), published in Eksperiment/Experiment 5 (1999): 138–­50 and excerpted in English translation in A Legacy Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-­Garde (Palace Editions: Moscow, 2002), 244–­46. John Bowlt’s translation of Lissitzky’s INKhUK lecture, “Proun: Toward the Defeat of Art,” made from a misdated typescript (now lost), appears in El Lissitzky (Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1976), 59–­72. El Lissitzky, “Tvorcheskoe depo sooruzhenii” (1921), RGALI fond 3145, op. 1, d. 540, l. 7. El Lissitzky to Kazimir Malevich, January 10, 1921, in In Malevich’s Circle, 54; El Lissitzky, “Proun. Nicht Weltvisionen, sondern—­Weltrealität,” De Stijl 5, no. 6 (June 1922): 81–­85. This change was first discussed by Peter Nisbet, “El Lissitzky in the Proun Years: A Study of His Work and Thought” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995),

n ot es to pag es 2 7–2 9

90–­94. Suprematism of the City is the title Lissitzky used for P1d in UNOVIS No. 1, a publication to which Nisbet did not have access. 95 Lissitzky, “Ne mirovidenie—­no miroreal’nost’” (1921), RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 25, l. 14. 96 Malevich, “Suprematism. 34 Drawings,” 1:124. 97 Lissitzky, “Ne mirovidenie—­no miroreal’nost’” (1921), RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 25, l. 14. d 98 A sketch of P2 inscribed “Orenburg-­Tevkelevo” was included in the exhibition The Suprematist Straight Line (London: Annely Juda Fine Art, 1977), 70. 99 Sant’Elia’s text, originally penned for the exhibition Nuove Tendenze, was reprinted under Marinetti’s supervision in the futurist organ Lacerba and as a stand-­alone flyer, both of which referred to the architect’s “Città Nuova” as a “Città Futurista.” On the contested authorship of the manifesto, see Esther da Costa Meyer, The Work of Antonio Sant’Elia: Retreat into the Future (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 141–­68. 100 The painting is identified as a “Wood panel . . . with zinc triangle” in Lissitzky’s Proun inventory, transcribed and annotated in Peter Nisbet, El Lissitzky, 1890–­1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 1987), 160. To date, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has not completed any analysis to verify Lissitzky’s description. 101 F. T. Marinetti, “Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor and Sensitivity Toward Numbers” (1914), in Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2006), 136. 102 Malevich, “O ‘ia’ i kollektive” (1920), in UNOVIS No. 1, 61. 103 Maria Kokkori, Alexander Bouras, and Irina Karasik, “Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of Materiality,” in Celebrating Suprematism: New Approaches to the Art of Kazimir Malevich (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 105–­25. Yudin’s table also includes mathematical notations such as Marinetti had advocated in “Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor.” 104 Viktor Shklovsky, “Prostranstvo v zhivopisi i Suprematizm,” Iskusstvo 8 (September 3, 1919); English translation in Zhadova, Malevich, 326. 105 Lissitzky, “Ne mirovidenie—­no miroreal’nost’” (1921), RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 25, l. 14. 106 Christine Poggi, “Dreams of Metallized Flesh: Futurism and the Masculine Body,” Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 3 (September 1997): 19–­39. 107 Nikolai Berdiaev, Krizis iskusstva, sbornik statei (Moscow: G. A. Leman and S. I. Sakharov, 1918), 13–­14. 108 Berdiaev, Krizis iskusstva, 8, 16. 109 Ivanov, “On the Crisis of Humanism,” 166. 110 Ivanov, “On the Crisis of Humanism,” 166. For Ivanov’s gendered cosmology, see Bird, Russian Prospero, 156–­58, 178–­81. 111 For a discussion, see Mladen Ovadija, Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-­ Garde and Postdramatic Theatre (Montreal: McGill-­Queens University Press, 2013), 109. 112 Lissitzky, “Ne mirovidenie—­no miroreal’nost’” (1921), RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 25, l. 14. 113 Sebastian Zeidler, Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 104–­13. 114 In his view, Suprematism represents “a liberation from the whole created notes to pages 2 9 –3 5

201

world held up by a creation from nothing.” Berdiaev, Krizis iskusstva, 14–­15, 23. For Malevich’s response to Berdiaev’s views, see his letter to Mikhail Gershenzon, February 11, 1922, in Malevich: Letters and Documents, 1:160–­ 61. 115 Berdiaev, Krizis iskusstva, 23. 116 Peter Nisbet, “El Lissitzky in 1921: Real Reversibility?” in Dear Print Fan: A Festschrift for Marjorie Cohn, ed. Craig Bowen, Susan Dackerman, and Elizabeth Mansfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2001), 219–­24. 117 Ivanov, “Two Elements in Contemporary Symbolism” (1908), in Selected Essays, 20. 118 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 112. 119 Lissitzky, “Ne mirovidenie—­no miroreal’nost’” (1921), RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 25, l. 14. Although it has often been rendered as “expediency,” tselesoobraznost’ is also used to translate Zweckmässigkeit, both today and in the Russian edition of Kant’s Third Critique current in the 1920s, Kritika sposobnosti suzhdeniia, trans. N. M. Sokolov (St. Petersburg: Popova, 1898). I have therefore used the term preferred by Kant’s English-­language translators, “purposiveness.” 120 Lissitzky, “Ne mirovidenie—­no miroreal’nost’” (1921), RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 25, l. 13. 121 Aleksandr Bogdanov, “Ocherki organizatsionnoi nauki. Osnovnye poniatiia i metody,” Proletarskaia kul’tura, nos. 9–­10 (June–­July 1919): 5. 122 Bogdanov, “Ocherki organizatsionnoi nauki,” 5. 123 Lissitzky, “Ne mirovidenie—­no miroreal’nost’” (1921), RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 25, l. 14. 124 Lissitzky, “Ne mirovidenie—­no miroreal’nost’” (1921), RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 25, l. 13. 125 Bokov, Avant-­Garde as Method, 120–­34, 190–­92. 126 Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 40. 127 Vladimir Krinskii, “Vozniknovenie i zhizn’ Assotsiatsii novykh arkhitektorov—­ASNOVA,” Sovetskaia Arkhitektura, no. 18 (1969): 37. 128 Bokov, Avant-­Garde as Method, 302–­4. 129 Aleksei Gan, Konstruktivism (Tver: Tverskoe, 1922), 3. 130 Malevich to the Creative Committee of UNOVIS, May 6–­7, 1921, in Malevich: Letters and Documents, 1:145. 131 Lissitzky, “Ne mirovidenie—­no miroreal’nost’” (1921), RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 25, l. 13. 132 Shatskikh lists seven Vitebsk graduates with the title “artist-­constructivist” in Vitebsk, 318–­23; khudozhnik-­konstruktivist is the term used in the Russian edition, Vitebsk: zhizn’ iskusstva, 1917–­1922 (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2001), 246–­49. 133 Lissitzky, “Tvorcheskoe depo sooruzhenii” (1921), RGALI fond 3145, op. 1, d. 540, l. 7. 134 Lissitzky, “Doklad o tekushchem momente” (October 27, 1920), Khardzhiev archive, inventory no. 716, sheet 2, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

202

notes to pages 3 5 –3 9

Chapter 2 1

2

3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13

14 15

16 17 18 19

20

Sergei Ippolitov and Almaziia Kataeva, “Ne mogu otorvat’sia ot Rossii” . . . : Russkie knigoizdatel’stva v Germanii v 1920-­kh gg. (Moscow: Izd. Ippolita, 2000), 20–­22, 147–­49. Lissitzky refers to his income for this period in an unpublished questionnaire, “Anketa dlia entsikslovariia” (1929), RGALI fond 3145, op. 1, d. 555, l. 4. Unsigned editorial [Ilya Ehrenburg and El Lissitzky], “Krestiny Veshchi,” Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, no. 3 (May 1922): 21. Yve-­Alain Bois, “Exposition: Esthétique de la distraction, espace de demonstration,” Cahiers du musée national d’art modern, no. 29 (Autumn 1989): 57–­79. Yuri Tynianov, “The Ode as an Oratorical Genre” (1922), in Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film, trans. and ed. Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 78–­79, 111. [Ehrenburg and Lissitzky], “Krestiny Veshchi,” 21. Aleksei Gan, Konstruktivizm (Tver: Tverskoe, 1922), 69–­70; trans. Christina Lodder, Constructivism (Barcelona: Tenov, 2013), 69–­70. [Nikolai Tarabukin?], “Institut khudozhestvennoi kul’tury,” Russkoe iskusstvo, nos. 2–­3 (1923): 87. Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 27, 41–­87. Christina Lodder, “El Lissitzky and the Export of Constructivism,” in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 27–­46. Kristin Romberg, Gan’s Constructivism: Aesthetic Theory for an Embedded Modernism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 133–­65. Unsigned editorial [Ilya Ehrenburg and El Lissitzky], “Blokada Rossii konchaetsia,” Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, nos. 1–­2 (March–­April 1922): 2–­4. This point is convincingly argued by Ben Dhooge in his essay “Constructive Art à la Ehrenburg: Veshch’–­Gegenstand–­Objet,” Neohelicon 42 (2015): 493–­527. Gan, Constructivism, 70. Kai-­Uwe Hemken, “‘Muss die neue Kunst den Massen dienen?’ Zur Utopie und Wirklichkeit der ‘Konstruktivistischen Internationale,’” in Konstruktivistische, internationale, schöpferische Arbeitsgemeinschaft, 1922–­1927: Utopien für eine europäische Kultur (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1992), 58. [Ilya Ehrenburg?], “Torzhestvuiushchii oboz,” Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, no. 3 (May 1922): 2. [Tarabukin?], “Insitut khudozhestvennoi kul’tury,” 88. Ilya Ehrenburg, A vse-­taki ona vertitsia (Berlin: Helikon, 1922), 87. “Honest workers” is one of four contemporary types, according to Ehrenburg. The others are “blind creators,” “the confused herd,” and “the mischief makers.” Ehrenburg, A vse-­taki ona vertitsia, 80, 85. [Ehrenburg and Lissitzky], “Blokada Rossii konchaetsia,” 2. [Ehrenburg and Lissitzky], “Blokada Rossii konchaetsia,” and Le Corbusier,

notes to pages 41– 4 4

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21

22 23 24

25

26 27

28

29

30 31

32

33 34

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“Sovremennaia arkhitektura,” Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, nos. 1–­2 (March–­ April 1922): 2, 21. Ulen, “Die Ausstellungen in Russland,” Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, nos. 1–­2 (March–­April 1922): 19. Lissitzky’s authorship of this review is confirmed by his letter to Malevich of February 25, 1922, in Experiment/Eksperiment 5 (1999): 150–­51. He also penned another review, “Vystavki v Berline,” in Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, no. 3 (May 1922): 14. Mary McLeod, “‘Architecture or Revolution’: Taylorism, Technocracy and Social Change,” Art Journal 43, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 132–­47. [Ehrenburg and Lissitzky], “Blokada Rossii konchaetsia,” 2. Romberg, Gan’s Constructivism, 155. Romberg uses the term “capacitor,” but as Joel Score points out to me, before the mid-­1920s the device was more likely to be known as a condenser. It should be emphasized that this distinction does not exist in Russian, where kondensator remains in use today—­and, perhaps not incidentally, that this is also the term used by Moisei Ginzburg in his well-­known phrase “social condenser.” Malevich, “K chistomu deistvu,” in UNOVIS No. 1: Prilozheniie k faksimil’nomu izdaniiu, ed. Tatiana Goriacheva (Moscow: Izd. Skanrus/State Tretyakov Gallery, 2003), 56. Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Deklaratsiia slova kak takovogo,” in UNOVIS No. 1, 74. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 12. Kruchenykh’s Russian expressions are “eko-­ez” (short for ekonomiia-­ poeziia) and “eko-­khud” (ekonomiia-­khudozhestvo). Notably, he chooses a word that signals artistry (whereas iskusstvo refers to skill). On the genesis of these ideas, see Aleksandra Shatskikh, Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism, trans. Marian Schwartz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 236–­38. Tsvetaeva’s translation, “Écoutez, canailles!,” is uncredited in the journal, but her authorship is confirmed by Ehrenburg in Men, Years, Life, vol. 2, The First Years of Revolution: 1918–­21, trans. Anna Bostock (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1962), 26. “Radio revet za vse granitsy / i v otvet / za nelepitsei nelepitsa / sypletsia v gazetnye stranitsy.” Mayakovsky, Dlia golosa (Berlin: Gosizdat, 1923), 21. Among other things, in Berlin Mayakovsky attempted to set up a press specializing in “Comfuturism” while acting as an intermediary for Gosizdat. Bengt Jangfeldt, Mayakovsky: A Biography, trans. Harry D. Watson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 194–­95. According to E. A. Dinershtein, the book was published without prior approval from Moscow and carried the imprimatur of Gosizdat on Mayakovsky’s order alone. So, while it circulated freely abroad, it was not available within the USSR for several years after its publication. Dinershtein, Maiakovskii i kniga: iz istorii izdanii proizvedenii poeta (Moscow: Kniga, 1987), 82–­85. “Gvozdimye strokami / stoite nemu! / slushaite etot volchii voi / ele prikidyvaiushchiisia poemoi!” Mayakovsky, Dlia golosa, 17. Lissitzky, “Typographical Facts” (1924), in Sophie Lissitzky-­Küppers, El

notes to pages 4 4 – 4 8

35 36 37

38

39

40 41

42 43 44 45

46

47 48 49

Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittal (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 355. Lissitzky, “O metodakh oformleniia kniga,” (ca. 1928), Nikolai Kharzhiev archive, inventory no. 725, l. 4, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Boris Arvatov, “Veshch’,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 7 (September–­October 1922): 342. Boris Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question),” trans. Christina Kiaer, October, no. 81 (Summer 1997): 125–­26; Aleksandr Bogdanov, Philosophy of Living Experience: Popular Outlines (1913), trans. David G. Rowley (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 157. Arvatov, “Veshch’,” 342. Le Corbusier’s essay “Esthétique de l’ingénieur, maison en série” was translated as “Doma seriiami” in Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, nos. 1–­2 (March–­April 1922): 22–­23. Bernd Finkeldy, “Die ‘1. Internationale Kunstausstellung’ in Düsseldorf 28. Mai bis 3. Juli 1922” in Konstruktivistische, internationale, schöpferische Arbeitsgemeinschaft, 23–­30. A notice that the Veshch’ editors had been invited appeared under the heading “‘Mezhdunarodnyi Kongress levykh khudozhnikov’ v Diussel’dorfe” in Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, no. 3 (May 1922): 3. Theo van Doesburg to Antony Kok, June 6, 1922; German translation in Konstruktivistische, internationale, schöpferische Arbeitsgemeinschaft, 313. See the account in De Stijl 5, no. 4 (1922): 49–­64; English translation in The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann (New York: Da Capo, 1990), 58–­62. Hausmann’s version of these events is contained in his letter to Hedwig Mankiewitz, May 30, 1922, in Scharfrichter der bürgerlichen Seele. Raoul Hausmann in Berlin 1900–­1933, ed. Eva Züchner (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1998), 137. El Lissitzky, Hans Richter, and Theo van Doesburg, “Erklärung,” De Stijl 5, no. 4 (1922): 63–­64. Van Doesburg to Kok, June 6, 1922, in Konstruktivistische, internationale, schöpferische Arbeitsgemeinschaft, 313. “Stellungnahme der Gruppe ‘Ma’ in Wien zum ersten Kongress der fortschrittlichen Künstler in Düsseldorf,” De Stijl 5, no. 8 (1922): 125–­28. El Lissitzky, “√ Konstruktsiia” (1922), in Arkhiv N. I. Khardzhieva: Russkii avangard: materialy i dokumenty iz sobraniia RGALI, vol. 1, ed. Ekaterina Borbinskaia et al. (Moscow: Defi, 2017), 272. Lissitzky’s epigraph, “We do not expect to find on the Red Square in Moscow a medieval tournament with knights doing each other to death for the favor of a lady’s smile,” is from section VI, “The Equilibrium between the Elements of Society,” of Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (New York: International Publishers, 1925), 132. Bukharin, Historical Materialism, 264. Gan, Constructivism, 35. Gan’s long citation ends with the sentence Lissitzky chose for his epigraph. Hemken, “Muss die neue Kunst die Massen dienen?” 62–­65. For an overview of the Hungarian debates, see Oliver A. Botar, “From Avant-­Garde to ‘Proletkult’ in Hungarian Émigré Politico-­Cultural Journals, 1922–­1924,” in Art Journals on the Political Front, 1910–­1940, ed. Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), 100–­141.

notes to pages 4 8 –51

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50 51 52

53

54

55 56 57 58

59

60 61 62 63

64

65

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“Vortrag Tzaras auf dem dadákongress in Weimar 1922,” Merz, no. 7 (January 1924), 69. “Lissitzky-­Moskwa sagt den dadaismus: ‘Du hast von innen ausgeschnitten die Bauchgehirn der Bourgeoisie.’” Mecano, Red issue (1923), n.p. El Lissitzky to Nelly van Doesburg, undated letter (fall 1922), inventory no. 111, Theo van Doesburg Archive, Rijksdienst Beeldende Kunst (Van Moorsel Donation), The Hague. Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 34. This painting was later displayed at the Entartete Kunst exhibition, after being confiscated from the Landesmuseum in Hanover, where it was on loan from Sophie Küppers. Its current whereabouts are unknown. See Nisbet’s comments in the corrigenda to his Proun inventory, “El Lissitzky in the Proun Years: A Study of His Work and Thought” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995), 375. As Cornelia Osswald-­Hoffmann notes in her study of Prouns Space, no documentation of the commission itself remains. Osswald-­Hoffmann, Zauber . . . und Zeigeräume: Raumgestalten der 20er und 30er Jahre (Munich: Akademiker Verlag München, 2003), 228n358. El Lissitzky, “Prounen Raum,” G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung, no. 1 (July 1923): 4. Lissitzky, “From a Letter” (1923), in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 344. Lissitzky, “Prounen Raum,” 4. The entry reads “Lissitzky; E. L., Berlin, Prounen-­Raum. Wand, Holz, Farbe.” Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung 1923 im Landesausstellungsgebäude am Lehrter Bahnhof (Berlin, 1923), 34. Lissitzky applied for an entry visa for the Netherlands at the end of April, a process that could take up to two weeks without assistance in the Hague. El Lissitzky to J. J. P. Oud, April 28, 1923, in El Lissitzky: Proun und Wolkenbügel: Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, ed. Jen Lissitzky and Sophie Lissitzky-­ Küppers (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977), 120–­21. Lissitzky’s typescript of the lecture “Neue russische Kunst” in the Nikolai Khardzhiev archive is signed and dated May 1923. Khardzhiev archive, inventory no. 720, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Lissitzky, “New Russian Art: A Lecture” (1923), in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 337–­38. Lissitzky, Richter, and van Doesburg, “Erklärung,” 64. Lissitzky, “Prounen Raum,” 4. Hans Richter to Theo van Doesburg, October 1922, in Konstruktivistische, internationale, schöpferische Arbeitsgemeinschaft, 317. Éva Forgács has argued along similar lines that Lissitzky’s repeated protestation in the G essay that the space is not a living room represents an attempt to distance it from a specific studio space, in her view, that of Erich Buchholz. Forgács, “Definitive Space: The Many Utopias of El Lissitzky’s Proun Room,” in Perloff and Reed, Situating El Lissitzky, 47–­77. Maria Gough, “Contains Graphic Material: El Lissitzky and the Topography of G,” in G: An Avant-­garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design and Film, ed. Detlef Mertens and Michael Jennings (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010), 32–­36. Lissitzky, “Prounen Raum,” 4.

notes to pages 51–59

66 67 68 69 70 71

72

73 74 75 76 77 78

79

80

81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89

El Lissitzky, “Ne mirovidenie—­no miroreal’nost’” (1921), RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 25, l. 13. Ernst Kállai, “El Lissitzky,” Der Cicerone 1 (1924): 1063. El Lissitzky, “Ne mirovideniie—­no miroreal’nost’” (1921), RGALI, fond 2361, op. 1, d. 25, ll. 13–­14. A slightly different wording appears in Lissitzky’s essay “Proun” (1921), RGALI fond 3145, op. 1, d. 542, l. 13. Selim Khan-­Magomedov, Konstruktivizm: Kontseptsiia formoobrazovaniia (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 2003), 207–­8. Nikolai Tarabukin, Ot mol’berta k mashine (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1923), 30; Maria Gough, “Tarabukin, Spengler, and the Art of Production,” October, no. 93 (Summer 2000): 105–­7. Aleksei Gastev, “Novaia kultur’naia ustanovka” (1923), in Kak nado rabotat’. Prakticheskoe vvedenie v nauku organizatsii truda, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Ekonomika, 1972), 95–­96. Gastev, “Novaia kultur’naia ustanovka,” 94–­95. Gastev, “Novaia kultur’naia ustanovka,” 97. Aleksei Gastev, “O novom iskusstve,” in Sbornik novogo iskusstvo (Kyiv: Vseukr. Otdela iskusstv NKP, 1919), 17–­18. Gastev, “Novaia kultur’naia ustanovka,” 104. Gastev, “Novaia kultur’naia ustanovka,” 111. In this context, Gastev distinguished between fixed and working capital. Kazimir Malevich, "On New Systems in Art," in Essays on Art, 1915–­1933, vol. 1, ed. Troels Anderson, trans. Xenia Glowacki-­Prus and Arnold McMillin (London: Rapp & Whiting, 1969), 98. Roman Jakobson, “Futurism” (1919), in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/ Belknap, 1987), 29. For Husserl, “the intentional Object, the valuable as valuable . . . the action as action, becomes an object seized upon only in a particular ‘objectifying’ turn. Being turned valuingly to a thing involves, to be sure, a seizing upon the mere thing; not however the mere thing, but rather the valuable thing or the value is the full intentional correlate of the valuing act.” Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 76. Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 202. Gustav Shpet, Appearance and Sense (1914), trans. Thomas Nemeth (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 157. El Lissitzky, “Doklad o tekushchem momente” (October 27, 1920), Khardzhiev archive, inventory no. 716, sheet 2, Stedelik Museum, Amsterdam. Yuri Tynianov, “Literary Fact” (1924), in Permanent Evolution, 161. Tynianov, “Literary Fact,” 163 (emphasis in original). Tynianov, “Literary Fact,” 164. Tynianov, “Literary Fact,” 164. Tynianov, “Literary Fact,” 164 (translation modified). Tynianov, “Literary Fact,” 168. Anyone who has ever called a sunset “romantic” or a social encounter “surreal” will have an inkling of the process notes to pages 59 – 6 3

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Tynianov is describing here. Tynianov, “Literary Fact,” 168. 91 Tynianov, “Literary Fact,” 169. 92 See Peter Nisbet, “Displaying Design: A Newly Identified Exhibition Proposal by El Lissitzky, Berlin 1923,” in Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive, Presented on His Seventy-­Fifth Birthday (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 1995), 191–­93. In addition to identifying the drawing, Nisbet carefully transcribed Lissitzky’s annotations, which led him to attribute the design and layout of the first issue of G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung to Lissitzky with reasonable certainty. 93 El Lissitzky, “Information on the Work of the Book Artist” (response to a questionnaire, April 13, 1941), in El Lissitzky (Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1976), 81. 94 This speculative (but to my mind convincing) interpretation appears in Nisbet’s dissertation, “Lissitzky in the Proun Years,” 275–­76. 95 Nancy Troy reported that Huszár and Rietveld’s design was not executed in The de Stijl Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 131. Nisbet, in turn, cites two reviews referring to Huszár and Rietveld’s design, which make no mention of Lissitzky’s; see his “Lissitzky in the Proun Years,” 274. 96 Kállai, “El Lissitzky,” 1063. 97 Nisbet assumes a sequence of four walls, while Gough, perhaps sensing a problem, cautiously describes the drawing as “an elevation study of a single long wall (or a series of shorter walls run together)” before moving on to the journal G, her main subject. Gough, “Contains Graphic Material,” 23. 98 Reexamining the room’s scale is helpful here. Troy refers to the space as 9 × 9 meters, based on notes on a photograph of the space in the collection of Truus Schröder. Troy, De Stijl Environment, 217n18. Huszár and Rietveld’s published plan, however, is not for a square room, and while it does not specify dimensions, an estimate based on the scale of the included furniture yields markedly smaller numbers: around 6.5 × 5.5 meters (Rietveld’s Berlin Chair, whose dimensions are known from a 1925 version he built for the Schröder house, is among the furniture on the published plan). Although Lissitzky’s sketch is much rougher and not to scale, a back-­of-­ the-­envelope calculation based on the size of the works he included gives comparable wall lengths. In their arrangement for the 1923 Great Berlin Art Exhibition, the corner galleries of halls 19 and 20 measure about 5 × 5 meters; a comparison with the catalogue of the 1924 Great Berlin Art Exhibition shows that room dividers in these large halls were sometimes relocated between exhibitions. 99 Adolf Behne, untitled essay in El Lissitzky, Moskau, Schau der Arbeit 1919–­23 (Berlin: Graphisches Kabinett J. B. Neumann, 1924), n.p. 100 Lissitzky, Richter, and van Doesburg, “Erklärung,” 63–­64; Behne, untitled essay in El Lissitzky, Moskau. 101 Behne, untitled essay in El Lissitzky, Moskau. 90

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Behne, untitled essay in El Lissitzky, Moskau.

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El Lissitzky, “Topography of Typography” (1923), in Sophie Lissitzky-­ Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittal (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 355 (translation modified). Lissitzky, “Topography of Typography,” 355. Aleksandr Bošković, “The Avant-­Garde Quest for a Bioscopic Book,” in Beyond Given Knowledge: Investigation, Quest and Exploration in Modernism and the Avant-­Gardes, ed. Harri Veivo et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 59–­76. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, March 21, 1924, in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 47. Michel Frizot, “On a Cinema Imaginary of Photography, 1928–­30,” in Between Still and Moving Images, ed. Laurent Guido and Olivier Lugon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 177–­96. László Moholy-­Nagy, “Production-­Reproduction” (1922), trans. Mátyás Esterházy, in Kristina Passuth, Moholy-­Nagy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 289–­90. See for instance, A. Filippov, “Production Art” (1921); English translation in The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann (New York: Da Capo, 1990), 22. Kant specifies that “insofar as the imagination is spontaneity,” that is, a pure, original, and determining act of apperception, “I also occasionally call it the productive imagination, and thereby distinguish it from the reproductive imagination, whose synthesis is subject solely to empirical laws, namely those of association, and that therefore contributes nothing to the explanation of the possibility of cognition a priori.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998), 257. Max Horkheimer later criticized the use of these categories as an instance of “the false consciousness of the bourgeois savant in the liberal era.” See his essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell et al. (New York: Continuum, 1972), 198. Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 259–­66. El Lissitzky, “Proun” (1921), RGALI fond 3145, op. 1, d. 542, l. 2. Lissitzky initially intended The Isms of Art as a special issue of Merz, before Arp located the Swiss publisher Eugen Rentsch. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, March 23, 1924, in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 48. Hans Arp, “dadaland” (1955), quoted in Maike Steinkamp, “Die letzte Truppenschau aller Ismen . . . ,” in Hans Arp: Der Nabel der Avantgarde (Berlin: Georg Kolbe Museum, 2015), 30. On King Stag, see Bibiana Obler, Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and Taeuber (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 166–­77. Sophie Taueber’s sister, it should be remembered, worked as Carl Jung’s secretary while the Cabaret Voltaire was operating in Zürich. Gretta Stroh, “Sophie Taueber-­Arp—­Leben und Werk,” in Sophie Taueber-­Arp: Zum 100. Geburtstag, nel centario della nascita (Lugano: Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, and Museo Cantonale d’Arte, 1989), 29–­30. n o t e s t o pa g e s 7 1 –74

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“In the Oedipus as well as the castration complex the father plays the same role of feared opponent to the infantile sexual interests. Castration and its substitute through blinding is the punishment he threatens.” Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913), in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1938), 907. Leo Steinberg, quoted in Yve-­Alain Bois, “El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility,” Art in America 76, no. 4 (April 1988): 174. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, September 15, 1925, in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 66–­67. Hausmann’s essay “Optofonetika” appears in Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, no. 3 (May 1922): 13–­14; it was announced in the previous issue. Adrian Sudhalter, “How to Make a Dada Anthology,” in Dadaglobe Reconstructed (Zürich: Kunsthaus Zürich/Scheidegger & Spiess, 2016), 42. Roman Jakobson, “Dada,” in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Belknap, 1987), 34, 40. El Lissitzky to Theo van Doesburg, July 7, 1924, in El Lissitzky: The Experience of Totality (Madrid: La Fabrica, 2014), 183. “Ein Schweizer Dokument über Lissitzky,” in El Lissitzky: Proun und Wolkenbügel: Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, ed. Jen Lissitzky and Sophie Lissitzky-­ Küppers (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977), 184–­85. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, November 1, 1924, in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 54. Christopher Phillips, “Resurrecting Vision: European Photography between the Wars,” in The New Vision: Photography between the World Wars, ed. Maria Morris Hambourg and Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 69. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, September 15, 1925, in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 66. Maria Elena Versari, “International Futurism Goes National: The Ambivalent Identity of a National/International Avant-­garde,” in Nation, Style, Modernism, ed. Jacek Purchla and Wolf Tegethoff (Munich: Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, 2006), 181. Giovanni Lista, Futurism & Photography (London: Merrell, 2001), 50. Murayama was included in the international section of a traveling exhibition of Italian futurism at J. B. Neumann’s Berlin gallery and was singled out for praise in a review published in Ruggero Vasari’s journal, “Betrachtungen über die Ausstellung futuristischer Bilder in Berlin,” Der Futurismus, no. 1 (May 1922): 6. From Switzerland, Lissitzky asked Küppers to send a copy of his portfolio of stage designs for Victory over the Sun to Murayama at his Tokyo address. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, March 2, 1924, Getty Research Institute special collections, item 950076, box 1, folder 2. Whether the portfolio was sent remains unclear; Lissitzky did, however, list Murayama among the correspondents of Izvestiia ASNOVA in 1926, and include Murayama’s journal Mavo among the illustrations of his essay “Our Book” the following year. Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Futurist Photodynamism, trans. Lawrence Rainey, Modernism/Modernity 15, no. 2 (April 2008): 364–­65. Marta Braun, “Fantasmes des vivants et des morts: Anton Giulio Bragaglia

n o t e s t o pa g e s 74 –7 9

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30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50

et la figuration de l’invisible,” Études Photographiques 1 (November 1996): 46–­50. Clément Chéroux, “Ghost Dialectics: Spirit Photography in Entertainment and Belief,” in The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 45–­46. Bragaglia, Futurist Photodynamism, 370, 376. Bragaglia, Futurist Photodynamism, 367. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 44. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 122. El Lissitzky, “K. und Pangeometrie,” in Europa Almanach, ed. Carl Einstein and Paul Westheim (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1925), 103–­13; English translation, “A. and Pangeometry,” in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 348–­53. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 352, 353. Stephen Heath, “On Suture,” in Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 89. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 353. László Moholy-­Nagy and Alfréd Kemény, “Dynamic-­Constructive System of Forces” (1922), trans. Mátyás Esterházy, in Passuth, Moholy-­Nagy, 290. Raoul Hausmann, “Vom sprechende Film zur Optophonetik,” G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung, no. 1 (July 1923): 2–­3. Jean Clair, Duchamp et la photographie (Paris: Editions du Chêne, 1977), 80–­ 92. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 352. Lissitzky gives 1 = 1 as the title of a book in which the essay would appear in his letter to Sophie Küppers of March 6, 1924. Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 45. “Amechanics of Art” appears in the drafts preserved in RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 28, l. 9. R. H. Francé, “Die sieben technischen Grundformen der Natur,” Das Kunstblatt, no. 1 (1923): 5. Oliver A. I. Botar, Sensing the Future: Moholy-­Nagy, Media and the Arts (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2014), 17–­38. R. H. Francé, Bios: Die Gesetze der Welt, vol. 2 (Stuttgart and Heilbronn: Walter Siefert, 1923), 96–­97. Francé, Bios, 2:118. On Francé’s role as heir apparent to Ernst Haeckel, see Botar, “Defining Biocentrism,” in Biocentrism and Modernism, ed. Oliver A. I. Botar and Isabel Wünsche (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 33. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 352. Peter Nisbet, “Introduction to El Lissitzky,” in El Lissitzky, 1890–­1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 1987), 29. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1929), 82, 84–­85. A contrary view, which treats the views expressed in Lissitzky’s “Proun” lecture of 1921 and those of “A. and Pangeometry” as continuous, can be found in Yve-­Alain Bois, “From –­∞ to 0 to +∞: Axonometry, or Lissitzky’s Mathematical Paradigm,” in El Lissitzky, 1890–­1941: Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer (Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbeuseum, 1990), 27–­33. notes to pages 79 – 8 2

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Spengler, Decline of the West, 58; Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 348. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-­Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 429–­30. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 352. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 350. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 350. Compare the following remark by Malevich: “I have transformed myself into the zero of form and dragged myself out of the rubbish-­filled pool of academic art.” Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting” (1916), in Essays on Art, 1915–­1933, vol. 1, ed. Troels Anderson, trans. Xenia Glowacki-­Prus and Arnold McMillin (London: Rapp & Whiting, 1969), 19. Jacques-­Alain Miller, “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier),” Screen 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977–­1978): 24–­34. Miller, “Suture,” 33. The text on photochemistry was identified by Klaus Pollmeier, “El Lissitzky’s Multilayer Photographs: A Technical Analysis,” https://www.moma.org/ interactives/objectphoto/assets/essays/Pollmeier.pdf, accessed May 1, 2017. This interpretation was first proposed by Peter Nisbet, “El Lissitzky in the Proun Years: A Study of His Work and Thought, 1919–­1927” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995), 309. On Schwitters’s Ursonate and related poems, see John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 174–­76. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 351. Bois, “From –­∞ to 0 to +∞,” 27–­33. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 352. George Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde, “Art Is in Danger” (1925), in Dadas on Art, ed. Lucy Lippard (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1971), 79–­85. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 348; Grosz and Herzfelde, “Art Is in Danger,” 82. In 1920, Schwitters rejected Richard Huelsenbeck’s political rhetoric as “Husk-­dada” (Huelsendadaismus) and advocated the concerns of abstract art and sound poetry pursued by the “core-­dadaists” (Kerndadaisten), Arp and Tristan Tzara. Kurt Schwitters, “Merz,” in Lippard, Dadas on Art, 102–­3. Botar, “Hungarian Émigré Politico-­Cultural Journals, 1922–­24,” in Art Journals on the Political Front, 1910–­1940, ed. Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 125–­26. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 348. Grosz and Herzfelde, “Art Is in Danger,” 84. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 348. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2001), 37, 47–­ 55. See Pollmeier’s discussion in “El Lissitzky’s Multilayer Photographs.” Lissitzky’s negatives in the collection of the Sprengel Museum all conform to the camera dimensions provided by Küppers; the larger size of his portrait of Schwitters and his self-­portrait, known as The Constructor (discussed below), owes to their assembly from multiple negatives. These unique prints were then rephotographed to produce copy prints; some

notes to pages 8 2– 8 8

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second-­generation prints are contact prints (like the portrait of Schwitters at the Museum of Modern Art), and others are enlarged to various dimensions. Although they were made later, when Lissitzky had access to different darkroom arrangements, the availability of the contact print as a basic printing operation makes dating second-­generation prints based on scale (or printing method) problematic. Kurt Schwitters, “i,” Merz, no. 2 (April 1923): 20–­21. Schwitters, “i,” 21. J. C. Middleton, “Pattern without Predictability, or: Pythagoras Saved. A Comment on Kurt Schwitters’s ‘Gedicht 25,’” German Life and Letters 22, no. 4 (1969): 348–­49. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 350. See Leah Dickerman, “El Lissitzky’s Camera Corpus,” in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 153–­76; Paul Galvez, “Self-­Portrait of the Artist as Monkey-­Hand,” October, no. 93 (Summer 2000): 109–­37. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, January 18, 1925, Getty Research Institute special collections, item 950076, box 1, folder 3. He thought the final result was “weak,” however. El Lissitzky and Mart Stam, “Die Reklame,” ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen, no. 2 (1924): 3. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 352 (translation modified). Lissitzky and Stam, “Die Reklame,” 4. Lissitzky and Stam, “Die Reklame,” 3. László Moholy-­Nagy, Painting Photography Film, trans. Janet Seligman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 39. Lissitzky, “Topography of Typography,” 355. Kurt Schwitters, “Thesen über Typographie,” Merz, no. 11 (Summer 1924): 91. Rosalind Krauss, “The Object Caught by the Heel,” in Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996), 249–­51. Ursula Kocher and Isabel Schulz, eds., Kurt Schwitters: Alle Texte, vol. 4 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 230. Beindorff owned a small watercolor, which is no longer extant. See no. 48, “Annotated Transcript of El Lissitzky’s Proun Inventory,” in Nisbet, El Lissitzky, 1890–­1941, 166. Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 37. Pelikan has no archival record of Lissitzky’s photographic work, but clippings kept by Jan Tschichold indicate that one of Lissitzky’s photographic experiments was published. Jan Tschichold papers, Getty Research Institute special collections, item 930030, box 3, folder 15. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, December 1, 1924, in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 54. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, December 12, 1924, in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 56. It is difficult to date individual Pelikan works, but Lissitzky’s letter of October 16, 1924, reports “a new idea for a photographic ink poster,” giving us some idea of his activities at the time. Lissitzky-­ Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 53 (translation modified). notes to pages 8 9 –9 8

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El Lissitzky to Sophie-­Küppers, December 8, 1924 (emphasis in original). Getty Research Institute special collections, item 950076, box 1, folder 2. 95 El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, December 15, 1924, in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 56. 96 El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, January 12, 1925, in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 57. 97 El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, January 15, 1925, Getty Research Institute special collections, item 950076, box 1, folder 3. 98 El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, [February?] 16, 1925, Getty Research Institute special collections, item 950076, box 1, folder 3. 99 Lissitzky probably left a copy of his self-­portrait with Stam when he visited him in Thun on Christmas day, 1924, a trip noted in his letter to Küppers of December 24, 1924. On March 15 he sent the following note to Küppers on a clean sheet of stationery: “I hereby authorize Frau Dr. Sophie Küppers to transact all sales and deal with all money matters for me. [signed] El Lissitzky.” Getty Research Institute special collections, item 950076, box 1, folder 3. On the origins of the British patent, see Nisbet, “Lissitzky in the Proun Years,” 334–­35. 100 Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 170. 101 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 38–­48. 102 Quoted in Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 165. 103 Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 180. 104

Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 353.

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El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, June 20, 1925, in Sophie Lissitzky-­Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittal (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 63. El Lissitzky to J. J. P. Oud, May 14, 1925, in El Lissitzky: Proun und Wolkenbügel: Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, ed. Jen Lissitzky and Sophie Lissitzky-­ Küppers (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977), 129. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (1925), translated by Frederick Etchells as The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 5. Nikolai Ladovskii to El Lissitzky, February 1, 1923, in Proun und Wolkenbügel, 177. El Lissitzky, “Seriia neboskrebov dlia Moskvy, WB1 (1923–­25),” Izvestiia ASNOVA, no. 1 (1926): n.p. Lissitzky requested the details of this kind of construction from Roth in December 1924. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, December 29, 1924, in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 56; Emil Roth to El Lissitzky, February 3, 1925, RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 48, ll. 8–­10. For an English translation of Lissitzky’s essay, see Catherine Cooke, Russian Avant-­Garde Theories of Art, Architecture, and the City (London: Academy Editions, 1995), 198. Lissitzky, “Seriia neboskrebov dlia Moskvy.” Lissitzky, “Seriia neboskrebov dlia Moskvy.” Lissitzky, “Seriia neboskrebov dlia Moskvy.”

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Peter Nisbet, “Introduction to El Lissitzky,” in El Lissitzky, 1890–­1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 1987), 51n80. J. Christoph Bürkle, El Lissitzky, der Traum vom Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky, Emil Roth, Mart Stam (Zurich: Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich/Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur, 1991), 35–­39. Velimir Khlebnikov, “Ourselves and Our Buildings. Creators of Streetsteads. Proclamor” (1920–­1921), in Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, vol. 1, Letters and Theoretical Writings, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 347–­56. Le Corbusier to El Lissitzky, May 6, 1924, RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 44, l. 1. A French version of an early draft of the essay survives in RGALI, fond 3145, op. 1, d. 548, ll. 1–­8. It eventually appeared as El Lissitzky, “SSSRs Architektur,” Das Kunstblatt, no. 2 (February 1925), 49–­53; English translation, “Architecture in the USSR,” in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 367–­69. El Lissitzky, “SSSRs Architektur” (1925), RGALI, fond 2361, op. 1, d. 27, l. 2. El Lissitzky to Kazimir Malevich, December 21, 1920, in In Malevich’s Circle: Confederates, Students, Followers in Russia, 1920s–­1950s, ed. Irina Karasik, trans. Kenneth MacInnes (Moscow: Palace Editions, 2000), 53. For an analysis of discrepancies between Lissitzky’s elevations and his parti, see Samuel Johnson, Mitesh Dixit, Lawry Boyer, and Stephen Melville, “Counterfactual Modeling in Historical Reconstruction: El Lissitzky’s Horizontal Skyscraper WB2,” Technology | Architecture + Design 6, no. 1 (2022): 46–­58. Vladimir Tatlin, “Memorandum of the Moscow Artistic Collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Education to the Council of People’s Commissars, on the Erection in Moscow of 50 Monuments to Outstanding Figures in the Area of Revolutionary and Social Activity, in Philosophy, Literature, Sciences, and the Arts,” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova, trans. Colin Wright et al. (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 185. Christina Lodder, “Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda,” in The Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in a One-­party State, 1917–­1992, ed. Matthew Cullerne Bowne and Brandon Taylor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 14–­32. Bürkle, Traum vom Wolkenbügel, 42. El Lissitzky to J. J. P. Oud, May 14, 1925, Lissitzky–­Oud letters, inventory no. 1583, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Nikolai Dokuchaev, “Arkhitektura i planirovka gorodov,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, no. 6 (1926): 13. Dokuchaev, “Arkhitektura i planirovka gorodov,” 16. Relevant here is Sitte’s conclusion that urban planning “might call attention to the act of seeing in general, to the physiological manner in which the perception of space, on which all architectonic effect is based, takes place.” Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, trans. George R. Collins and Christiane Craseman Collins (New York: Random House, 1965), 133. “Neboskrebov na lubianskoi ploshchadi,” Izvestiia ASNOVA, no. 1 (1926): n.p. “Soobshchenie gazety ‘Izvestiia’ o zasedanii komissii po plany ‘Novoi Moskvy,’” Izvestiia, no. 51 (March 1, 1924), in Iz istorii sovetskoi arkhitektury, 1917–­1925 gg. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Izd. Akadamii Nauk SSSR, not es to pages 1 0 5 –112

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1963), 45–­46. On the Garden City movement’s impact in Russia, see Catherine Cooke, “Russian Responses to the Garden City Idea,” Architectural Review, no. 976 (June 1978): 354–­63. Aleksei Shchusev, “Problemy ‘Novoi Moskvy,’” Stroitel’naia promyshlennost’, no. 3 (1925): 194. Dokuchaev, “Arkhitektura i planirovka gorodov,” 11. The share of housing built by the private sector peaked at 80.8 percent in 1923 before falling to 54.3 percent in 1928. Gregory D. Andrusz, Housing and Urban Development in the USSR (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 43. Albert J. Schmidt, “The Restoration of Moscow after 1812,” Slavic Review 40, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 47. “Soobshchenie gazety ‘Izvestiia,’” 49–­50. “Soobshchenie gazety ‘Izvestiia,’” 50; P. Gaevskii, “Chto nuzhno stroit’,” Izvestiia, no. 3 (January 5, 1926), 3. “The city consists of atrophying old parts and growing, live, new ones. We want to deepen this contrast.” Lissitzky, “Seriia neboskrebov dlia Moskvy.” The neo-­avant-­garde will later rediscover this antagonistic relation as “bigness,” which transforms the street into a “mere segment of the continuous metropolitan plane where remnants of the past face the equipments of the new in an uneasy standoff.” Rem Koolhaas, S M L XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998), 514. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, July 9, 1925, in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 64. On the strength of his organizing activities in Germany and Switzerland, Lissitzky was invited to the first two CIAM congresses, but could not attend either. See Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–­1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 12–­26. “CIAM: La Sarraz Declaration,” in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-­Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 110–­11. N. M., “Po povodu No. 1 ‘Izvestii assotsiatsii novykh arkhitektov,” Stroitel’naia promyshlennost’, no. 8 (1926): 567. Jean-­Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR: Theories and Projects for Moscow, 1928–­1936, trans. Kenneth Hylton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 24–­26. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, July 9, 1925, in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 64. Lissitzky received a copy of the book from Küppers, who had visited the Paris Exposition. Dokuchaev’s “Arkhitektura i planirovka gorodov” was written principally as a critical response to Le Corbusier’s book. Le Corbusier, City of Tomorrow, 220 (emphasis in original). Lissitzky, “Seriia neboskrebov dlia Moskvy.” Peter Behrens, “Einfluss von Zeit-­und Raumausnutzung auf moderne Formentwicklung,” in Der Verkehr. Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbund (Jena: Eugen Diedrichs, 1914), 8. Behrens, “Einfluss von Zeit-­und Raumausnutzung,” 9. Berlage had highlighted the importance of simplification as early as the 1890s, as Matthias Noell points out in “Bioscopic and Kinematic Books: Studies on the Visualization of Motion and Time in the Architectural Book ca. 1900–­1935,” Photo Researcher, no. 18 (2012): 46.

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El Lissitzky, “Preodolenie iskusstva” (1921), Experiment/Eksperiment, no. 5 (1999), 148. El Lissitzky, “Rad–­Propeller und das Folgende,” G: Material zur Elementaren Gestaltung, no. 2 (September 1923): n.p.; English translation, “Wheel–­ Propeller and What Follows,” in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 345. Fritz Hoeber, “Stadtbau und Verkehr,” in Der Verkehr. Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbund, 11. Behrens, “Einfluss von Zeit-­und Raumausnutzung,” 10. Lissitzky, “Preodolenie iskusstva,” 147. Lissitzky, “Wheel–­Propeller,” 345. Ernst Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture, trans. Lauren K. Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 127. Lissitzky jotted down the title of Kapp’s book on an undated sheet that also contains references copied from R. H. Francé. Getty Research Institute special collections, item 950076, box 1 folder 7. Lissitzky, “Wheel–­Propeller,” 345. Helmut Müller-­Sievers, The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 139–­50. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 71. Fritz Wichert, “Airship Travel and Architecture,” Frankfurter Zeitung (March 21, 1909); trans. Iain Boyd White, in Tilmann Buddensieg, Industriekultur: Peter Behrens and the AEG, 1907–­1914 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 231–­32. Lissitzky, “Architecture in the USSR,” 368 (translation modified). Le Corbusier, City of Tomorrow, 188. El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, Die Kunstismen = Les ismes de l’art = The Isms of Art (Erlenbach-­Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1925), xi. Following the revelation that Roth conceived the three-­legged structure of WB1, the indeterminacy of this painting’s date led Bürkle to speculate that the engineer might have contributed the form of the building’s horizontal corpus as well. Bürkle refers to a sketch in the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, inscribed “Minuso,” the place of Lissitzky’s Swiss residency. This reverses the precedence of Proun and Wolkenbügel but leaves the bond intact. Bürkle, Traum vom Wolkenbügel, 36. Lissitzky, “Seriia neboskrebov dlia Moskvy”; Lissitzky, “Typographical Facts” (1924), in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 355. Lissitzky, “Preodolenie iskusstva,” 148. Lissitzky, “Suprematizm mirostroitel’stva” (1920), in UNOVIS No. 1: Prilozheniie k faksimil’nomu izdaniiu, ed. Tatiana Goriacheva (Moscow: Izd. Skanrus/State Tretyakov Gallery, 2003), 71. Lissitzky, “Preodolenie iskusstva,” 148. El Lissitzky, “Unser buch,” in Gutenberg Jahrbuch (Mainz: Gutenberg Gesellschaft, 1927), 172; English translation, “Our Book,” in Lissitzky-­ Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 357 (translation modified). Joseph Lux, Ingeniuer-­Aesthetic (Munich: Gustav Lammers, 1910), 20. Lissitzky, “Unser Buch,” 172. Compare the centrality of the rotary press in another account influenced by Reuleaux, Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and not es to pages 11 6 –12 2

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Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 84–­85. Chrisoph Asendorf, Super Constellation: Flugzeug und Raumrevolution (Vienna: Springer, 1997), 74. Lissitzky, “Seriia neboskrebov dlia Moskvy.” Moisei Ginzburg, “Tselevaia ustanovka v sovremennoi arkhitekture,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 1 (1927): 4–­10. Lissitzky, Proun und Wolkenbügel, 14. Peter Nisbet, “El Lissitzky in the Proun Years: A Study of His Work and Thought” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995), 182. R. H. Francé, Bios: Die Gesetze der Welt, vol. 2 (Stuttgart and Heilbronn: Walter Seifert, 1923), 144. Francé, Bios, 2:122, 89–­90. Raoul Hausmann, “Optofonetika,” Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, no. 3 (May 1922): 13. Cornelius Borck, “Sound Work and Visionary Prosthetics: Artistic Experiments in Raoul Hausmann,” Papers of Surrealism, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 18–­19. El Lissitzky, “‘Americanism’ in European Architecture,” in Lissitzky-­ Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 370. Lissitzky, “Seriia neboskrebov dlia Moskvy.” Lissitzky, “Typographical Facts,” 153 (translation modified); Megan Luke, Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 44. Jan Tschichold, The New Typography (1928), trans. Ruara McLean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 112. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 25. Benjamin, Moscow Diary, 25. El Lissitzky, “Element und Erfindung,” ABC, no. 1 (1924): n.p.; English translation, “Element and Invention,” in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 346. This idea is further developed in an unsigned “Open Letter to Mossovet” in Izvestiia ASNOVA that proposes a special commission on the painting of façades: “Each street can have its own basic tone, in which there can be modulations and violations (breaks), depending on the particularity of the individual structures. Structures faced with other materials or imitating them, and likewise possessing an archaeological significance or protected by the commission for the preservation of monuments, can remain untouched.” “Doma ili ulitsy?” Izvestiia ASNOVA, no. 1 (1926): n.p. Lissitzky, “Seriia neboskrebov dlia Moskvy.” Theo van Doesburg, “The Significance of Color for Interior and Exterior Architecture,” in Joost Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg (New York: MacMillan, 1974), 139. Doesburg, “Significance of Color,” 139. Doesburg, “Significance of Color,” 139. Theo van Doesburg, “Towards Plastic Architecture,” in Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, 144. Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 75–­93. INKhUK discussion of Lavinskii’s paper “Inzhenerizm,” January 26, 1922,

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quoted in Selim Khan-­Magomedov, Ratsionalizm (Ratsio-­arkhitektura) (Moscow: Arkhitektura-­S, 2007), 132. Nikolai Ladovskii to El Lissitzky, February 23, 1924. RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 59, ll. 9–­10. Vkhutemaska, “Levaia metafizika,” Lef, no. 4 (1924): 220. Nikolai Ladovskii, “Osnovy postroeniia teorii arkhitektury,” Izvestiia ASNOVA, no. 1 (1926): n.p. Ladovskii, “Osnovy postroeniia teorii arkhitektury.” Nikolai Ladovskii, “Psikho-­tekhnicheskaia laboratoriia arkhitektury,” Izvestiia ASNOVA, no. 1 (1926), n.p. On the roots of these theories, see Anatole Senkevitch Jr., “Aspects of Spatial Form and Perceptual Psychology in the Doctrine of the Rationalist Movement in Soviet Architecture in the 1920s,” VIA, no. 6 (1983): 79–­115, and more recently, Alla G. Vronskaya, “Composing Form, Constructing the Unconscious: Empiriocriticism and Nikolai Ladovskii’s ‘Psychoanalytical Method’ of Architecture at VKhUTEMAS” in Architecture and the Unconscious, John Shannon Hendrix and Lorens Eyen Holm, eds. (Surrey: Ashgate, 2016), 77–­98. Izvestiia ASNOVA, no. 1 (1926): n.p. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, March 6, 1926. Getty Research Institute special collections, item 950076, box 1, folder 4. Maria Gough, “Constructivism Disoriented,” in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 89. Siegfried Giedion, “Live Museum” (1929), in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 378.

Chapter 5 1

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The title of this exhibition is sometimes translated as All-­Union Printing Trades Exhibition, but the summary translation “printing trades” is not wholly adequate. The English word “polygraphic” has an unfortunate association with the so-­called lie detector test, but its literal meaning retains the sense of a multiplicity of graphic processes, and like the Russian adjective poligraficheskii, it can be used in a nominal form that avoids this issue. I have thus chosen to retain the term here and in the following chapter, where the process of “polygraphic development” (i.e., preparing material for publication) comes into focus. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s seminal account “From Faktura to Factography,” October, no. 30 (Autumn 1984), 82–­119. Buchloh’s framework was given an extended treatment in Jorge Ribalta, ed., Public Photographic Spaces: Exhibitions of Propaganda from Pressa to The Family of Man, 1928–­55 (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008). For more recent developments, see the special issue “Artists Design Exhibitions,” October, no. 150 (Fall 2014). Astrid Blome, Holger Bönig, and Michael Nagel, eds., The PRESSA, International Press Exhibition Cologne 1928, and the Jewish Contribution to Modern Journalism, vol. 1 (Bremen: Edition Lumière, 2012), 11. For internal Soviet numbers, see V. P. Tolstoi, ed., Vystavochnye ansambli SSSR, 1920–­1930-­e not es to pages 12 7–13 3

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gody, materialy i dokumenty (Moscow: Galart, 2006), 137. “Za den’,” Pravda, no. 239 (October 19, 1927), 8. “Za den’,” 8. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, December 8, 1925. Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 72. Lissitzky taught a course on furniture design for the woodworking faculty on the design of detached individual items, matched sets, and built-­in furnishings for both architecture and mass transit. El Lissitzky, “Programma po kursu mebelestroeniia Drevfaka Vkhutemasa,” 1926, RGALI fond 3145 op. 1, d. 551, ll. 1–­4. El Lissitzky to Ilya Chashnik, November 6, 1926, RGALI fond 3145, op. 1 d. 571; English translation, John Bowlt, in El Lissitzky (Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1976), 75–­76. “Organizatsionnogo zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta proizvodstvenno-­graficheskoi vystavki,” February 12, 1927, RGAE fond 8053, op. 1, d. 21, l. 52. “Organizatsionnogo zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta proizvodstvenno-­graficheskoi vystavki,” February 12, 1927, RGAE fond 8053, op. 1, d. 21, l. 52; “Zasedaniia komiteta vystavki proizvodstvennoi grafiki,” February 9, 1927, RGAE fond 8053, op. 1, d. 21, l. 27. “Zasedaniia otdela demonstratsii poligraficheskikh dostizhenii protsessov vystavki proizvodstvennoi grafiki,” February 24, 1927, RGAE fond 8053, op. 1, d. 23, l. 13; “Ob’edinnogo zasedaniia biuro inzhenerno-­tekhnicheskoi sektsii mosk. Gubotdela profsoiuza pechatnikov, kluba direktorov, biuro poligraficheskii sektsii i vystavochnogo komiteta poligraficheskoi vystavki,” February 26, 1927, RGAE fond 8053, op. 1, d. 23, l. 14; “Zasedaniia vystavochnogo komiteta GOSTORGa,” RGAE fond 8053, op. 1, d. 23, l. 5. GOSTORG approved the exhibition committee’s appeal for import licensing on April 19, 1927, and requested that a committee member from the exhibition’s foreign division be assigned to assist in the coordination of its activities with its own exhibition committee. The polygraphics exhibition committee resolved to seek legal assistance in gaining All-­Union status with VSNKh as early as February 26, but did not do so until late May. “Zasedaniia komiteta vystavki,” May 24, 1927, RGAE fond 8053, op. 1, d. 21, l. 9. This evidence allows us to accept Margarita Tupitsyn’s assertion that the exhibition was “sanctioned and controlled by high-­ranking government officials” only with significant qualifications: it is true that the show was approved and facilitated by the state, but the initiative came from below. Tupitsyn, “Back to Moscow,” in El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet: Photography, Design, Collaboration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 26. “Organizatsionnogo zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta proizvodstvenno-­graficheskoi vystavki,” February 12, 1927, RGAE fond 8053, op. 1, d. 21, l. 52; “Zasedaniia komiteta vystavki proizvodstvennoi grafiki,” February 12, 1927, RGAE fond 8053, op. 1, d. 21, l. 26. “Zasedaniia komiteta vystavki,” April 16–­May 31, 1927, RGAE fond 8053, op. 1, d. 21, ll. 7, 9, 11, 17, 21. In a photomontage illustration to his essay “SSSRs Architektur,” which he made from materials mailed to him by Ladovsky, Lissitzky combined several photographs of VSKhV under the sardonic caption “Is this Dada?” El

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Lissitzky, “SSSRs Architektur,” Das Kunstblatt, no. 2 (February 1925): 49–­53. Selim Khan-­Magomedov, Arkhitektura sovetskogo avangarda, vol. 1 (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 2001), 72. El Lissitzky, “Die künstlerischen Voraussetzungen zur Standardisierung individueller Möbel für die Bevölkerung. Vortrag für die Sektion Standardisierung NTU WSNCh,” in El Lissitzky: Proun und Wolkenbügel: Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, ed. Jen Lissitzky and Sophie Lissitzky-­Küppers (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977), 102–­3. Friedrich Kiesler, “Ausstellungssystem, Leger und Träger,” De Stijl 6, no. 10/11 (1925): 138–­42. After a visit to Vienna, van Doesburg wrote to Lissitzky of the great impression made on him by Kiesler’s stage designs and the possibility of another constructivist congress. Theo van Doesburg to El Lissitzky, November 29, 1924, RGALI fond 3145, op. 1, d. 574, l. 1 (verso). “Otkrytie vsesoiuznoi poligraficheskoi vystavkoi,” Izvestiia, no. 190 (August 21, 1927), 2. Although this notice states that the foreign section will open on September 1, it was not until October, when lectures on Western technology were announced, that the opening of the foreign section was acknowledged in the press. “Tekhnika pechatnogo dela na zapade,” Izvestiia, no. 227 (October 4, 1927), 4. S. Mikhailov, “Na poligraficheskoi vystavke,” Izvestiia, no. 227 (October 4, 1927), 3. Mikhailov, “Na poligraficheskoi vystavke,” 3. Ia. Tugendkhol’d, “Eshche o poligraficheskoi vystavke,” Izvestiia, no. 209 (September 13, 1927), 5. P. N., “Zapisnaia knizhka Lefa,” Novyi lef, no. 2 (1928): 44. Quoted in Khan-­Magomedov, Arkhitektura sovetskogo avangarda, 1:72. Piskarev presented a mockup of his design in mid-­May, after which his name disappears from archival records. “Zasedaniia komiteta vystavki,” May 19, 1927, RGAE fond 8053, op. 1, d. 21, ll. 10. “Zasedaniia predstavitelei komissii po premirovaniiu eksponatov vsesoiuznoi poligraficheskoi vystavki,” October 13, 1927, RGAE fond 8053, op. 1, d. 23, l. 3. Klutsis’s diploma is published in Margarita Tupitsyn, Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: Photography and Montage after Constructivism (New York: Steidl/International Center of Photography, 2004), 176. El Lissitzky, “Khudozhnik v proizvodstve,” in Vsesoiuznaia poligraficheskaia vystavka, putevoditel’ (Moscow: Mospoligraf, 1927), 7. Tupitsyn hazards several guesses as to the identity of these images, which vary in plausibility, in Beyond the Abstract Cabinet, 27–­28. The one extant photograph of the installation simply does not provide enough information to make further attributions, and until additional evidence comes to light it seems prudent to acknowledge the current limits of scholarship. El Lissitzky, “Fotopis’,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 10 (May 15, 1929), 11; English translation, “Photography,” trans. Peter Nisbet, in El Lissitzky, 1890–­1941: Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer (Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1990), 70. El Lissitzky, Self Portrait, 1924, inventory no. 1571, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. The inscription is typed on a small square of paper affixed to the front of the print, and although the ink has badly faded, the typed not es to pages 13 6 –14 0

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impression of the words makes them legible in raking light. Incidentally, Photomalerei is also the title given to the self-­portrait in Traugott Schalcher’s essay on Lissitzky in Gebrauchsgraphik, no. 12 (1928): 49. “Zadachi otdeleniia [istorii pis’men i pechati],” Vsesoiuznaia poligraficheskaia vystavka, putevoditel’ (Moscow: Mospoligraf, 1927), 4. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, September 15, 1925, in Sophie Lissitzky-­ Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittal (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 67 (emphasis in original; translation modified). Osip Brik, “Foto-­kadr protiv kartiny,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 2 (1926): 40–­42; English translation, “The Photograph versus the Painting,” trans. John Bowlt, in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–­1940, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), 213–­18; Boris Arvatov, “Pochemu ne umerla stankovaia kartina,” Novyi lef, no. 1 (1927): 38–­41. Excerpt of a letter from a group of artists to I. V. Stalin, no later than February 3, 1926, in Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–­1953, ed. Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 45–­48 (emphasis in original). The “well-­known resolution” dates to July 1, 1925. The remark is from Varvara Stepanova’s diary entry of November 12, 1927: “Why Osia [Brik] arranged a meeting with the kinocs is completely incomprehensible . . . this disparity between Lef conversations about newsreel and non-­fiction film and their support of the more right-­wing workers in this field already reeks of provocation and speculation.” English translation in Yuri Tsivian, ed., Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Gemona: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004), 281. The “right-­wing” producer alluded to here is Sergei Eisenstein. Compare Brik’s view that “pieces of newsreel are valuable in themselves” with Viktor Shklovsky’s insistence on regarding Vertov’s supposedly raw constructions as art, in Brik, “Against Genre Pictures,” and Shklovsky, “On the Fact That Plot Is a Constructive Principle, Not One from Everyday Life,” both in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, 275–­78, 266–­72. Lissitzky, “Khudozhnik v proizvodstve,” 4 (emphasis in original). Lissitzky, “Khudozhnik v proizvodstve,” 7. Arvatov, “Pochemu ne umerla stankovaia kartina,” 41. Yuri Tynianov, “On Literary Evolution” (1927), in Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film, trans. and ed. Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 274. On this aspect of the image, see Maria Gough, “Lissitzky on Broadway,” http://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/assets/essays/Gough.pdf, accessed February 1, 2015. Peter Nisbet first proposed this connection in “El Lissitzky in the Proun Years: A Study of His Work and Thought” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995), 329n46. Nisbet’s identification has been bolstered by Maria Gough, who also discusses the sports club project in “Lissitzky on Broadway.” Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Predosterezhenie,” Novyi lef, no. 11 (1928): 36–­37; English translation, “A Caution,” trans. John Bowlt, in Philips, Photography in the Modern Era, 264–­66.

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Gustav Klutsis to Valentina Kulagina, June 11, 1928, in Tupitsyn, Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina, 179. Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” 108. Leah Dickerman, “El Lissitzky’s Camera Corpus,” in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 171; T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 283. Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 136. Jowitt specifies that “while they extend political activity to previously excluded social forces [Leninist regimes] oppose the emergence of an autonomous public realm.” Michael David-­Fox, “From Illusory ‘Society’ to Intellectual ‘Public’: VOKS, International Travel and Party–Intelligentsia Relations in the Interwar Period,” Contemporary European History 11, no. 1 (February 2002): 23–­24. O. D. Kamaneva, “Cultural Rapprochement: The U.S.S.R. Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries,” Pacific Affairs 1, no. 5 (October 1928): 8. Alfred H. Barr Jr., “Russian Diary, 1927–­28,” October, no. 7 (Winter 1978): 19. On December 28, a VOKS committee invited Lissitzky to lead the exhibition design, along with Isaak Rabinovich (who had worked on the design of the 1925 Decorative Arts Exposition in Paris), but as of December 30, Lissitzky is the sole artist recorded in the planning meetings. “Zasedaniia komiteta po organizatsii Sovetskogo otdela na mezhdunarodnoi vystavke pechati v Kel’ne,” December 28 and 30, 1927, GARF fond 5283, o. 11. d. 35, ll. 25–­26. The brief presence of Rabinovich was first noted by Igor V. Riasantsev, “El Lissitzky und die ‘Pressa’ in Köln, 1928,” in El Lissitzky: Maler, Architekt, Typograf, Fotograf (Halle: Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, 1982), 73. According to Riasantsev, this marked the first time a single artist had led a large international exhibition design. “Zasedaniia komiteta po organizatsii Sovetskogo otdela na mezhdunarodnoi vystavke pechati v Kel’ne,” July 28, 1927, GARF fond 5283, op. 11, d. 35 ll. 2–­4. GARF fond 5283, op. 11, d. 38 ll. 181–­82, 185, 190, 193–­94. Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 104. Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, 148–­49. The CC resolution was published in Zhurnalist, no. 11 (1927), 54–­55. Khalatov had confirmed to Berlin that VOKS was beginning negotiations with Sovkino on December 21. GARF fond 5283, op. 11, d. 38, l. 197. Lissitzky was assigned the task on December 30. GARF fond 5283, op. 11, d. 35, l. 26. Two copies of this document exist: one typed and one handwritten copy signed by Lissitzky. GARF fond 5283, op. 11, d. 35, ll. 151, 157–­59. On February 11, Khalatov wrote to Berlin about a transfer of $513.47 (American) into a German account for use by Lissitzky and Gus, who was traveling with him, noting that the two had departed the previous day. GARF fond 5283, op. 11, d. 38, l. 232. Kameneva remained in office at VOKS until summer 1929, according to Ludmilla Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–­40: From not es to pages 14 5 –147

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Red Square to the Left Bank (London: Routledge, 2007), 113. Between 1923 and 1934, Rabkrin was merged with the party’s highest control organ, the Central Control Commission. Quoted in Robert V. Daniels, “The Left Opposition as Alternative to Stalinism,” Slavic Review 50, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 282. On Trotsky and Kamenev’s removal from the Politburo and the growing power of the Secretariat under Stalin, see Graeme Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 155–­58. Quoted in David-­Fox, “From Illusory ‘Society’ to Intellectual ‘Public,’” 26. El Lissitzky to Hans Richter, October 2, 1924, RGALI fond 3145, op. 1, d. 569, l. 1. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, September 24, 1925, Getty Research Institute special collections, item 950076, box 1 folder 3. “Doklad sobraniiu khudozhnikov gor. Vitebska ob organizatsii Soveta utverzhdeniia novykh form iskusstva pri Vitebskom Gubernskom Otdele narodnogo Obrazovaniia,” in UNOVIS No. 1: Prilozheniie k faksimil’nomu izdaniiu, ed. Tatiana Goriacheva (Moscow: Izd. Skanrus/State Tretyakov Gallery, 2003), 102. Barr, “Diary,” 19. Barr records that Lissitzky mentioned Gropius by name. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, May 5, 1926, Getty Research Institute special collections, item 950076, box 1 folder 4. The archived letter differs slightly from the version published in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 75. According to the data gathered by Michael David-­Fox, 1926 saw a sudden spike in the difficulty of obtaining permission for international travel through Narkompros: fifty-­eight of its applications that year were rejected, compared to eighteen the previous year. David-­Fox, “From Illusory ‘Society’ to Intellectual ‘Public,’” 19. GARF fond 5283, op. 11, d. 35, ll. 48–­49. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, April 14, 1928, Getty Research Institute special collections, item 950076, box 1, folder 4. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, April 14, 1928, Getty Research Institute special collections, item 950076, box 1, folder 4. This letter was composed over the course of several days. Riasantsev, “El Lissitzky und die ‘Pressa,’” 80–­81. Lissitzky is credited with the frieze’s design and Senkin with its execution in Mikhail Gus, ed., Katalog des Sowet-­Pavilions auf der internationalen Presse-­Ausstellung Köln, 1928 (Köln: M. Dumont Schauberg, 1928), 26. Tupitsyn, “Back to Moscow,” in Beyond the Abstract Cabinet, 34–­37. See Ulrich Pohlmann, “El Lissitzky’s Exhibition Designs: The Influence of His Work in Germany, Italy and the United States, 1923–­1943,” in Tupitsyn, Beyond the Abstract Cabinet, 53. It bears repeating that Lissitzky did not originate the architecturally scaled photograph. The 1903 panorama cited by Pohlmann was, for reasons that are readily imaginable, erected by “well-­ known manufacturers of bromide paper,” according to a notice in the British Journal of Photography 50 (October 30, 1903): 862. In 1932, Julien Levy reported that large-­scale photographs were regularly used as backdrops in Hollywood studio productions. See Levy, “Photo-­Murals,” in Murals by American Painters and Photographers (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932), 12. El Lissitzky, “Khudozhnik v proizvodstve,” 7.

not es to pages 147–15 2

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El Lissitzky to J. J. P. Oud, December 12, 1928, in Proun und Wolkenbügel, 135–­36; Gus, Katalog des Sowet-­Pavilions, 16. Gus, Katalog des Sowet-­Pavilions, 14–­15. El Lissitzky, “Our Book,” in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 358 (translation modified). On the Shakhty affair, see Kendall Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 69–­94. On the phenomenon of the show trial in the Soviet press, see Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, 78–­83. Quoted in Bailes, Technology and Society, 87–­88. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The Soft Line on Culture and Its Enemies” and “Cultural Revolution as Class War,” in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 91–­149. See the criteria, themselves an outgrowth of Lissitzky’s accomplishments, set out in Herbert Bayer, “Fundamentals of Exhibition Design,” PM 6, no. 2 (December 1939–­January 1940): 17–­25. Michel Foucault refers to “initiators of discursive practices” as authors who “produced not only their own work, but the possibility and rules of formation of other texts” in “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-­Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 131–­36.

Chapter 6 1

2 3

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El Lissitzky to J. J. P. Oud, December 12, 1928, in El Lissitzky: Proun und Wolkenbügel: Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, ed. Jen Lissitzky and Sophie Lissitzky-­Küppers (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977), 135. “Celebrating Ogonek, 1899–­2020,” Kritika 22, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 223–­25. Despite its addition in August 2008 to the city’s register of cultural and historical monuments, a spate of fires on the property, widely viewed as typical of the extralegal tactics employed by developers to destroy Moscow’s modernist architectural heritage, drew international attention and fueled a successful preservation effort. The Russian Avant-­Garde Fund pushed petitions signed by hundreds of experts as far as the desk of then-­ President Dmitri Medvedev, and a variety of online publications helped raise awareness of the effort. See, among others, http://wwEw.archnadzor. ru/2013/08/01/mosgorlisitskiy/; http://docomomo-­us.org/news/el_lissitzkys_ogonyok_printing_plant_under_threat (accessed July 14, 2016). Since 2012, the building has undergone a restoration of questionable merit, which is slated to transform it into a hotel. A relevant analysis of similar treatments of historical buildings in Moscow is Edmund Harris, “Façading and Sham Replicas,” in Moscow Heritage at Crisis Point, ed. Anna Bronovitskaya and Edmund Harris (Moscow: Moscow Architecture Preservation Society, 2009), 226–­36. The participating architects were Lissitzky; Leontovich and Modorov; Shchusev and Teplitsky; and and Golosov and Kurovsky. Pravda eventually built its new headquarters from a design by Panteleimon Golosov that differed significantly from the project he submitted with Kurovsky. not es to pages 15 2–15 9

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V. N. Simbirtsev, “Konkursy. Poligraficheski gigant—­kombinat ‘Pravda,’” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy 7, no. 5 (1930): 24. “Zasedaniia pravleniia Aktsionernogo Izdatel’tskogo O-­va ‘Ogonek,’” April 16, 1930, GARF fond A-­299, op. 1, d. 11, l. 7. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, July 19, 1930, in Sophie Lissitzky-­Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittal (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 95. Notably, the original version of this letter is not among the Lissitzky papers at the Getty Research Institute. Lissitzky-­Küppers also had good reason to fudge the details on the Ogonek building. After the conviction and execution of Mikhail Koltsov for supposed Trotskyist sympathies in 1938, the plant was taken offline and passed into the hands of the NKVD. Its subsequent uses became the subject of dark rumors among the neighborhood’s residents. Ogonek directors to El Lissitzky, March 1, 1930, RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 61, l. 2. GARF fond A-­299, op. 1, d. 4, ll. 18–­19; d. 7, ll. 6, 27; d. 11, ll. 3, 7, 12, 18. “Podavaemye predstavlenii proekta po proizvodstvo stroitel’nykh rabot po promyshlennomu stroitel’stvu,” March 31, 1931, TsANTDM fond 2, op. 1, d. 8358, ll. 4–­5. Jean-­Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR: Theories and Projects for Moscow, 1928–­1936, trans. Kenneth Hylton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 180. GARF fond A-­299, op. 1., d. 11, ll. 7, 10. László Moholy-­Nagy, Zhivopis’ ili fotografiia, trans. A. N. Telesheva (Moscow: Aktsionernoe izdatel’skoe obshchestvo “Ogonek,” 1929). GARF fond A-­406, op. 3, d. 1026, l. 51; fond A-­299, op. 1, d. 11, l. 5. El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, July 19, 1930, in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 95. TsANTDM fond 2, op. 1, d. 8358, l. 32. “Zhurnal’naia fabrika iz-­va ‘Ogonek’,” Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 37 (August 25, 1930), 1. Though Lissitzky is almost certainly the architect of this final variant, the archives provide no definitive evidence. Unlike the designs for the first two variants, the blueprints and elevations of the final design do not bear the signature of Lissitzky or any other architect. TsANTDM fond 2, op. 1, d. 8359, ll. 2–­8. GARF fond A-­299, op. 1, d. 9, l. 22. On the cultural climate after the Shakhty trial, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 91–­149. “Prevratit’ OGIZ v shtab kul’trevoliutsii,” Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 37 (August 25, 1930): 1; “Izdatel’skoe delo na novom etape,” Izvestiia, no. 239 (August 30, 1930), 3. More novel than Khalatov’s slogan was the organization he represented. Formed by decree of the Central Committee in July, the Union of State Book and Magazine Publishers, OGIZ, was charged with centralizing the distribution, finances, and production of all Soviet presses and drawing up an industry-­wide plan for 1931. “Ne otryvat’ formy ot soderzhaniia!,” Brigada khudozhnikov, no. 4 (1931): 23. The portion of this text summarizing Lissitzky’s presentation is translated

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into English in Peter Nisbet, El Lissitzky, 1890–­1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 1987), 61–­62. El Lissitzky, “Poligraficheskoe oformlenie knigi,” typescript in Nikolai Khardzhiev archive, inventory no. 726, sheet 17, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. El Lissitzky, “Unser buch,” in Gutenberg Jahrbuch (Mainz: Gutenberg Gesellschaft, 1927), 172–­78; abridged English translation by Helene Aldwinckle, in Lissitzky-­Küppers, Life, Letters, Texts, 356–­59. The various fields of activity united at VKhUTEIN were dispersed when the institute was closed in 1930. The Moscow Architectural Institute, Moscow Textile Institute, Moscow Polygraphics Institute, and Academy of Arts, among others, took over the school’s operations. Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 114. Firsthand accounts by students and general information on the Moscow Polygraphics Institute can be found in My iz MPI: Moskovskii poligraficheskii institut (Moscow: Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet pechati, 2005). “Prevratit’ OGIZ v shtab kul’trevoliutsii,” Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 37 (August 25, 1930), 1; “Izdatel’skoe delo na novom etape,” Izvestiia, no. 239 (August 30, 1930), 3. Lissitzky, “Poligraficheskoe oformlenie knigi,” Khardzhiev archive, inventory no. 726, sheets 10–­11, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. “The literary artel can and must make the book . . . [but] if the physiognomy of our publishing houses doesn’t change, the artel will remain just a many-­headed private enterprise.” Sergei Tret’iakov, “To Be Continued” (1929), trans. Devin Fore, October, no. 118 (Fall 2006), 53–­54. Lissitzky, “Poligraficheskoe oformlenie knigi,” Khardzhiev archive, inventory no. 726, sheets 17–­18, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Belknap, 2008), 87. Benjamin, “Author as Producer,” 87. I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 13 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1951), 41. The speech was published in Pravda on February 5, 1931. Diane Koenker, The Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918–­1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 218–­35. Lissitzky, “Poligraficheskoe oformlenie knigi,” Khardzhiev archive, inventory no. 726, sheets 21 and 22–­23, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Telingater goes further toward accepting Moholy-­Nagy’s theses than many of his contemporaries, insofar as he is willing to salvage a potentially useful “science of the hygiene of perception” that is unattainable under current conditions from “the great number of deeply subjective points of view on this question.” For a more critical perspective, see Aleksei Federov-­Davydov’s introduction to the Soviet edition of Moholy-­Nagy’s text in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–­1940, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), 273–­82. Lissitzky, “Poligraficheskoe oformlenie knigi,” Khardzhiev archive, inventory no. 726, sheet 25, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. not es to pages 1 6 8 –170

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Lissitzky, “Poligraficheskoe oformlenie knigi,” Khardzhiev archive, inventory no. 726, sheet 28, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Text of the resolution appeared with commentary in Brigada khudozhnikov, nos. 2–­3 (1931): 1–­3. Lissitzky, “Poligraficheskoe oformlenie knigi,” Khardzhiev archive, inventory no. 726, sheet 40, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Pravda’s page-­one headline on April 1, 1931, blared: “We are entering the second quarter of the decisive year of the Five-­Year Plan. In Bolshevik tempo let’s achieve the timely launch of 518 new factories, let’s build 1040 machine-­tractor stations, let’s expand the construction of State-­and Collective farms.” This source image was first identified by Peter Nisbet in the corrigenda to his catalogue raisonné of Lissitzky’s graphic works. See Nisbet, “El Lissitzky in the Proun Years: A Study of his Work and Thought, 1919–­1927” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995), 383. Quoted in John MacKay, “Allegory and Accommodation: Vertov’s ‘Three Songs of Lenin’ (1934) as a Stalinist Film,” Film History 18, no. 4 (2006): 377–­91, 383. Though The Eleventh Year did include intertitles, Vertov claimed that the film had been conceived without them, and they would in fact disappear completely in Man with a Movie Camera. My summary here and in the paragraph above follows MacKay. Lissitzky had lobbied successfully for the screening of Vertov’s Kino-­Eye at Pressa. GARF fond 5283, op. 11, d. 35, ll. 151, 157–­59 and 163–­64. Sophie Lissitzky-­Küppers helped organize Vertov’s tour of Germany in 1929 and wrote a glowing review of Man with a Movie Camera for Das Kunstblatt, “Look at Life through Dziga Vertov’s Kino-­Eye,” an excerpt of which appears in Yuri Tsivian, ed., Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Gemona: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004), 359. Lissitzky, “Poligraficheskoe oformlenie knigi,” Khardzhiev archive, inventory no. 726, sheet 19, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Stalin, Sochineniia, 13:35. “Postanovlenie TsK VKP(b) ot 15 avgusta 1931 goda po dokladu OGIZ ob izdatel’skoi rabote” and “Zhurnal’no-­gazetnoe ob’edinenie,” Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 48 (September 5, 1931): 1, 4. A portion of Lissitzky’s pay from USSR in Construction was earmarked to finance his travel to the Dniepr dam site. RGALI fond 2361, op. 1, d. 55, ll. 6–­9. In 1932 the average annual income of industrial and transport workers was 1,473 and 1,506 rubles, respectively. Handbook of the Soviet Union (New York: American-­Russian Chamber of Commerce, 1936), 513. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle, trans. Nora Seligman Favorov (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 8. Informal rationing had been present since 1929, but in January 1931 centralized distribution of ration cards for party members and industrial workers was introduced. Like all “free professionals,” Lissitzky could still purchase food through socialist co-­ops, albeit at prohibitively high prices, and this only where the state held a monopoly. Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917–­1953 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 167. For an account of the social distinctions and labor incentives encoded in the ration system, see Elena

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 7 1 –1 74

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49

50

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57 58 59

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Osokina, Za fasadom “stalinskogo izobiliia”: Raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniia v gody industrializatsii, 1927–­1941 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998), 89–­ 100. For kulak arrest quotas, see Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag, trans. Vadim A. Staklo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 11. On the origins of USSR in Construction, see Erika Wolf, “When Photographs Speak, To Whom Do They Talk? The Origins and Audience of SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction),” Left History 6, no. 2 (2000): 53–­82. Ogonek did, however, continue to handle distribution of the magazine. GARF fond A-­299, op. 1, d. 7, l. 35. This photograph is published in Margarita Tupitsyn, El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet: Photography, Design, Collaboration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 154–55, where it is misidentified as a design for USSR in Construction. On Alpert’s development of the foto-­ocherk within USSR in Construction, see Erika Wolf, “USSR in Construction: From Avant-­Garde to Socialist Realist Practice” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1999), 124–­67. For Heartfield’s work in the USSR, see Maria Gough, “Back in the USSR: John Heartfield, Gustav Klucis, and the Medium of Soviet Propaganda,” New German Critique 36, no. 2 (2009): 133–­83. Victor Margolin notes this shift in The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-­Nagy, 1917–­1946 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 172. On the dam’s history and construction, see Anne Dickason Rassweiler, The Generation of Power: The History of Dneprostroi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Wolf, “USSR in Construction,” 195–­96. El Lissitzky, Russland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architecture in der Sowjetunion (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1930), 92–­93. Quotes in this paragraph are taken from the English text by D. S. Mirsky of USSR in Construction, no. 10 (1932): n.p. Wolf, “When Photographs Speak,” 64; Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal 41, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 21–­23. On Piatakov, see Oleg Khlevniuk, “Piatakov’s Arrest,” in In Stalin’s Shadow: The Career of “Sergo” Ordzhonikidze, trans. David J. Nordlander (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 92–­103. Stalin had appeared in the magazine’s front matter several times, but never in one of its features. Quoted in Wolf, “When Photographs Speak,” 73. El Lissitzky to Jan Tschichold, September 29, 1932, in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 257. “Stroitel’stvo i voprosy mirovoi politiki,” Stroitel’naia promyshlennost’, no. 4 (1925): 299.

Afterword 1

El Lissitzky, “Tvorcheskoe depo sooruzhenii,” RGALI fond 3145, op. 1, d. 540, l. 7. n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 74 –1 8 5

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Nikolai Ladovskii to El Lissitzky, February 23, 1924, RGALI fond 2361 op. 1 d. 59, ll. 9–­10. Lissitzky, “Proun,” RGALI fond 3145, op. 1, d. 541, l. 7. On the fragmentation of the constructivists and the debate about constructivism, see Christina Lodder, “Constructivism and Productivism in the 1920s,” in Art into Life: Russian Constructivism, 1914–­1932 (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 106. For a suggestive treatment of some of these episodes, see the excellent study by Alla Vronskaya, Architecture of Life: Soviet Modernism and the Human Sciences (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022). El Lissitzky to Sophie Küppers, July 20, 1925, in Sophie Lissitzky-­Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittal (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 65.

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Illustration Credits Figs. 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.10, 1.11, 3.2, 3.10, 5.7, 6.11: © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Figs. 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.11, 5.7: Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY Figs. 1.10, 3.12: Digital Image © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN–­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY Fig. 2.4: © Artists Rights Society Figs. 2.6, 2.7: Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College, M14281 and M14282 Figs. 2.6, 2.7, 3.8: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn Figs. 2.11, 3.10: Photo the Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY Figs 2.11, 6.12: © 2022 Estate of Gustav Klutsis/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Fig. 3.2: Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY Fig. 3.3: © The Heartfield Community of Heirs/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2023. Photo Kunsthaus Zürich, Collection of Prints and Drawings Fig. 3.8; plate 5: © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/c/o Pictoright Amsterdam Fig. 3.12: © 2022 Estate of László Moholy-­Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Figs. 4.7, 5.8: Photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Cologne, rba_c004529, rba_c009259 Figs. 4.8, 6.5: © F.L.C./ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2023 Fig. 5.3: © Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna Fig 6.11: Photo © Russian State Library, Moscow/HIP/Art Resource, NY Fig. 6.12: Photo © Tate, London/Art Resource, NY Plate 7: © 2022 Estate of Alexander Rodchenko/UPRAVIS, Moscow/ARS, NY. Photo HIP/ Art Resource, NY

Index “A. and Pangeometry” (Lissitzky), 72, 80–­82, 85, 88–­89, 94, 98, 100, 211n50; zero, significance of, 83–­84 ABC ( journal), 93, 99, 125 abstract painting, 3. See also Suprematism advertising, 89, 96, 98, 100, 124, 129; industrial capitalism, contribution to, 99; photography, as medium of, 94; propaganda, connection between, 93 Agapov, Boris, 177 All-­Russia Conference of Art Teachers and Students, 24–­ 25, 28 All-­Ukrainian Central Publishing House, 197n30 All-­Ukrainian Committee for Plastic Arts, 197n30 All-­Ukrainian Photo-­Film Directorate (VUFKU), 147, 171–­72 All-­Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV), 135 All-­Union Congress of Factory Managers, 169, 173 All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition, 10–­11, 133, 136–­37, 143–­45, 149, 155, 219n1; catalogue of, 138–­42, 152, 154 All-­Union Society for Foreign Cultural Relations. See VOKS Alpert, Max, 176–­78 apperception, 62 Archipenko, Aleksandr, 78 Architect’s Equipment (Lissitzky), 140 “Architecture and the Planning of Cities” (Dokuchaev), 112 Arp, Hans, 51, 71–­74, 100–­101, 209n11; Lissitzky portrait of, 77–­78, 80, 84–­85, 93, 140

“Art as Technique” (Shklovsky), 44 “Art Is in Danger” (Grosz), 85 “Artist in Production, The” (Lissitzky), 142, 151–­52 Arvatov, Boris, 48–­49, 61–­62, 69, 142–­43 Asendorf, Christoph, 122 ASNOVA, 4, 104, 107, 112–­13, 123, 127, 129, 185–­86 Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR), 142 Association of New Architects. See ASNOVA avant-­garde, 5, 42–­43, 49, 73, 95, 129, 134, 185; advertising, turn to, 99 Baader, Johannes, 76, 78 Barkhin, Grigory, 3, 113 Barr, Alfred, 146, 148, 192n4 Barshch, Mikhail, 157, 166 Barthes, Roland, 118 Bauhaus, 3, 51, 147–­48 Baumeister, Willi, 65–­66 Bayer, Herbert, 192n12 Beat the Whites (Lissitzky), 139–­40 Behne, Adolf, 68, 114 Behrens, Peter, 10, 117–­18, 123; rapid transit and, 116 Beijing (China), 117 Beindorff, Fritz, 84, 97–­98 Bely, Andrei, 14, 17, 41 Benjamin, Walter, 124, 169 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 10, 32, 34–­35 Berlage, Hendrik Petrus, 116; simplification, on importance of, 216n39 Berlin (Germany), 29, 46–­47, 66, 69, 75–­76, 98, 136, 146–­47; dada, 72; Russian émigré community in, 41

Bioscope, 71–­72 Black Square (Malevich), 44, 61–­62 Bogdanov, Aleksandr, 26, 30, 38, 49; cultural hegemony, theory of, 8–­9; on purposiveness, 37; on world-­building, 14, 26 Bois, Yve-­Alain, 5, 75, 84, 211n50 Bolsheviks, 8–­9, 14, 19, 21, 42, 61, 99–­100, 145, 158–­59, 169, 179–­80, 197n30, 198n40, 228n38; cultural revolution, call for, 166–­67 Bortnyik, Sandor, 51 Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, 78–­80 Bragaglia, Arturo, 78–­79 Brandist, Craig, 19 Breuer, Marcel, 192n12 Brigada khudozhnikov (Artists’ Brigade) ( journal), 167, 171 Brik, Osip, 127, 142–­43, 222nn34–­35 Broderzon, Moishe, 3 Broom (magazine), 95–­96 Buchholz, Erich, 65–­66, 206n63 Buchloh, Benjamin, 145, 219n2 building arts, 8 Bukharin, Nikolai, 50–­51 Bürkle, Christoph, 105, 112, 217n54 Cabaret Voltaire, 209n13 Caden, Gert, 43 capital: conflict between merchant and industrial forms of, 99; as goods, 179; as money, 174; as social power, 61, 64 capitalism: dematerialization and, 6; transition to socialism from, 51, 55 Cartesian grid, 118 index

233

“Catastrophe of Architecture” (Lissitzky), 27 Catherine II, 113 Cendrars, Blaise, 43 Central Committee of the All-­ Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 26–­27, 142, 146–­47, 164; Resolution on Poster Agitation and Propaganda, 170–­71, 184; resolution “On Restructuring Literary and Arts Organizations,” 195n49; Resolution on the Work of the Presses, 173–­74; Union of State Book and Magazine Publishers (OGIZ), creation of, 226n21 Central Park of Culture and Leisure (Gorky Park), 4, 187 Chagall, Marc, 2–­3, 5, 13 Chashnik, Ilya, 108, 127, 134 “Chemical Famine: Ballads about the Carborundum Stone” (Kruchenykh), 32 Chicago Tribune (newspaper), international design competition, 103 chronophotography, 80 Cité Industrielle (Garnier), 106 City on Springs (Lavinsky), 106 City Planning According to Artistic Principles (Sitte), 112 Clark, T. J., 145 classicism, 43 Cohen, Jean-­Louis, 163 Cologne (Germany), 133, 145–­ 49 colonization: as industrial strategy, 61; in urban history, 117 Comintern (Communist International): Third Congress of, 28; Fourth Congress of, 60 Commissariat of Heavy Industry, 160 Commissariat of Labor, Committee on Press Affairs, 164, 170 Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), 114, 216n30 constructivism, 3, 10, 39–­40, 50–­51, 73, 103, 122–­23, 127, 131, 138, 185–­86; artistic everyday and, 42; dada, link with, 76, 81, 87; as international phenomenon, 43; “uncompromising war on art,” declaration of, 38 constructivist International, 86 234

index

Constructor, The (Lissitzky), 91, 212n73 “Contemporary Architecture” (Le Corbusier), 43–­44 Crystal Palace Exhibition, 154 cubism, 24, 25, 31–­32, 34 cultural revolution, 154, 166–­67, 178 dada, 3, 43, 50–­51, 72, 74, 77, 85–­86; constructivism, link with, 76, 81, 87 Dadaglobe (Tzara), 76 dada photomontage, 75 Darmstadt arts colony, 3 David-­Fox, Michael, 224n62 Debabov, Dmitry, 175 Decline of the West, The (Spengler), 82 dematerialization, 6–­7, 34, 72, 81–­83, 121, 130, 141, 186 De Stijl ( journal), 50, 59, 78, 136–­37 Deutsch, Nathaniel, 192n8 Dhooge, Ben, 203n13 Dickerman, Leah, 145 Die Wolkenpumpe (The Cloud Pump) (Arp), 77 Dinershtein, E. A., 204n32 Dlia golosa (For the Voice) (Mayakovsky), 46, 61, 65, 69; thumb index, 47–­48; typography of, 48 Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, 174, 176–­79 Dokuchaev, Nikolai, 112–­13 Dorner, Alexander, 51 Dresden (Germany), 134, 155 Dresden International Hygiene Exhibition, 130, 155, 175 DuBois, W. E. B., “double consciousness,” 192n8 Duchamp, Marcel, 81 Düsseldorf Congress of Progressive Artists, 78 Dutert, Ferdinand, 6 Dymovka (film), 147 Dynamic Sensation Produced by the Face of Luciano Folgore (Bragaglia brothers), 78–­79 easel painting, 144; resurgence of, 142; surpassing of, 29, 143 Eggeling, Viking, 43, 88, 129 Egypt, 82 Egyseg (Unity), 86–­87 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 41–­43, 71, 203n19

Eiffel, Gustave, 44 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 18–­19, 24 Einstein, Carl, 34 Ekster, Aleksandra, 136 electrification, 61. See also GOELRO Elements of a Philosophy of Technology (Kapp), 117 Eleventh Year, The (film), 171–­72, 177–­78, 228n40 Engels, Friedrich, 58 Engineer Menni (Bogdanov), 26, 199n66 England, 145–­46 Ermolaeva, Vera, 15 Esders Clothing Factory (Perret), 163 Ettinger, Pavel, 22 Euclid, 82 Europe, 1, 8, 43, 71, 76, 99, 103, 105–­6, 107, 123, 133, 185 Exhibition of Achievements of the Domestic Economy (VDNKh), 187 Exhibition of New Theater Techniques, 136 Experiment for a Fresco for a Sports Club (Lissitzky), 144 Exposition of Decorative Arts (Paris, 1925), 115, 223n48 expressionism, 73 faktura, 31–­32, 35–­36 Favorsky, Vladimir, 134 fifth façade, 118, 122, 131 film, 7, 59, 69, 73, 80, 82, 96, 129–­30, 142, 158, 167–­68; dematerialization of, 72, 81, 121; imaginary space and, 81, 83, 88, 94; irrational space and, 83, 88; photography and, 72; transience, force of, 100; as unfulfilled promise, 81 Film und Foto. See International Werkbund Exhibition (Stuttgart, 1929) First International Art Exhibition, 49 First International Congress of Progressive Artists, 49 First Russian Art Exhibition, 41, 46, 55 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 154 Five-­Year Plan, 11, 154, 157–­60, 166–­67, 171, 176–­77, 183, 228n38 Ford, Henry, 173 Forgács, Éva, 206n63

For the Voice (Mayakovsky). See Dlia golosa (For the Voice) (Mayakovsky) Fotoglaz (Photo-­Eye) ( journal), 152 fotopis’. See photo-­painting Foucault, Michel, 225n78 Four Arts Society, 134, 142, 144 4 i Lampe (Lissitzky and Huszár), 89, 91–­92 France, 106 Francé, Raoul, 123, 217n46; biocentric approach, 82 Freud, Sigmund, 80, 210n14 Freyssinet, Eugène, 163 Friends’ Societies, 145–­46 Frizot, Michel, 72 Future Planits (Malevich), 106 futurism, 3, 8, 10, 24–­25, 32, 34–­35, 43, 50, 61–­62, 78–­79, 85, 107 Futurist House, 78 Futurist Photodynamism (Bragaglia and Bragaglia), 78 Gabo, Naum, 43, 55, 94 Galerie Van Diemen, 41, 46, 55 Gan, Aleksei, 42–­44, 51, 167, 205n48 Garnier, Tony, 106 Gastev, Aleksei, 60; “cultural setting maneuver,” 64; futurism, and potential of, 61; scientific organization of labor, 122–­23; Taylorism, as advocate of, 61 German Werkbund, 10, 104, 114, 116, 123 Germany, 10, 28, 41–­42, 51, 64, 145–­46; trade unionism, 3 Gershenzon, Mikhail, 22 Gestalt psychology, 72–­73 Giedion, Sigfried, 130 Ginzburg, Moisei, 122–­23, 204n24 Gitelman, Lisa, 192n3 Glove, The (Arp), 73–­74 G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung (newspaper), 41, 55, 58–­59, 64–­65, 69, 116, 124, 147–­48, 206n63, 208n92; Prouns Space, reproduction of in, 56–­57 GOELRO, 176–­78 Golosov, Panteleimon, 225n4 Gorky, Maxim, 187 Gosizdat, 204nn31–­32 Gough, Maria, 37–­38, 68, 130, 140, 208n97, 222n41

Gräff, Werner, 49 graphic statics, 6 Great Berlin Art Exhibition, 41, 49, 51–­52, 55, 66, 208n98 Greenberg, Clement, 193n25 Gropius, Walter, 116, 147–­48 Grosz, George, 85–­88, 101 Gus, Mikhail, 146, 223n55

Isms of Art 1914–­1924, The (Lissitzky and Arp), 71, 73, 77–­78, 100, 209n11 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 22–­23, 34–­35 Izvestiia ASNOVA ( journal), 104, 112, 114–­15, 120, 137–­38, 210n26; “Open Letter to Mossovet,” 218n78

Hanover (Germany), 51, 94, 206n53 Hausmann, Raoul, 49–­50, 78, 81, 84, 123, 205n41; optophonetics, research on, 76 Heartfield, John, 176 Heath, Stephen, 81 Hegel, G. W. F., 6, 84 heliography, 140–­41 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 82–­83 hieroglyphs, 141 Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops. See VKhUTEMAS Historical Materialism (Bukharin), 50–­51 Hoeber, Fritz, 116–­17 Horkheimer, Max, 209n8 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 212n66 Husserl, Edmund: Einstellung, term, 62; “intentional Object,” 207n80 Huszár, Vilmos, 65–­68, 75, 140, 208n95, 208n98; “Helioconstruction,” 89

Jakobson, Roman, 76; “set toward expression,” notion of, 62; ustanovka, use of, 62 Japan, 78 J. B. Neumann Gallery, 210n26 Jones, Owen, 16 Journal-­and-­Newspapers Union (Zhurgaz), 173 journalism, 9. See also mass journalism; photojournalism Jowitt, Kenneth, 145, 223n45 Jung, Carl, 209n13 Junge Rheinland, 49 Jury Free Art Show, 41, 64–­66

imaginary space, 72, 81–­83, 85–­ 88, 94, 100 individualism, 9, 49–­50 INKhUK, 37–­38, 42–­43, 60, 127 Institute of Artistic Culture. See INKhUK Institute of the Living Word, 19 intelligentsia, 146–­47, 174; as potential saboteurs, 167; as technical specialists, 9, 49, 179 International Exhibition of New Theater Techniques, 108 International Faction of Constructivists, 42, 49, 136 International Press Exhibition. See Pressa pavilion International Werkbund Exhibition (Stuttgart, 1929), 154–­55 In the Studio (Lissitzky), 75–­77 Ioganson, Karl, “cold structures,” 127

Kállai, Ernő, 59, 61, 66 Kamenev, Lev, 147 Kameneva, Olga, 146–­48 Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics, theory of, 36–­37; imagination, theory of, 209n8 Kapp, Ernst, 117, 217n46 Kemény, Alfred, 81 Kestner Proun Portfolio, Io (Lissitzky), 51–­53, 55, 64–­65 Kestner Society, 51, 94 Khad Gadya (Lissitzky), 20–­21 Khalatov, Artem, 146, 166–­ 68, 182, 223n53, 223n55, 226n21 Khan-­Magomedov, Selim, 5–­6 Khardzhiev, Nikolai, 167 Khidekel, Lazar, 106–­7 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 10, 14, 26, 30, 106, 197n40 Khorsabad (Iraq), 117 Kiaer, Christina, 42, 99–­100 Kiesler, Friedrich, 136–­37, 221n16 kinematics, 117, 122 Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) (Gabo), 94 kinetic sculptures, 94 King Stag, 73–­74 Kittler, Friedrich, 80 Klein, Roman, 3 Kliun, Ivan, 27 Klutsis, Gustav, 55, 60–­61, 139, 141, 145, 178 index

235

Kogan, Nina, 15 Kok, Antony, 50 Koltsov, Mikhail, 157, 164, 226n7 Kozlov, V. V., 178 Krasnoe znamia (Mendelsohn), 159 Krauss, Rosalind, 96 Krinsky, Vladimir, 112 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 17, 32, 34, 65, 204n28; eco-­a, as term, 44, 81–­82; eco-­et, as term, 44 Kultur-­Lige, 21, 197n30 Kunstmuseum Mortizburg, 118–­19 Kunstwollen, 117 Küppers, Hans, 4 Küppers, Kurt, 4 Küppers, Sophie, 4, 77–­78, 88, 98–­99, 134, 147–­49, 160, 193n28, 205n53, 210n26, 212n73, 214n99, 216n34 Kurovsky, Aleksandr, 225n4 Kushner, Boris, 60 Lacan, Jacques, 80–­81 Laclau, Ernesto, hegemonic task, 88, 99 Ladovsky, Nikolai, 28, 37–­38, 127–­29, 131, 220n13; psychotechnics, 129 Landesmuseum, 51, 206n53 Lavinsky, Anton, 106–­7, 127 League of Nations, 76 Lebedev, Vladimir, 134 Le Corbusier, 43, 103–­4, 107, 114, 116, 122, 131, 163, 174–­ 75, 216n34; construction, and Taylorism, 44; grid, as rational norm, 117–­18; model city, exhibiting of, 115; rational organization, and mass-­produced housing, 49 Lef, 142, 144, 185, 222n34 Lehrter Bahnhof, 51–­52, 66 Lenin, V. I., 8, 19, 26, 150, 177–­ 79, 194n37; Plan for Monumental Propaganda, 111 Leningrad (Russia), 134. See also Petrograd (Russia); St. Petersburg (Russia) Lenoe, Matthew, 146 Leontovich, Sergei, 160, 225n4 L’Esprit nouveau ( journal), 44, 107 Levy, Julien, 224n69 Lissitzky, Jen, 4 Lissitzky, Lazar Markovich, 15–­ 17, 22, 26, 31, 43, 45, 52–­53, 236

index

66–­67, 129, 167, 192n12, 192n15, 193n28, 195n1, 196n18, 197n33, 205n46, 205n48, 206n59, 206n63, 208n92, 208n98, 210n26, 216n28, 216n30, 216n34, 217n46, 217n54, 220n13, 221n16, 223n48, 223n55, 224n69, 225n4, 226n18, 228n47; abstract color composition, integrating into functional space, 68; academic historicism, critique of, 27; address book, 47–­48; advertising, 89, 99–­100; All-­Union Polygraphics Exhibition, design for, 134–­42, 144–­45, 149, 154–­55; anti-­specialist position, 169, 170; architectonic color composition, 69; architectural tourism, 177; Arp, portrait of, 77–­78, 80, 84–­85, 93, 140; background of, 2–­3; “Bioscopic” book, 73; on book, as aesthetic totality, 5; books as film, theme of, 167–­69; Brigada khudozhnikov (Artists’ Brigade) ( journal), design of, 171–­73; cameraless photography, experiments in, 91, 154–­55; “cinema imaginary,” predicting rise of, 72; on color, as navigational aid, 125; constructivism, association with, 185–­86; on constructivism manifesto, 50–­51; constructivist International, call for, 55–­56; dada, attitude toward photography and, 77; death of, 4; dematerialization and, 121; dematerialization and disintegration, attitude toward, 6–­7, 9–­10, 72; demonstration, concept of, 42; Dlia golosa (For the Voice), design of, 46–­48, 61, 65; economy, notion of, 44; elusiveness of, 1; exhibition designs, 10–­11, 41–­42, 133–­39, 148, 154–­55; experimental photography, advocacy for, 154; experimental printing works, call for, 173; fifth façade, approach to design problems of, 118, 122, 131; on film, and materiality, 80–­

81; on film, as unfulfilled promise, 81; on flight, and architecture, 118; fotopis’, 140; furniture design course, 220n6; G (newspaper), design of, 56–­59, 65; German Werkbund, debt to, 114; haptic principles, use of, 48; “Helioconstruction,” 89; imaginary space and, 83, 85–­88, 100; on imaginary space, and film, 81, 94; irrational space and, 85, 88, 94; kinematics and, 117, 122; letterhead, 118–­19; lithographs of, 139–­40; living picture and, 25, 29; machine technology and, 117; mathematics, interest in, 82–­83; monument, and power of, 112; on monumentality, 100; “moveable architecture” to “new system of movement,” shift from, 117–­18; new culture, advocacy for, 21; on new Russian art, 55; Ogonek (Little Flame), printing plant design, 157, 160–­61, 163–­66, 173–­74, 183; paper architecture, 2, 192n4; Pelikan brand office products, designing for, 94–­99; photobooks, 4, 7; photo-­frieze, 145, 150–­51, 153–­54; photography, 80, 88–­89, 91, 94, 139–­41, 187; on photography and film, 100; photography, effect on, 71–­72, 101; photograms, 89, 92, 98, 140–­41; photojournalism, interest in, 158, 177; photomontage, and multiple-­exposure and negative-­sandwich techniques, 143–­44; photomontage, use of, 73–­75, 77–­78, 85, 87, 154, 176, 180–­82, 186–­87; photo-­painting, 143, 155, 186; “photoun”, 71, 73–­75, 100–­101; portraits, exploration of, 71–­72; Pravda (newspaper) project, 158–­61; Pressa pavilion, designs for, 144–­46, 148–­ 55; principle of economy, 37; print propaganda, 4; Prouns, 13, 29–­30, 32, 34–­40, 42, 58–­59, 62–­65, 71, 186; pulmonary tuberculosis,

3–­4, 71; purposiveness, 37; rotary press, 121–­22; Schwitters, portrait of, 84–­ 85, 93, 140; self-­criticism of, 157; self-­portrait of, 92–­93, 99–­100, 140, 214n99; self-­representation, 98; serial approach of, 64, 69; seriality, 136; skaz (tale), 18–­19, 40; solo shows, 51; Soviet film, promotion of, 147; space, concept of, 53–­ 54; Stalinist text, inflection of, 173; suture and, 81, 85; “thought traffic,” 121–­22; typography, 44, 48–­49, 120–­ 21; urban transit and, 114, 123; urban typologies and, 116–­17; USSR in Construction (magazine), design of, 158, 174–­83; USSR Is Building Socialism (photobook), design of 174; ustanovka, as term, use of, 59, 62–­63; utility of art, 37; Veshch’, design of, 65; at Vitebsk People’s Art School, 13; Wolkenbügel projects, 10, 103–­5, 106–­11, 113, 116, 127, 129–­31, 134, 155; Yiddish children’s books, illustrations for, 20–­21 Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary Gazette) (newspaper), 165–­ 66, 173 Lobachevsky, Nikolai, 82–­83 Lonberg-­Holm, Knud, 114, 143–­44 Luke, Megan, 124 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 26–­27, 146–­48 Lux, Joseph, 121 Ma (Today) ( journal), 50 Mach, Ernst, 123 MacKay, John, 228n40 maison particulière (van Doesburg and van Eesteren), 125–­26 Malevich, Kazimir, 3, 13–­15, 17, 21–­23, 27, 30–­32, 38, 40, 44, 49, 83, 106–­7, 198n55, 212n55; “living picture,” 25; “Whoever feels painting . . .” axiom, 61–­62 Malinovsky, Grigory, 147 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 7; on book, as “spiritual instrument,” 6 Man Ray, 141; cameraless photographs of, 78, 96

Man with a Movie Camera (film), 171, 228n40 Marey, Étienne-­Jules, chronophotography of, 80 Margolin, Victor, 197n30, 229n51 Marinetti, F. T., 6–­7, 32, 34, 78, 193n28, 201n99, 201n103; “Futurist City,” 31; “literary ‘I,’” 31 Mars: canals on, 26–­28; Martian creativity, 10, 14, 30 Marx, Karl, 6, 58 Marxism, 26–­27, 170 mass journalism, 146–­47 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 45–­47, 99–­100, 139, 157, 204n31 meaning, 69, 80, 112, 169, 186; Logos/word, as locus of, 17, 22, 34, 62 media, 5, 7–­8, 41, 64, 121; digital, 192n3; new, 59, 69; nonprint, 146; photographic, 72; print, 133, 157; transit and, relation between, 120 Medvedev, Dmitri, 225n3 Méliès, Georges, 142 Melnikov, Konstantin, 136, 174–­75 Mendelsohn, Erich, 159 Merz (publication), 89, 96, 209n11; Nasci special issue, 71 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 75 Mezhrabpom-­Rus, 147 Middleton, J. C., 91 Mikrob kommunizma (The Microbe of Communism) (film), 147 Miller, Jacques-­Alain, 83 mimesis, 142 Miturich, Petr, 134 modernity, 138, 141 Modorov, Mikhail, 160, 225n4 Moholy-­Nagy, László, 10, 43, 49, 51, 73, 76, 81–­82, 95, 164, 170, 227n34; frame of reference, as psychological, 72; typo-­photos, 96 monumental architecture, 125, 177 monumentality, 5–­6, 100 Monument to the Third International (Tatlin), 103, 107–­8, 114; WB2, connection to, 109–­11, 127 Moscow (Russia), 3–­4, 13, 24–­ 25, 27–­32, 38, 41–­42, 46, 52,

59, 68, 72, 82, 103, 105–­6, 108, 111, 115, 119, 133–­35, 157, 186; demolition in, 112; destruction of, by retreating Napoleonic armies, 113; garden city principles, 112; Mossovet (city council), 112–­14, 218n78; New Moscow project, 112–­13, 116; orientation, 124; Project Plan of 1775, 113; public lands, private development of, 113; Red Square, 112, 124, 205n46; skyscrapers, ban on, 113–­14; White City, 113; working class, 114, 131 Moscow House of the Press, 167 Moscow Polygraphics Institute (MPI), 158, 167–­68, 170, 173, 179, 182 Moscow Province Directorate of Building Administration, 158 Moscow Real Estate Commission (MUNI), 113–­14 Moser, Koloman, 16 Moss, Kenneth, 197n30 Mouffe, Chantal, on hegemonic task, 88, 99 Müller-­Sievers, Helmut, 117–­18 Murayama Tomoyoshi, 78, 114, 210n26 Museum Ludwig, 148 Museum of Modern Art, 213n73 Narkompros, 22–­24, 26, 28, 40–­41, 111, 198n55, 224n62; reorganization of, 27 naturalism, 144 Negative-­Positive (Lissitzky), 140 Netherlands, 55 New Economic Policy (NEP), 8–­9, 99–­100, 103, 113, 133, 146, 154, 157 Neznamov, Petr, 138 Nisbet, Peter, 5, 35, 65, 105, 123, 140, 192n15, 200n94, 208n92, 208n95, 208n97, 212n59, 222n41, 228n39 Noell, Matthias, 216n39 “Not Worldvision—­but Worldreality” (Lissitzky), 29, 34, 59, 123 Novyi lef ( journal), 138, 142, 144 occultism, 80 October Revolution, 8, 14, 174 Of 2 Squares (Lissitzky), 10, 13–­ 15, 20, 23, 30, 41, 65; as index

237

October Revolution (continued) ornament, 16; play and speech, 17–­18; as skaz (tale), 18 Ogonek (Little Flame) (newspaper), 4, 11, 159, 167, 170, 173, 183, 226n7; photojournalism, synonymous with, 157–­58; printing works construction plans, 160–­61, 164–­66, 174 Ogonek Joint-­Stock Company, 158. See also Journal-­ and-­Newspapers Union (Zhurgaz) Olbrich, Joseph Maria, 3 On New Systems in Art (Malevich), 15 “On Poetry” (Malevich), 22 “On the ‘I’ and the Collective” (Malevich), 21–­22 “Optophonetics” (Hausmann), 123 ornament, 7, 10, 31, 116, 123; function of, 16–­17 Osswald-­Hoffmann, Cornelia, 206n54 Oud, J. J., 103, 112, 157 “Our Book” (Lissitzky), 121–­22, 153, 168, 210n26 Overthrow of Art, The (Lissitzky), 29, 116–­17, 120–­22 Painting Photography Film (Moholy-­Nagy), 72, 96, 164, 170 Palace of Soviets, 163 Pale of Settlement, 10, 192n8 Palladio, 10 paper, 8, 16–­17, 88, 119, 134, 143, 167, 194n40; as artistic material, 31, 38, 151; as commodity, 9, 121, 165, 194n40; as distribution medium, 16, 29, 64–­65, 69; as recording medium, 2, 75, 91–­92, 157, 173, 177, 186; as spatial schema, 48, 58–­59, 192n3 Paris (France), 104, 115–­16 Paxton, Joseph, 6 Pelikan brand, 94–­98, 213n91 Pen, Yehuda, 2 People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment. See Narkompros Peri, László, 43 Perret brothers, 106, 163 Petrograd (Russia), 111. See 238

index

also Leningrad (Russia); St. Petersburg (Russia) Pevsner, Antoine, 43, 55 photograms, 91–­92, 140, 143; cameraless, 72; “painterly value” of, 141; for promotional purposes, 95, 98 photography, 73, 85, 129, 179, 187; architectural, 158; cameraless, 94, 154–­55; “cinema imaginary,” and rise of, 72; as irrational, 89; as means or end, 71; as medium of advertising, 94; “painterly value” of, 141–­ 43; of parapsychological phenomena, 79; techniques of, 72 photojournalism, 157–­58, 177 photomechanical reproduction, 7 photomontage, 56–­57, 71, 73–­74, 76–­78, 85, 87, 139, 141, 143, 151–­52, 186–­87; in dada, 75 photo-­painting, 143–­44, 186; painterly connotation of, 140; svetopis’, association with, 140–­41 Piatakov, Giorgy, 179 Picasso, Pablo, 6, 32, 34 Piskarev, Nikolai, 139, 221n23 planarity, 54, 83–­84, 151; in kinematics, 117–­18; in statics, 6 Plan for Monumental Propaganda, 111 Poggi, Christine, 32 Pohlmann, Ulrich, 224n69 Pollmeier, Klaus, 212n58 Popova, Liubov, 127 Poster Poem (Hausmann), 84 Prampolini, Enrico, 78 Pravda (newspaper), 4, 228n38; building competition, 158–­ 61; “On the Proletkults,” 26–­27 preservation, 112, 218n78, 225n3 Pressa pavilion, 11, 144, 149–­50, 155, 167, 225n4; aesthetics and politics, mixture of, 145; catalogue of, 152–­54; external signage, 148; of Five-­Year Plan, as harbinger, 154; “kinoshow,” 152–­53; mass journalism, 146–­47; as media spectacle, 133, 153; photo-­frieze, 154; photo-

montage, 151–­52, 154 Principles of Art History (Wolfflin), 84 print culture, 7, 9, 139; dominant social class, consolidates power of, 8; trade shows, 154 printing industry, 170–­71; linotype and intaglio techniques, 138 productivism, 42–­43, 59, 127, 142 “Proletariat and Art, The” (Lissitzky), 21 Proletkult, 8–­10, 14, 21, 24, 26, 39–­40, 61 Proun 1c (House above the Earth) (Lissitzky), 51 Proun 84 (Lissitzky), 109 Proun 88 (Lissitzky), 118–­19 Proun GBA (Lissitzky), 52–­54 “Proun” lecture (Lissitzky), 29, 82, 211n50 Prouns, 33–­34, 36–­37, 40, 42, 52, 58, 62–­65, 69, 71, 75, 118, 131, 186, 217n54; genealogy of, 13–­14; principle of noncompetition, examples of, 38–­39; P series, 29–­32, 35, 38–­39; technology, relationship to, 61; as term, 186; as transfer point, 59 Prouns portfolio (Lissitzky), 1, 4–­5, 7, 10, 29–­30, 32, 38–­39, 75; ideal city, juxtaposition of faktura and, 31; purposiveness, 37 Prouns Space (exhibition), 41, 52, 55–­59, 61, 66–­69; imperialism of constructive principle, 63–­64 psychotechnics, 129 publishing industry, 167, 170 Puni, Ivan, 49, 78 Rabinovich, Isaak, 223n48 Raskin, Ben Zion, 21 ration system, 228n47 Rauschenberg, Robert, 75 Record (Lissitzky), 140, 143–­44, 151 Red Star (Bogdanov), 26, 199n66 Reklam-­Konstructor (Advertising Constructor), 99 Rentsch, Eugen, 71, 209n11 Reuleaux, Franz, 121–­22; “Everything rolls,” motto of, 117 Rhythmus 21 (film), 58–­59 Riasantsev, Igor, 223n48

Richter, Hans, 42–­43, 49–­50, 55–­56, 58, 88, 147–­48 Riegl, Aloïs, 117 Rietveld, Gerrit, 66–­68, 208n95, 208n98 Rigaut, Jacques, 76 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 37, 43, 99–­100, 127, 142, 144; constructive composition, 38 Romanovs, 20 Romberg, Kristin, 44, 204n24 Rotary Demisphere (Duchamp), 81 Roth, Emil, 104–­6, 110, 114, 217n54 Russia, 1–­3, 14, 20, 32, 41, 43, 62, 103, 106, 157. See also Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Russia (Lissitzky), 177 Russian Association of Proletarian Photo-­Reporters (ROPF), 9 Russian Avant-­Garde Fund, 225n3 Salon d’Automne, 115 Sandkuhl, Hermann, 65–­68 Sant’Elia, Antonio, 30–­31, 201n99 Schiaparelli, Giovanni, 26 Schröder, Truus, 208n98 Schwitters, Kurt, 10, 49, 51, 71, 84, 86, 93, 100, 124, 212n66, 212n73; advertising work, 96–­97; dada, 85; i picture, 89; Lissitzky’s portrait of, 85, 140 Secession, 31 Sekula, Allan, 179 Senkin, Sergei, 150–­51 seriality, 69, 136 “Series of Skyscrapers for Moscow WB1 (1923–­1925), A” (Lissitzky), 104 Shakhty wreckers’ trial, 153–­54, 166–­67, 169 Shatskikh, Aleksandra, 24–­25 Shchusev, Aleksei, 28, 112–­14, 136, 225n4 Shestakov, Sergei, 112 Shklovsky, Viktor, 32, 44–­45, 197n40, 222n35 Shpet, Gustav, 62 Shterenberg, David, 28, 198n49 shtetl culture, 3 “Significance of Color for Interior and Exterior Architecture, The” (van Doesburg), 125

signs, 13, 25, 39, 62, 83–­84, 124, 129, 131, 186 Sikhes Khulin (Small Talk) (Broderzon), 3 Sitte, Camillo, 112; on urban planning, 215n20 Six Tales with Easy Endings (Ehrenburg), 71 skaz (tale), 18–­19, 40 skyscrapers, 103–­7, 113, 115, 131 Sliding (Advance) (Lissitzky), 34–­35 Society for the Spread of Enlightenment among Jews in Russia, 3 Society of Young Artists (OBMOKhU), 127 Sovetskoe foto (Soviet Photo) ( journal), 142, 157 Soviet Union. See Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Sovkino (motion picture studio), 147, 171–­72, 223n53 Sovremennaia arkhitektura (Contemporary Architecture) ( journal), 9, 177 Spatial Construction (Ioganson), 127 Speaker’s Rostrum (Chashnik), 108 Spengler, Oswald, 82 spirit photography, 80 Sprengel Museum, 135, 212n73 SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction) (magazine), 4, 9, 158, 174–­83 Stalin, Joseph, 1, 9, 133–­34, 142, 147, 153–­54, 169–­71, 173, 178–­81, 187, 229n57; collectivization and industrialization, policies of, 174; Five-­Year Plan, 11, 171 Stam, Mart, 93, 114, 214n99 State Free Art Studios (SVOMAS), 14, 24–­25, 27, 29, 198n53 State Publishing House (GIZ), 46, 146, 174 State Trade Commission (GOSTORG), 134 Stedelijk Museum, 55 Steinberg, Leo, 75 Stepanova, Varvara, 222n34 stereoscopy, 81 Stölzl, Gunta, 192n12 St. Petersburg (Russia), 2, 157. See also Leningrad (Russia); Petrograd (Russia)

Stroitel’naia promyshlennost’ (Building Industry) ( journal), 177, 183 Stroitel’stvo Moskvy (Construction of Moscow) ( journal), 159 structuralism, 23 Sudhalter, Adrian, 76 Suprematism, 10, 13, 15, 17, 24–­25, 29, 32, 34–­35, 40, 44, 48–­49, 61, 139, 201n114; irrational space and, 83, 91 “Suprematism of World-­ Building” (Lissitzky), 120–­21 Supreme Soviet of the National Economy. See VSNKh suture, 85, 181; film theory, 81; signification, 84; zero, significance of, 83 svetopis’, 140–­41 “Svolochi” (Scoundrels”) (Mayakovsky), 45–­47 Symbolists, 6, 10, 14, 22, 32, 36, 39–­41 Taeuber, Sophie, 73, 77, 209n13 Tarabukin, Nikolai, 60, 69 Tatlin, Vladimir, 27, 103, 107–­ 10, 114, 127, 199n75 Taylorism, 44, 61 Teige, Karel, 114 Tektology (Bogdanov), 37 telegraphy, 7, 69 Telingater, Solomon, 139, 167, 170, 227n34 Tendenzkunst, 51, 85 Teplitsky, Dmitry, 225n4 Thaïs (film), 78 “Theses on Typography” (Schwitters), 98 34 Drawings (Malevich), 30 391 ( journal), 77 “Toward Pure Action” (Malevich), 44 transit, 124; architecture and, 120; infrastructure, 9, 49, 116; mass, 10, 220n6; and media, relation between, 120; rapid, 104, 116, 123; urban, 114, 123 Transvolga famine, 45 Tretiakov, Sergei, 169 Tretyakov Gallery, 110–­11 Trotsky, Lev, 147–­48, 177 Troy, Nancy, 208n95, 208n98 “Trumpet of the Martians” (Khlebnikov), 22, 25–­26 Tschichold, Jan, 124, 182, 213n91 index

239

Tsvetaeva, Marina, 45 Tugendkhold, Yakov, 138 Tupitsyn, Margarita, 140, 151, 220n10, 221n27 Tynianov, Yuri, 10, 42, 143; artistic everyday, 41, 63–­64 Typesetter’s Equipment (Lissitzky), 140 “Typographical Facts” (Lissitzky), 120 typography, 42, 44, 48–­49, 120–­ 21, 124, 139, 186–­87 Tzara, Tristan, 76, 78; speech at Weimar Congress, 51 Ukraine, 21, 147 Union of Progressive Artists, 49 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 4, 8, 25, 61, 93, 99, 112, 123, 133–­34, 145–­46, 149–­50, 153, 157–­58, 163–­67, 173. See also Russia Union of State Book and Magazine Publishers (OGIZ), 166, 226n21 United States, 8, 129 UNOVIS (Affirmers of the New Art), 3, 8, 10, 13–­14, 17, 23, 25–­28, 32, 38, 41, 44–­45, 106–­8, 186, 198n50, 199n61, 199n75; collective creativity, 39–­40; internationalism, commitment to, 148; motto of, 22; “party in art,” idea of, 15, 24; planetary utopia, 29 UNOVIS No. 1 (almanac), 16–­17, 24–­28, 44 Urbanisme (Le Corbusier), 103, 115–­16 urban planning, 112–­13 Ursonate (Schwitters), 84 USSR in Construction (magazine), 158, 174–­75, 177, 178–­ 79, 183; photomontages in, 176, 180–­82 USSR Is Building Socialism, The (book), 174, 178–­79, 182 ustanovka, 60–­61; apperception and, 62; gaze and, 62–­63; as term, 59 Van Abbemuseum, 140 van Doesburg, Theo, 42–­43, 49–­ 51, 55, 125–­26, 221n16 van Eesteren, Cornelis, 49, 125 Vasari, Ruggero, 78, 210n26 Versari, Maria, 78 Vertov, Dziga, 142, 147, 157, 171–­73, 177–­78, 228n40 240

index

Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand ( journal), 41–­42, 45–­46, 50, 61–­ 62, 65, 76; class character of, 48–­49; constructive art, advocate for, 43–­44 Vesnin, Leonid, 3, 161, 163 Vesnin, Viktor, 3, 161, 163, 177 Victory over the Sun (Kruchenykh), 65, 140 Vienna (Austria), 72–­73 Ville-­Pilotis (Le Corbusier), 106 Villon, François, 10 Vitebsk Committee for the Struggle against Unemployment, 15, 17 Vitebsk People’s Art School, 3, 13 Vitruvius, 16 VKhUTEMAS, 4, 10, 27, 29, 37, 39, 127, 134, 147–­48, 160, 168, 174–­75; “Psychotechnical Laboratory of Architecture” proposal, 129; “Space” discipline, 28; spatial models, 38 Voisin (automaker), 115 VOKS, 145–­48, 223n48, 223n53 von Sydow, Eckart, 51 Vrubel, Mikhail, 2–­3 VSNKh, 134, 136–­38, 220n10; Printing Committee, 170 “Vysoty” (Kruchenykh), 34 Wagner, Günther, 94 Wagner, Richard, 6 Walden, Herwarth, 78 War of the Worlds (Wells), 22 WB1 (Lissitzky), 10, 103–­4, 106, 110, 113–­14, 120, 122, 124–­ 25, 127, 129–­31, 217n54; city gate and arch, allusions to, 112; logotype, 118; Proun 88, as source for, 118–­19 WB2 (Lissitzky), 10, 103–­4, 106, 113, 131; Monument to the Third International and, bond between, 109–­11, 127 Wells, H. G., 14, 22, 177 Werkbund Jahrbuch ( journal), 116 “Wheel–­Propeller and What Follows” (Lissitzky), 116–­17, 120–­21 “Why the Easel Picture Didn’t Die” (Arvatov), 142 Wichert, Fritz, 118 Wolf, Erika, 179 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 84 Wolkenbügel, 1, 10, 103–­5, 116,

119, 124–­25, 127–­31, 134, 155, 217n54; from fifth façade to sixth façade, 122; Monument to the Third International and, bond between, 106–­09, 111–­12; serializing of, 114–­15. See also WB1 (Lissitzky); WB2 (Lissitzky) worker-­correspondents’ movement, 9, 146 Workers and Peasants Inspectorate (Rabkrin), 147, 160, 224n56 Working Group of Constructivists, 38 World War I, 3, 123, 157 Yiddish: literary status of, 21; political status of, 194n40 Yudin, Lev, 31–­32; Yudin’s table, 201n103 Za industrializatsiia (For Industrialization) ( journal), 160 Zeno’s paradox, 91 zero, significance of, 83–­84 Zholtovsky, Ivan, 28, 136, 138