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 El Lissitzky— an Agent for Change
“Space is there for man, not man for space,” said El Lissitzky in 1923. Guided by his own words he took his own space in the history of photography after already leaving his mark in the history of art and design.
The life of El Lissitzky (b. 1980) was closely connected and intertwined with exiting and tragic events of the twentieth century in Russian and world history: the First World War, the Soviet Revolution, the Russian Civil War and mass exodus of Russian citizens abroad, unrest and
upheaval all over Europe, Stalinism in Soviet Union and Fascism in Italy and Germany, Second World War. These were the political changes, the echoes of which we still feel today. Lissitzky saw himself as “an agent for change,” changing art and design and adapting to political changes around him, and in a personal battle with tuberculosis
in the last twenty years of his life (Arwas 7-21). After art and design, photography was the last
creative frontier for Lissitzky to conquer.
 However, it would be false to name him as a great photographer. He did not photograph wars and
historical events as did Alexander Gardner, or document devastations as did Dorothea Lange; he did not leave a gallery of portraits or places, nor did he develop any modernist technique. He did not have formal photographic education and many photos attributed to him were either not made by him or taken by others at his request. His
illness restricted his activities and his photos were taken at “belly-button level”, as his fellow artist Rodchenko called it. Lissitzky could not do complicated set-ups and processes and was compelled to take simple shots; his models were friends and family or even puppet-mannequins. Political developments in the USSR restricted his
freedom of expression and probably even the freedom to take and publish the images he wanted. With
the Soviet Union moving toward oppressive one-party rule and later dictatorship, Lissitzky’s excitement as an avant-garde painter gave way to his ambitions as a designer and later his photographic activities. The reasons for this transformation are not always easy to follow; the written documentation is scarce and often biased. Lissitzky
himself contributed to this confusion, as five months before his death, in anticipating art history’s impulse to sort his work into “major” and “minor”, he manipulated the archive, undermining this type of classification.
His engagement with photography evolved gradually, but constantly. Lissitzky’s first photos were made in 1921-22 as illustrations during his artistic engagement with Prouns. A year later, he created the first fotopis. In his own words, fotopis was a
technique that “unlike painting ‘paints’ its image with light directly on a photographic paper, using, depending on the task, negatives, obtained by means of a camera or through the direct impact of a light ray, which on its way to photographic paper encounters objects of different transparency and obtains direct reflection of them”
(Tupitsyn 26). The word fotopis, created by Lissitzky, is a neologism, based on the Russian word zhivopis (painting or literally live-writing). In the new interpretation zhivo (live) was changed to foto giving way to fotopis (photo-writing). Not many of Lissitzky’s fotopis survive. V
Lampe (In the Lamp, 1923) is a strange image with a dark background and portraits of Lissitzky and a Dutch artist Vilmos Huszar in small light circles. Hans Arp (1924) depicts two overlapping portraits of the poet: one full frontal and one a fading profile. Record (1926), later manipulated into photomontage, was
made for the Moscow water-sports and yacht club. Lissitsky’s next experiments were
photograms, a Western term for photographic image, made by placing objects directly onto the surface of a photo-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The most famous is the image of Lissitzky’s hand with a compass (one of his later elements of Self-Portrait).
His Negative-Positive photos consist of compositions of pliers and wire, objects which Lissitzky and his
students used at VKhUTEMAS (the Higher State Artistic-Technical Workshops) where he taught. Lissitzky’s
interests in these techniques may have originated from Man Ray’s rayographs from the series Champs delicieux, found in Lissitzky’s estate. His further interest in the negative images could have come from a very unusual source. In 1923 he became sick with tuberculosis and traveled to a Swiss sanatorium. While there he wrote
about the X-ray photos showing spots in his lungs, and remarking that “the right one looks too much like a work of art” (Tupitsyn 26). This certainly leaves room to speculate that even this medical experience served the artist as an inspiration. Lissitzky’s most famous work from this time is Constructor (1924). Made in Switzerland
as a layout for his book “Prounen”, it combines photographic images of the artist and his hand, holding a compass with his own typographic design in the background.
For the first time his photo work was officially exhibited during the All-Union Printing Trades Exhibition in 1927 for which he also designed the layout of the grounds and pavilions, catalogues, posters and invitation cards. The exhibition was certainly one of the turning points in
Lissitzky’s career. During preparations and organization, he befriended many of the USSR leading photographers and became interested in the rhetoric of the Productivist art movement, represented by Klutzis’s and Senkin’s designs.
In his book “Artist in Production” written for the exhibition, Lissitzky, clearly influenced by new developments in soviet art and politics, Marxist theories of production and the Leninist-Stalinist ideology of the state, elaborated on the meaning of art and the artist in this
new and unprecedented historical time. In his view “it became necessary to transfer the experience of working in an individual studio and the experience of working with easel painting, to the context of the factory and the machine.” Painting “had devolved into a kind of luxury because it reflected a visible gap between energy that was
invested into the painting and the scope of its function,” consequently it was “increasingly annihilated by the printed page.” Drawing on his experience in design and topography, Lissitzky came to the conclusion that photomontage was “born and blossomed” as a response to the “social requirements of our epoch and the artist’s mastering of
the new technology.” “Only in our country”, he concluded, “was it cast into a clear social art form” (in Tupitsyn 30). From the moment of this conclusion about photomontage, it becomes Lissitzky’s primary form of expression and an increasingly desperate means of economic and political survival.
The last decade of Lissitzky’s life is a complex puzzle of personal and political issues. In 1927 he married Sophie
Küppers, the widow of a German gallery owner and settled with her and her two children in a room in a communal apartment. When their son Jen was born in 1930, the family moved to a village sixty kilometers outside of Moscow. In 1928 Stalin consolidated his power, his rival Trotsky left the country, and Bukharin was executed. The first
Five Year Plan, a program of industrialization and forced collectivization of agriculture, was initiated. In 1932, the Central Committee of the Communist Party abolished all artistic associations and established the Union of Soviet Artists. The USSR closed its borders and it become increasingly difficult for Soviet artists to have a
cultural exchange with Western artists. Lissitzky’s tuberculosis progressed, but treatment in foreign sanatoriums was no longer an option, and the much-needed money for expensive medicine, was available only through his work for the state press. Lissitsky was welcomed as a designer for a leading monthly propaganda magazine, USSR in
Construction, published in five languages for distribution in western countries. As Peter Nisbet states in the Catalogue from Lissitzky’s selected works:
On one hand, he emotionally linked the future of his own son, […] to the future of the Soviet state. […] On the other hand, he maintained some independence throughout the years that he was
participating in the promotion of Stalinist Russia. His major works of this kind, for example, were the design layouts for the propaganda journal USSR in Construction, where he was never a regular employee, but worked in a quasi-freelance status, signing a new contract for each job. (44,45)
Victor Margolin, in his Struggle for Utopia, adds:
This is particularly important in considering the work of Lissitsky […] during the Stalin years. Just as I don’t wish to recognize an oversimplified repressive force that reduced [his] work to obligatory capitulation, neither do I want to suggest that [he] had an unambiguous positive
relation to the Stalinist regime, particularly as information about its repressive policies and acts of terror surely become known to [him]. (166)
To a certain extent Lissitzky could choose the themes on which he worked, but as a leading artist he was also entrusted with commemorative issues of the magazine devoted to the Army, the Stalinist Constitution and the Republic of Georgia, Stalin’s homeland.
During the first Five Year Plan many issues of USSR in Construction emphasized huge industrial projects.
Construction of the Dniep hydroelectric station, from 1927-1932, was the embodiment of the Soviet Union’s technological accomplishments and transformation of nature into dams and power stations. The book Russia in the Shadows by Herbert Wells, who visited Russia shortly after the revolution and criticized its economy, had hurt the
national pride. Lenin’s vision for Russia was “Communism in Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country.” The Soviet conquest over nature was the theme of the October 1932 issue of USSR in Construction. “Lissitzky conceived the issue as a visual narrative that employed all the devices and techniques of modern art,
typography, and printing technology, including large bold letters, photomontage, strong colors, and gatefolds” (Margolin, 172). His design approach was continuous with the artistic avant-garde publications of the early ‘20s. The colors for the front and back covers were black, white and red, the same as Lissitzky’s earlier books and poster
designs. A contrasting sepia tone was chosen to emphasize the visual flow of the photographs and photo collages. The front cover displayed the nocturnal opening ceremony of the brightly lit station with airbrushed light beams, highlighting the huge name of the project. The same image is repeated toward the end of the issue but as a montage
with the image of Stalin, crediting him with the realization of Lenin’s vision. The bold photomontages of the magazine, the photographs juxtaposed with text and other effective design elements, had a high rhetorical power. Especially abroad, in foreign language issues, they carried out Maxim Gorky’s concept of “romantic realism”, the
simultaneous representation of life as how it is and how it could ideally be. In one collage depicting two hands turning on the power switch, a red banner with Lenin’s slogan “Unite! Dneprostroi will become a great memorial to the first electrificator in the USSR”, and the image of the rushing water, Lissitzky captured the spirit of the
translation of the leadership’s ideology into enormous industrial projects by heroic workers. Another magazine spread depicted on two opposing pages Wells and Lenin under the title “A Conversation Between two worlds”. But by positioning a photograph of an electric power grid between the two men and making the photo of Lenin of a larger
format, Lissitzky suggested the boundless Soviet potential and the superiority of Lenin’s optimism over Wells’ pessimism. As the story unfolds the next sequence shows Lenin during his speech at the Eighth Congress of Soviets in 1920 against a background of the map of the Soviet Union. The site of the future hydro station is circled and a
dotted line extends across the page, pointing to the airbrushed photomontage of the rushing waters to be tamed. “Here Lissitzky makes the arrow operate simultaneously as an informational device and metaphor”(Margolin 175). The final page is a manifesto to the Soviet masses as the driving forces behind Party efforts. The photo is divided into
two parts with the tall power grid masts, “that rise like cathedral spires against a background of clouds” above and the demonstrating crowd below (Margolin 180). The banner “Bolsheviks” which runs through the middle of the page symbolizes the union of the “human mass with the technological achievements of the regime” (Margolin 180).
The photos Lissitzky used were of a simple technique, some of them taken by other photographers to Lissitzky’s
specifications, but he invented his own style of blended slogans and pathos, information and emotion, which had an impact on the public at home and abroad, giving “visual form to the forceful argument made by USSR in Construction for the superiority of communism” (Margolin 180).
The next big issue was devoted to the Soviet Arctic. In it Lissitzky developed a new rhetorical device – “hyperbole” or
exaggeration. The Soviet sea captains, explorers and pilots conquering the harshness of nature exemplified two orders of reality, the ordinary and the extraordinary, characteristic of Stalinist culture in the 1930s.
With time, the magazine and Lissitzky’s narrative became increasingly ceremonial in portraying historical and contemporary events. From the narrative style, derived from his avant-garde techniques, Lissitzky moved to a grander style of “epic narrative”. “This new style was characterized by
its historical sweep and the way it held together large amounts of visual information—notably photographs, photomontages, drawings, paintings, and maps in a coherent framework. It was also marked by visual devices such as heraldic emblems, banners, and other regalia which gave dignity or nobility to the theme” (Margolin 180). As information
about mass arrests and murders slowly emerged in the west, Lissitzky was commissioned to create photomontages and layouts for issues devoted to the commemoration of the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet Georgia, homeland of Stalin, and to Stalin’s Constitution. In later issues, the Soviet occupation of Poland, West Ukraine and Western
Byelorussia were presented by Lissitzky as an important theme of the national defense against rising Fascism, revising history and following the official Soviet representation of the events.
When Lissitzky died in 1941, after twenty years of suffering tuberculosis, he left the legacy, common to many artists of his time: hope in the new world order and imprisonment in the new regime; the struggle for utopia and the struggle for survival; the creation of heroic and epic
narratives in artistic practice and the hard realities of daily life; fulfillment and disillusionment. Paradoxically, Lissitzky and other artists sought the creation of credibility for Soviet Union and its people, but their efforts disguised for the world the regime’s mass murder and violation of human rights. Lissitzky’s life and work give
enough material to fill a narrative, for which he himself found a name: “El Lissitzky-an agent for change”.
Works Cited Arwas, Victor. “The Great Russian Utopia.” A&D 1993: 7-21.
Lissitzky-Küppers, Sophie. El Lissitzky. New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1980. Margolin, Victor. The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko,
Lissitzky, Maholy-Nagy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Nisbet, Peter. “An Introduction to El Lissitzky.” El Lissitzky 1890-1941. Catalogue for an
Exhibition of Selected Works from North American Collections, the Sprengel Museum Hannover and the Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle. Ed. Nisbet Peter. Harvard: Harvard University Art Museum, 1987.
Tupitsyn, Margarita. El Lissitzky. Beyond the Abstract Cabinet: Photography, Design, Collaboration. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Links Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
El Lissitzky at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Museum of Modern Art
National Galleries of Scotland
El Lissitzky at the National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Canada
Berlinische Galerie
Cleveland Museum of Art
Harvard University Art Museum
Museum Ludwig
Museum of Modern Art
Norton Simon Museum
Tate Gallery
Van Abbemuseum |
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