El Lissitzky

b. 1890, Polchinok, Smolensk province, Russia – d. 1941, Moscow, Soviet Union.

He studied at the Technical College in Darmstadt, Germany (1909-14), at the Riga Technical University (1914-16). During 1917-24, he illustrated Yiddish picture books. He taught architecture and graphic design in Vitebsk (1919), where he adopted Suprematism and joined UNOVIS. In 1919-20 he began working on his Proun project, while in 1920 he became member of IZO NARKOMPROS in Moscow. In 1922 he immigrated to Berlin, where he published the journal Veshch/Gegenstand/Object with Ilya Ehrenburg, as well as his book Story of Two Squares. He was one of the organizers of the First Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin (1922) and in Amsterdam (1923). He illustrated Vladimir Mayakovsky’s For the Voice, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Mikail Matiushin’s Victory over the Sun and published his book The -isms of Art with Hans Arp. He taught (1925-30) at the VKhUTEMAS in Moscow. He was appointed head of the projects for the Soviet Pavilions in Cologne (1929) and in Leipzig (1930) and he designed horizontal skyscrapers. In 1930 he published his book Russia: Architecture for World Revolution and from 1932 he was a permanent collaborator of the magazine USSR in Construction.