El lissitzky

born Nov. 10 [Nov. 22, New Style], 1890, Pochinok, near Smolensk, Russia

died Dec. 30, 1941, Moscow

in full Lazar Markovich Lisitsky, Russian painter, typographer, and designer, a pioneer of non-representational art in the early 20th century. His innovations in typography, advertising, and exhibition design were particularly influential.

Lissitzky studied architecture at Darmstadt, Germany., and, during World War I, at Moscow. In 1919 Marc Chagall appointed him teacher at the revolutionary school of art in Vitebsk. Kasimir Malevich, the painter and founder of the Suprematist movement, which advocated the supremacy of pure geometric form over representation, also taught there, and he greatly influenced Lissitzky. In 1919 Lissitzky began to work on a series of abstract geometric paintings that he named “Proun,”an acronym for the Russian words translated as “Projects for the Affirmation of the New.” These paintings were a major contribution to the Constructivist art movement. In 1921 he became professor at the state art school in Moscow, but he left his country at year's end, when the Soviet government turned against modern art. He went to Germany, where he met the artist-designer László Moholy-Nagy, who transmitted Lissitzky's ideas on art to western Europe and the United States through his teaching at the Bauhaus.

Between 1925 and 1928 Lissitzky lived in Hannover, where he cofounded a number of periodicals propagating the most progressive artistic tendencies of the 1920s. In the winter of 1928–29 he returned to Moscow, where he continued to be an innovative force. His experiments in spatial construction led him to devise new techniques in exhibiting, printing, photomontage, and architecture, which have had much influence in western Europe.

Vladimir tatlin

born Dec. 16 [Dec. 28, New Style], 1885, Kharkov, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]

died May 31, 1953, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

Ukrainian painter, sculptor, and architect remembered for his visionary “Monument to the Third International” in Moscow, 1920.

Tatlin was educated at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1910. Late in 1913 he went to Paris, where he visited Pablo Picasso, whose reliefs in sheet iron, wood, and cardboard made a deep impression on him. Returning to Moscow, Tatlin created constructions that he called “painting reliefs,” which he exhibited at a Futurist exhibition held in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in February 1915. He became the leader of a group of Moscow artists who tried to apply engineering techniques to the construction of sculpture. This developed into a movement known as Constructivism (q.v.).

This type of avant-garde art continued for a brief period after the Russian Revolution of 1917, during which time Tatlin created his most famous work—the “Monument to the Third International,” which was one of the first buildings conceived entirely in abstract terms. It was commissioned in 1919 by the department of fine arts and exhibited in the form of a model 22 feet (6.7 m) high at the exhibition of the VIII Congress of the Soviets in December 1920. A striking design, it consisted of a leaning spiral iron framework supporting a glass cylinder, a glass cone, and a glass cube, each of which could be rotated at different speeds. The monument's interior would have contained halls for lectures, conferences, and other activities. The monument was to be the world's tallest structure—more than 1,300 feet (396 m) tall—but it was never built owing to the Soviet government's disapproval of nonfigurative art.