Designblog

What fascinated me in the exposition is how El Lissitzky redesigned Malevich’s opera, Victory over the Sun.

Victory over the Sun was a futurist opera premiered in 1913. The costume and set design was done by the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich. The futurist opera couldn’t succeed as the suprematist techniques were pretty new. The audience reacted negatively and violently to the performance.

What happened afterwards is that following the Russian revolution, El Lissitzky worked with Malevitch for a new version of the opera as an electro-mechanical show. Lissitzky transformed Malevich’s black and red squares into figures constructed of transparent prisms and metallic rods, bending and receding in space. He created a typography specially for the libretto. Most importantly, he transformed the old costumes into new robotic figurines/figures.

The new version of Victory over the Sun was closer to El Lissitzky’s Proun principles, where his work was more focused on the interaction of his architectural, graphic and typographic experiments, transforming sounds to architecture, words to costumes, or drawings to characters. This made me realize that he is not only a painter, but a graphic artist and an architectural designer, and a designer of furnitures, books and posters.

This is the proof that architecture and design are not just about constructing buildings or visuals, but also about how to create a coherent whole with a story, connecting different elements like the space, decors, visuals or texts.

Then maybe design is an activity one can apply to any kind of system. Architecture is a principle for making relational systems that can improve the totality of an artwork.

[cover] "Two Squares" / Dedication page / [page.4], from Lissitzky's "Two Squares"

Dit verhaal (1920) behoort tot de proun-serie van lissitzky.
Ik vind het een van zijn beste werken. Simpel en toch heel sterk.
In eerste instantie wist ik helemaal niet dat dit een kaft van een boek was. Een kinderboek nog wel. Over een rood en een zwart vierkant die de wereld gaan redden met behulp van een cirkel. Ze bundelen hun krachten samen om zo de chaos te vernietigen en een nieuwe orde te vestigen.

[page.4] Don’t read, get paper, rods, blocks, set them out, paint them, build.

De tekst op pagina 4 maakt duidelijk dat Lissitzky met zijn verhaal kinderen en volwassenen lezers aanspoorde tot activiteit. Zijn intentie was het verhaal tot leven te laten komen in een schouwspel. Je zou het dan ook niet alleen op een (typo)grafisch twee dimensionele kunnen zien, maar ook op een architecturale drie dimensionele manier kunnen bekijken.

[page.5] Here are the two squares / [page.6] They fly on to the Earth from far away and / [page.7] And see a black storm.

[page.8] Crash – and everything flies apart / [page.9] And on the black was established Red Clearly / [page.10] This is the end – let’s go on.

‘The words move within the fields of force of the figures as they act: these are squares’, zoals hij zelf zegt. De plaatsing van de woorden en het gebruik van de letters vertegenwoordigde een totaal nieuwe benadering. Het verhaal wordt dan ook over het algemeen aanvaard als een van de eerste voorbeelden van de Nieuwe Typografie.

Het werk werd voor het eerst gepubliceerd in 1922 en bestaat uit 10 pagina’s. Lissitzky maakte zelfs een speciale editie voor ons beroemde vaderlandse tijdschrift De Stijl ( in “De Stijl” 5e Jaargang 10/11). Enkele uitgaven hiervan zijn nog op te vragen bij het magazijn van de openbare bibliotheek (De Stijl : [maandblad voor de beeldende vakken], maar de editie waar ik het over heb is daar helaas niet meer in de collectie. Wel de volledige facsimile herdruk met het gehele in het Nederlands vertaalde “van tWee kWAdrAten in 6 konstrukties” in deel II. Ook kun je de volledige originele versie nog vinden in het boek “El Lissitzky”, wat door zijn vrouw Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers is geschreven.

De Stijl facsimile (red. Theo van Doesburg ; ed. by Ad Petersen1968) [page 5,6,7,8,9, 10+page 4]
El Lissitzky by Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers [top 3 pages, original print 22 x 28 cm]

In this work you see influences of Design, Fine arts, Architecture and Graphic design.
A nice thing of this work is that the upper drawing can stand on his own, and therefore can be divided in Fine arts. What Lissitzky is doing in the painted photo below, can be compared with design. Almost all his work contains influences of Design, Fine arts, Architecture and Graphic design. For myself I see it back the most in this one.
I really like the composition and colour distribution and how Lissitzky combines the 2D/3D perspective, which makes the drawing much more architectural.
I think the later work of Kandinsky is in some way comparable. I’m talking about elements of composition, colour distribution wise and form contrasts.
What’s fascinating actually is that for example in these paintings ( K1, L1, K2, L2 ) the triangles, (half) circles, stripes and composition have so much in common. While the ideas of their work are so different. Kandinsky combines painting with music, which Lissitzky does with architecture.

What I appreciate is the modern way of exposing his work. I like the way he puts his drawing and his street-exhibition in one frame on the cardboard. And the fact that he paints on the photo. The street celebration design reminds me a bit of graffiti in legal manners. In Graffiti you have multiple meanings of doing it. Some do it for the adrenaline-kick, some for the group or competition feeling, some to show their design skills and others for  political statements or propaganda. This last example is what I see in a part of Lissitzky’s work.

I think it’s interesting to see how he uses his propaganda work in other work but then he integrates his in his autonomous work (proun. street celebration design).

All in all I think it’s a great work and a unique style. I really admire that Lissitzky makes so many different things, and still keeps it in one theme

From Van Abbemuseums power point presentation I got attracted to a painting by El Lissitzky called “Proun P23, no 6″, in this presentation it has number 51. I have never really been into constructivism, suprematism or any of these kind of movements but I will try to focus on the things I actually like in El Lissitzkys painting. In general, I like the way he is able to leave empty spaces without making it comfortable. I always have to be alert so I don’t fall into the harsh abstractions of his work. The patina or aging paper makes it easier.

In this specific painting, “Proun P23 no 6″, I get the false illusion that he has done the same thing and left an empty space. But in fact the painting is packed. Trying to describe the painting, one can say that it has a fleshy colour in bottom, there are two deep red triangular forms almost meeting in the middle. Preventing them from coming together is a rectangle, a cube and two things that appear more flat, a stick and a square. The cube has a deep green coulor, the other objects are more neutral to the paintings colours. I like the colour composition and that it feels light even though it’s made in oil and on canvas. It’s a nice mix of painting and drawing. I also like the spacial aspect and the loose objects. It’s interesting the way he here presents the abstraction, I mean the space and volume is meeting some very basic shapes that seems easy to recognize and comprehend but makes an intriguing whole.

It’s hard to say anything about the texture of the painting from this point of view, but with the zoom site I attached it’s easier to get a feeling of it. From looking at other modernistic paintings, I really don’t like that dry texture from when the paint is not enough in one stroke or when the canvas is shown too much. These things create a very uncomfortable and also very physical feeling, just like some people don’t like and get chills when scratching your nails against a blackboard. This don’t seem to be a problem here with Proun 23, and I can understand that Van Abbemuseum must be very proud to have this painted Proun in it’s collection.

At the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung in 1923, Lissitzky was given the use of a small square space. Instead of hanging existing paintings, he decided to put new Prouncompositions with reliefs on the walls, thus creating a three-dimensional Prouneraum (Proun space).

The way Lissitzky turned 2D into 3D is admirable. One can experience being inside Prounspace as being in a Proun painting. By utilizing shifting axes and multiple perspectives, it feels like being in a spaceship. It has uncontrolable power over people, the same power that architecture can have.

At the same time wooden construction, the relief guides the viever through the room – “the journey“ – remindes me of a scale model of an another “space“. Prounspace thus allows us to be part of a space and at the same time have control/overview over another space.

The reason why I think Lissitzky’s Prounspace is that faschinating is the way it manipulates reality and our feeling for space. It challenges our notion of scale/ size.

There are two interesting japanese photographers that I like, who play with the same idea. One part of  Naoya Hatakeyam’s photo series called Scales consists of photos taken of existing architectural models of New York City and Tokyo as if they were real.

Another photographer Naoki Honjo makes pictures of existing cities, but plays with the focus, colour intensity and lighting in a way that urban life appears to look model-like.

Looking at Lissitzky and the mentioned photographers as references, I do not believe that making scalemodels belongs to achitects alone. I think that scale sized models are not only just a way to perceive reality differently but also to analyze the visual world. Taking the distance, a birds-eye view can often make things clear/better.

And there is always some nice hidden romantic feeling in scale models, even if we deny it.

This work seems to me like a project that started as a painting, then it became a 3d object and in the end it became something with a function on large scale. That was my first impression. But it’s not a coincidence at all. Lissitzky made this work in his Proun- period. And if you look at the painting closely you can see that he has been using differect perspectives. It’s like he was already searching for a good architectural design, the painting seems like a study for the model.

Later on Lissitzky calls this Proun period “the station where one changes from painting to architecture”. But nothing comes from nowhere. The Russian Revolution and the First World War had gave art and design a whole lot of new opportunities. Art and Design were ready for a new start, with no right or wrong.

When I look at the painting and I see all the lines and different compartments, I find it very intriguing how Lissitzky makes the transition to architecture. It’s interesting to look at a process like this, making something that is two dimensional into tree dimensional.  It really triggers me, the whole thing looks very playful and I like the model very much. The building that came off of the painting and the materials that have been used in the model are very exciting.  The shapes that you see in the painting are literally translated to the model, but the materials that have been used in the model are very different from what you expect of the painting.

For me personally, something is missing, something that I find very interesting and important. I conclude that there has to be made a next step in this very nice project. You don’t see any doors, windows or floors. Finding the right balance between exterior and interior is the challenge.