El Lissitzky

Lazar (El) Lissitzky was born in 1890 near Smolensk and trained as an architect in Darmstadt. His first mature work was the illustration of Yiddish books, among them Had Gadya (1919). That year Marc Chagall invited him to teach in Vitebsk, where he met Kazimir Malevich and turned to abstraction: the Prouns, floating constructions of bars, planes and circles, and the civil-war poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919–20).

In the 1920s he worked between Moscow and Germany, linking the Soviet avant-garde to the Bauhaus and De Stijl. About Two Squares (1922) is a children's book told in geometry and type. He designed rooms for abstract art in Dresden and Hanover, and the Soviet pavilion at the Pressa exhibition in Cologne (1928), with photomontage on an architectural scale. He died near Moscow in 1941.