El Lissitzky

Based on Wikipedia: El Lissitzky

The Hand of God and the Hand of Revolution

In 1919, a Jewish artist in Kiev created a children's book illustration that captured something extraordinary: the Angel of Death lying slain, with Hebrew letters spelling "here lies" hovering above its palm. The hand that killed death wasn't just any hand—it was simultaneously the hand of God and the hand of the Soviet people. The artist was making a bold theological and political statement disguised as a Passover song for children.

That artist was El Lissitzky, and that illustration tells you everything you need to know about his extraordinary life. He moved fluidly between Jewish mysticism and Soviet propaganda, between children's books and architectural manifestos, between ancient Hebrew calligraphy and the most radical avant-garde experiments of the twentieth century. He was a bridge between worlds that seemed incompatible.

A Jewish Childhood in the Pale of Settlement

Lazar Markovich Lissitzky was born in 1890 in Pochinok, a small Jewish community about fifty kilometers southeast of Smolensk in the Russian Empire. His father was an unusually cultured travel agent who knew English and German and spent his spare time translating the German poet Heinrich Heine and Shakespeare. His mother strictly observed Jewish religious traditions.

The family lived near what was called the Pale of Settlement—the western region of Imperial Russia where Jews were permitted to live. Outside this zone, Jews faced severe restrictions on residence, employment, and education. Growing up in this environment created what one art historian called "a powerful Jewish solidarity," born from the knowledge that Jews would never be considered true Russians regardless of how long they had lived there or how much they contributed to society.

When Lissitzky was thirteen, he began studying with Yury Pen, a famous Jewish artist and teacher in Vitebsk. Two of his fellow students would also become legendary: Marc Chagall and the sculptor Ossip Zadkine. By fifteen, Lissitzky was teaching students himself, earning money as a tutor while still a teenager.

He applied to the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1909 and was rejected. This might have been because he failed the entrance exams, or it might have been because of the "Jewish quota"—Tsarist restrictions that limited how many Jewish students could attend Russian schools. Either way, the rejection pushed him toward Germany.

Wandering Through Europe

Lissitzky enrolled at the Darmstadt Polytechnic Institute to study architectural engineering. He was a diligent student, but he also had a practical streak—his wife later wrote that he earned extra money by completing examination projects for fellow students "who were either too lazy or too inept to do their test-pieces for themselves." He also worked as a bricklayer.

But the most important work he did during these years wasn't academic at all. During his vacations, he traveled to medieval Jewish historical sites, including the ancient synagogue in Worms, Germany, where he made detailed drawings of the interior and decorations. He visited Paris and Belgium. In 1913, he took an extended tour of Italy, writing in his diary that he "covered more than 1,200 kilometers in Italy on foot—making sketches and studying."

This wasn't tourism. It was preparation.

He graduated with honors in 1914, just as World War One erupted. He had to take a circuitous route home through Switzerland and the Balkans. Back in Russia, he continued his architectural studies in Moscow while beginning to participate in art exhibitions and work for established architectural firms.

Rediscovering Jewish Art

In 1916, Lissitzky and his artist colleague Issachar Ber Ryback undertook an ethnographic expedition that would transform his artistic vision. Funded possibly by a Jewish historical society, they toured cities and towns throughout the Belarusian Dnieper region and Lithuania, documenting monuments of Jewish antiquity before they could be lost to time and persecution.

Lissitzky was particularly moved by the Cold Synagogue in Mogilev. Years later, he wrote an article comparing his experience there to visits to "Roman basilicas, Gothic chapels, or baroque churches." His description captures the overwhelming impact:

The walls—wooden, oaken beams that resound when you hit them. Above the walls, a ceiling like a vault made out of boards. The seams all visible. ... the whole interior of the shul is so perfectly conceived by the painter with only a few uncomplicated colors that an entire grand world lives there and blooms and overflows this small space.

The synagogue was decorated from floor to ceiling by a painter named Chaim Segal. Lissitzky was awed by the work. The building itself was square at floor level but transformed into an octagonal vaulted ceiling, "resembling a yarmulke"—the traditional Jewish head covering. Lissitzky saw this as "the fruit of a great culture," something "completely contrary to the primitive."

This expedition gave him a mission: to help create a new, secular Jewish culture that honored this visual heritage while speaking to modern times.

Children's Books as Revolutionary Art

After the 1917 Revolution, the Tsarist decree prohibiting Hebrew lettering in print was abolished. Jews suddenly had the same rights as other peoples of the former Russian Empire. Lissitzky moved to Kiev and began designing Yiddish books with fervent purpose.

His first book design was extraordinary in its ambition. Moishe Broderzon's "An Everyday Conversation" was created in the form of a Torah scroll—the sacred format of Jewish scripture—printed in only 110 copies. Lissitzky explained that he "intended to couple the style of the story with the 'wonderful' style of the square Hebrew letters."

In 1918, he illustrated Mani Leib's "The Mischievous Boy," a children's book where he incorporated typography directly into the illustrations. Each of the ten pages arranged text and drawings differently. The first illustration shows a Christian church and a Jewish study house side by side, representing peaceful coexistence; a goat and pig at the bottom symbolize Jews and Christians respectively.

Scholars trace his style to both the ethnographic expeditions and to Chagall's influence. But Lissitzky was doing something more complex than either source suggested. He was merging the visual traditions of Russian fairy tales with Jewish folk art, creating what researchers describe as children's books that "grow out of a double Slavic-Jewish oral and visual tradition."

The Passover Book That Killed the Angel of Death

Lissitzky created two versions of "Had Gadya" (The Only Kid) in 1917 and 1919. Had Gadya is an Aramaic song sung at the conclusion of the Passover seder—the ritual meal commemorating the exodus from Egypt. The song tells a simple, cumulative story: a father buys a young goat, a cat eats the goat, a dog bites the cat, and so on through a chain of increasingly powerful attackers until finally God destroys the Angel of Death.

Traditionally, the song is interpreted as an allegory for Jewish persecution. Each attacker represents a different empire or people that oppressed the Jews throughout history. But Lissitzky transformed this ancient meaning.

The two versions differ dramatically. The 1917 version is colorful and folkloric, with the Angel of Death "cast down but still alive." But in the 1919 version, completed after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Angel of Death is definitively dead—and its victims are resurrected.

Art historians see this as Lissitzky expressing his sympathies for the Revolution. The hand of God that slays death bears a striking resemblance to the first stamp issued in Soviet Russia, showing a hand gripping a sword under the sun. The crowned Angel of Death becomes symbolically linked to the Tsar himself, "killed by the force of revolution."

The cover of the 1919 edition was designed in abstract suprematist forms—the geometric visual language of the Russian avant-garde. Lissitzky was merging ancient Jewish narrative with cutting-edge revolutionary aesthetics.

But the book's technical innovations were equally remarkable. Lissitzky invented a color-coding system where the color of each character in the illustrations matches the color of that character's name in the Yiddish text. The kid is yellow, and so is the Yiddish word for kid. The father's face is green, matching the green type for the word "father."

One art historian called Had Gadya "a quintessence of El Lissitzky's post revolutionary Jewish Renaissance inspiration." Another sees it as "the culmination of his artistic and personal engagement with Judaica."

Hidden Symbols and Revolutionary Meaning

Some illustrations in Had Gadya reference things not mentioned in the original song. In scene five, a red rooster appears. In Yiddish, "royter henn"—literally "red rooster"—also means arson. It was a visual pun loaded with revolutionary meaning.

Art historian Haia Friedberg noticed that the final illustration closely resembles the biblical story of the binding of Isaac, where Abraham nearly sacrifices his son before God intervenes. But Lissitzky imposed a radically different meaning:

Instead of Isaac being under the knife ... it is the Angel of Death who is being killed by the hand of god. One should not be mistaken in thinking that there is identification between Isaac and the Angel of Death; on the contrary: Isaac, and the kid are saved from the hand of death because death itself is killed.

Friedberg argues that Lissitzky was offering young Russian Jews—"raised traditionally and living in a revolutionary age"—a choice. Through the familiar story of Had Gadya, he was suggesting they "leave the old ways paved with victimization in favor of the new redemptive path of the revolution and communism, a gift offered from heaven itself."

The visual motif of a powerful hand would recur throughout Lissitzky's entire career, most notably in his famous 1924 self-portrait "The Constructor," where a hand holding a compass is superimposed over his own face.

Teaching and Spreading Ideas

Lissitzky began teaching at age fifteen and never really stopped. Teaching wasn't just a job for him—it was a calling and a method. By teaching, he spread ideas; by teaching, he also learned.

In 1918, he helped found the art section of the Kultur-Lige movement in Kiev, working alongside Joseph Chaikov, Issachar Ber Ryback, and others to promote Jewish culture. Then, in 1919, Marc Chagall invited him to teach at the People's Art School in Vitebsk.

Vitebsk became a crucible of avant-garde art. Kazimir Malevich arrived and introduced Lissitzky to suprematism—an abstract art movement focused on geometric forms, especially the square and circle. Malevich believed that pure geometric shapes could express pure artistic feeling, freed from any representation of the physical world.

Lissitzky became Malevich's ally and helped develop suprematist ideas further. Together they led UNOVIS, an art group whose name stood for "Affirmers of New Art." But Lissitzky was too restless to simply follow anyone's program. He developed his own variant of suprematism called Proun.

Proun: The Interchange Station

Proun—an acronym Lissitzky coined that roughly translates to "Project for the Affirmation of the New"—was neither purely painting nor purely architecture. Lissitzky called it "the interchange station between painting and architecture."

Where Malevich's suprematist works were flat, suggesting infinite cosmic space, Lissitzky's Prouns were ambiguous—geometric forms that seemed to float in three-dimensional space but refused to settle into any consistent perspective. They looked like architectural plans for impossible buildings, or views of abstract machines from angles that couldn't exist.

The Prouns represented Lissitzky's belief that art should move off the canvas and into the world. He didn't want to create beautiful objects for galleries. He wanted to transform how people experienced space itself.

The Move West

In 1921, Lissitzky left Russia for the Weimar Republic—the democratic German government that existed between World War One and the Nazi takeover. This was a period of extraordinary artistic ferment in Germany. The Bauhaus school was reinventing design education. Dada artists were challenging every convention. New ideas about typography, architecture, and photography were transforming visual culture.

Lissitzky dove in. He met and collaborated with artists from across Europe, spreading ideas he had developed in Russia while absorbing new influences. He became a crucial conduit between Soviet and Western European avant-garde movements.

During his years in Western Europe, Lissitzky brought what one might call "significant innovation and change" to several fields simultaneously: typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and book design. His work won international acclaim.

From the Cradle to the Grave

Lissitzky's career traces an arc that mirrors the arc of the Russian Revolution itself. He began by celebrating Jewish liberation through children's books. He ended creating Soviet propaganda.

In 1941, dying of tuberculosis on his deathbed, he produced one of his last works: a propaganda poster urging the Soviet people to build more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany. The nation that had murdered the Angel of Death in his Passover illustrations was now fighting the regime that would soon attempt to murder all of European Jewry.

He died on December 30, 1941, at age fifty-one.

The Tension at the Heart of His Work

El Lissitzky's life embodies a tension that many Jewish intellectuals of his generation faced. The Russian Revolution promised liberation from Tsarist oppression—the end of pogroms, quotas, and the Pale of Settlement. For a brief moment, it seemed possible to be fully Jewish and fully Soviet, to honor ancient traditions while building a revolutionary future.

This hope proved tragically naive. Stalin's purges would target Jewish intellectuals. The Soviet state would suppress Jewish culture, religion, and eventually even Yiddish itself. The very traditions Lissitzky had documented in his ethnographic expeditions would be actively destroyed.

But in his art, especially in his Yiddish children's books, the synthesis holds. The hand of God merges with the hand of revolution. Ancient Aramaic songs take on new meanings through avant-garde typography. Hebrew letters float among suprematist geometric forms.

Lissitzky was wrong about the Revolution bringing lasting liberation to the Jews. But he was right about something more enduring: that tradition and innovation need not be enemies, that the deepest roots can nourish the most radical growth, and that a children's book about a little goat can contain an entire philosophy of history.

Why He Matters

El Lissitzky influenced virtually every field of visual design in the twentieth century. His exhibition designs pioneered the idea that viewers should move through space rather than simply look at pictures on walls. His typographic experiments shaped modernist graphic design. His photomontages anticipated techniques that would become standard in advertising and propaganda.

But perhaps his most important contribution was demonstrating that avant-garde art could draw power from tradition rather than simply rejecting it. His most innovative works—the Had Gadya illustrations, the Proun series—succeeded precisely because they synthesized seemingly incompatible elements: Jewish mysticism and Soviet materialism, folk art and geometric abstraction, ancient calligraphy and modern design.

At fifteen, he was teaching students. At fifty-one, he was still working on his deathbed. Between those points, he helped invent the visual language of the modern world while never forgetting the wooden synagogue in Mogilev where, as he wrote, "an entire grand world lives there and blooms and overflows this small space."