El Lissitzky on Paper - by Samuel Johnson (Hardcover)

About the Book

"The artist and architect El Lissitzky (1890-1941) is celebrated for his contributions to painting, architecture, photography, and graphic design, and for his role in disseminating Russian and Soviet avant-garde art in Europe during the 1920s. Though he worked in a diversity of media, Lissitzky nonetheless produced the majority of his work on paper in the form of innovative photomontages, architectural drawings, lithographs, typography, books, and photo magazines. This monograph--the first career-spanning archival study of Lissitzky since 1968--reveals that the artist's multiple pursuits arose from his deep commitment to print as the premier medium of public exchange in the young and turbulent twentieth century. Samuel Johnson demonstrates that paper and print media were preoccupations that shaped Lissitzky's worldview, values, politics, and production in ways that have never been fully appreciated. Probing Lissitzky's stance on the problems of distribution and reception, this book offers a compelling and nuanced portrait of Lissitzky as experimenter, visionary designer, technocrat, and propagandist-the very prototype of the twentieth-century artist, with a legacy that remains largely on paper"--

Book Synopsis

An examination of the importance of paper in the work of Soviet artist, designer, and architect El Lissitzky.

Russian artist El Lissitzky's work spans painting, photography, theatrical and exhibition design, architecture, graphic design, typography, and literature. He was active in the Jewish cultural renaissance, formed an artists' collective with Kazimir Malevich, was a key figure in the dissemination of early Soviet art in Western Europe, and designed propaganda for the Stalin regime. With such a varied history and body of work, scholars have often struggled to identify the core principles that tied his diverse oeuvre together.

In El Lissitzky on Paper, Samuel Johnson argues that Lissitzky's commitment to creating works on paper is a constant that unites his endeavors. Paper played a key role in the utopian projects that informed Lissitzky's work, and the artist held a commitment to print as the premier medium of immediate public exchange. Johnson analyzes and contextualizes this idea against the USSR's strict management of this essential resource and the growth of new media communications, including the telephone, telegraph, and film.

With this book, Johnson presents a significant contribution to scholarship on this major artist, revealing new connections between Lissitzky's work in architecture and visual art and bringing to light sources from largely unstudied Russian archives.

Review Quotes

"This book is a profound investigation of how Lissitzky's thought transformed the disciplines in which he worked, pushing not only the borders between them but also their very ideological and epistemological grounds. Both specialists and general scholars of early twentieth-century art will appreciate this thorough and original presentation of the Lissitzky's universe."-- "H-Net Reviews"

"Johnson's El Lissitzky on Paper delimits Lissitzky's activity mostly to paperwork. . . . Johnson opts for a poetic mode of narration. His book unfolds through a series of suggestive juxtapositions, presented diachronically. Each chapter offers a sequence of descriptive vignettes, arranged in such a way as to generate dialogue between them. For instance, Johnson's parallel discussion of Lissitzky's exhibition showrooms and typographic designs for printed media implicitly suggests that the artist's three-dimensional projects utilized the skills that were developed initially in his two-dimensional experiments. . . . A global artist in Stalin's isolationist times, he managed to remain both avant-garde architect and skillful propagandist, always proving his readiness to pivot."-- "Times Literary Supplement"

"El Lissitzky on Paper presents a significant contribution to the scholarship on Lissitzky, Constructivism, and Soviet art and architecture. Among its strengths are the book's deep archival research and presentations--often for the first time--of material pertaining to Lissitzky's career. Introducing reams of new material and fresh analyses, Johnson works to revise the long-held narrative on the relationship between pragmatism and utopianism in the historical avant-garde."--Noam Elcott, author of "Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media"

"Johnson offers an original approach to the much-studied oeuvre of the artist El Lissitzky, considering his work in printing together with his work in architecture, rather than as separate areas of endeavor. Johnson's careful, embedded analysis of Lissitzky's practice throws down the gauntlet to previous scholarship that has fretted over a false division between Lissitzky's early modernism and later 'Stalinism.' The result is a new understanding of the artist as both a communist and a modernist artist, effectively reframing both of those limiting terms. I believe it will become standard in the field."--Christina Kiaer, author of "Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism"

About the Author

Samuel Johnson is the Carole & Alvin I. Schragis Faculty Fellow and assistant professor of art history at Syracuse University.