Lissitzky, Lazar, "El"

Lazar Lissitzky, known as "El Lissitzky" is an architect, painter, photographer and typographer. He was born in Potchinok in 1890 to a Jewish family. Rejected at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, because of racial quotas, he enrolled in 1909 at the Polytechnic School of Darmstadt, to become an architectural engineer. From 1909 to 1914, Lissitzky traveled through France, Italy and Germany, where he studied religious buildings. When the war forced him to return to Russia, he deepened his mastery of graphic arts and painting as an autodidact. His work was initially involved in the revival of Jewish national culture, which, with the notable participation of Marc Chagall, took off in the 1910s. In the fall of 1919, however, his meeting with Kasimir Malevich led to a profound reorientation of his aesthetic concerns. In the post-revolutionary context, Lissitzky joined the ranks of opponents of easel painting, a practice considered bourgeois and individualistic: with his interdisciplinary works called prouns, he undertook to rethink architecture, urbanism and design based on the spatial experiences of abstract painting. An architect who had never built, he was nevertheless one of the catalysts of international constructivism in the 1920s. In addition to his major contributions to the history of graphic design and his museographic innovations, he was one of the principal theorists of a new synthesis of the arts which, based on the notion of environment, sought to redefine the place of the spectator.