Lazar  Lissitzky
(1890-1941) 

  L.Lissitzky and UNOVIS group
 

A MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR TO MODERN ART

Lazar Lissitzky   worked as a painter, typographer, architect and designer. 

Lissitzky grew up in Vitebsk, the hometown of Chagall, and studied architecture in the Polytechnic school in Darmstadt between 1909 and 1914. 

He then went to Moscow where he began to work as an architect. He also began to illustrate Jewish books for children in 1917, at first in a style influenced by Chagall and produced  popular prints as well. 

In 1919 he was appointed professor of architecture and applied art at the art school in Vitebsk, where Malevich was a colleague, and collaborated with him in the Unovis group. More

He began to make abstract pictures, which he called Prouns, as the interchange station between painting and architecture. Lissitzky was sent to Berlin in 1921 to establish contacts between artists in the USSR and Germany. There he met Schwitters, Moholy-Nagy, van Doesburg and many others, and has his first one-man exhibition at the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover, in 1923. 

He also designed books and periodicals with radical innovations in typography and photomontage. Lissitzky went to Switzerland in 1924 and returned to Moscow a year later. He then devoted himself to designing, periodicals and exhibition displays, including an exhibition room for the Landesmuseum, Hanover, and the Soviet pavilions for several international exhibitions. His works, mostly gouaches are now worth between US $ 15,000 and 150,000.