Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German
Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet: Photography, Design, Collaboration FROM THE PUBLISHER
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky is widely known as a Russian avant-garde artist who made significant contributions to abstract art the 1920s. Until now his experiments with photography, photomontage, and graphic and exhibition designs in the 1920s and throughout the 1930s have not been documented and thoroughly analyzed. This book explores both the political and aesthetic aspects of Lissitzky's late multimedia work from his designs for the Abstract cabinet to his death in 1941.
The author and the two contributors give special attention to Lissitzky's intense collaboration first with German and then with Soviet photographers, designers, and filmmakers, and they discuss how his various personal friendships and acquaintances influenced the directions he took in photography and design. The book presents photographic works by Lissitzky's and these other artists as well as some of Lissitzky's early non-objective art that foreshadows his experiments in figurative art. It also includes Lissitzky's correspondence with his Western colleagues and his wife Sophie Kueppers.
FROM THE CRITICS
Taylor - The Boston Book Review
El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet is among the more meticulously crafted publications on photography to have appeared in the last dozen years...the catalogue encourages readers to see with their own eyes and reflect on El Lissitzky's concept of modern composition and production techniques.