Synopses & Reviews
Situating El Lissitzky reassesses the complex career of one of the most influential yet controversial experimental artists of the early twentieth century. A prolific painter, designer, architect, and photographer, El Lissitzky (1890-1941) worked with the Soviet and the European artistic avant-gardes in the 1920s and as a propagandist for the Stalinist regime in the following decade.
Taking readers into the thick of current debates about Lissitzky's artistic personae, Situating El Lissitzky reconstructs aspects of his elusive identity across different periods, places, and media. Following an introduction in which Nancy Perloff distills and draws together the volume's eight essays, Christina Lodder, Éva Forgács, and Maria Gough offer revisionist accounts of Lissitzky's years as an international constructivist and exhibition designer in Europe. John E. Bowlt then investigates the role of handicraft and the symbol of the hand in Lissitzky's artistic production, and Leah Dickerman and Margarita Tupitsyn elucidate the interplay between physicality and opticality at different stages in Lissitzky's development as a photographer. Finally, T. J. Clark and Peter Nisbet address the disconcerting balance of aesthetic value and political expediency in Lissitzky's overtly Communist art. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait of Lissitzky as Bolshevik visionary, craftsman, modernist, internationalist, and Soviet propagandist.
Synopsis
Situating El Lissitzky reassesses the complex career of one of the most influential yet controversial experimental artists of the early twentieth century. A prolific painter, designer, architect, and photographer, El Lissitzky (1890-1941) worked with the Soviet and the European artistic avant-gardes in the 1920s and as a propagandist for the Stalinist regime in the following decade.
Synopsis
In 1927, while a student of architecture at the Moscow Vhutemas, Georgii Krutikov presented a vision for a flying city. More than just a flight of architectural fancy, Krutikovandrsquo;s flying city was a utopian dream, a plan to solve the seemingly intractable problems of overcrowding and resource depletion by moving humanityandrsquo;s living quarters to space. Inspired in equal parts by sci-fi dreams of space travel and the revolutionary idealism that still percolated in the Soviet Union at that time, Krutikov created an incredible amount of detailed information about his city: sketches, drawings, plans, and more.
Krutikovandrsquo;s flying city has been cited as a major influence on Russian modernism for decades, yet little has been written about the design, its creator, or his subsequent architectural career. This beautifully illustrated book fills that gap, presenting a detailed study of Krutikovandrsquo;s scheme and its underlying ethos, then tracing Krutikovandrsquo;s later work as an architect. It will interestandmdash;and amazeandmdash;all fans of the avant-garde, architecture, and Russian history.
About the Author
S. O. Khan-Magomedov (1928andndash;2011) was a leading scholar of the Russian avant-garde from the 1920s and andrsquo;30s.Christina Lodder is a scholar of Russian art who is an honorary fellow at the Universities of Edinburgh and Kent.