埃尔·利西茨基

El Lissitzky (Russian: Эль Лиси́цкий; born Lazar Markovich Lissitzky; Russian: Ла́зарь Ма́ркович Лиси́цкий, ; 23 November [O.S. 11 November] 1890 – 30 December 1941) was a Russian and Soviet artist, active as a painter, illustrator, designer, printmaker, photographer, and architect. He was an important figure of the avant-garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the Soviet Union.

Lissitzky began his career illustrating Yiddish children's books in an effort to promote Jewish culture. He started teaching at the age of 15, maintaining his teaching career for most of his life. Over the years, he taught in a variety of positions, schools, and artistic media, spreading and exchanging ideas. He took this ethic with him when he worked with Malevich in heading the suprematist art group UNOVIS, when he developed a variant suprematist series of his own, Proun, and further still in 1921, when he moved to Weimar Republic. In his remaining years he brought significant innovation and change to typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and book design, producing critically respected works and winning international acclaim for his exhibition design. This continued until his deathbed, where in 1941 he produced one of his last works – a Soviet propaganda poster rallying the people to construct more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany.

Early years

Lazar Markovich Lissitzky was born on 23 November 1890 in Pochinok, a small Jewish community 50 kilometres (31 mi) southeast of Smolensk, Russian Empire. His father Mordukh Zalmanovich (Mark Solomonovich) Lissitzky was a well-educated travel agent who knew English and German, "in his spare time he translated Heine and Shakespeare". He emigrated to America, but returned to Russia as his wife's rabbi advised against emigration. Lissitzky's mother Sarah strictly observed Jewish religious traditions. From 1891 to 1898 Lissitzky's family lived in Vitebsk, where Lazar's brother and sister were born.

In 1899 Lazar moved to Smolensk, where he lived with his grandfather and attended City School 1. In 1903, during a summer vacation he spent with his parents in Vitebsk, he started to receive instruction from Yury Pen, a famous Jewish artist and teacher. Marc Chagall and Ossip Zadkine were also Pen's students. By the time Lissitzky was 15 he was teaching students himself; he later recalled in his diary that "[a]t age fifteen I began to earn a living by tutoring and drawing."

He applied to the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1909, but was rejected, possibly because he failed the exams or due to the "Jewish quota" under the Tsarist regime that limited the number of Jewish students in Russian schools. Instead, in 1909 he moved to Germany to study architectural engineering at the Darmstadt Polytechnic Institute. His wife later wrote that while studying Lissitzky "earned extra money by doing examination projects for fellow-students who were either too lazy or too inept to do their test-pieces for themselves". He also worked as a bricklayer, and visited local Jewish historical sites on vacations, like the medieval Worms Synagogue, of which he made drawings of the interior and decorations.

Lissitzky had travelled to Paris and Belgium during 1912, and spent several months in St. Petersburg. In 1913 he went to a tour of Italy; he wrote in his diary that "I covered more than 1,200 kilometers in Italy on foot – making sketches and studying." He graduated cum laude from Darmstadt Polytechnic in 1914 . When World War I began, Lissitzky returned to Russia via Switzerland and Balkans; and in 1915 started studies at Riga Polytechnic Institute, that was evacuated to Moscow, and started to participate in exhibitions. He also started to work for the architectural firms of Boris Velikovsky and Roman Klein. Klein was also a Egyptologyst, and he was responsible for creating the Egyptian Department of the Pushkin Museum. Lissitzky also took part in arranging this exhibition.

节选，摘自英文维基百科「El Lissitzky」，按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用。