El Lissitzky's first suprematist book is a story about how two squares, one red, one black, transform a world. It is Lissitzky's "scientific romance," an allegory of the fourth dimension and its effect on the three-dimensional world. When it was first published in Berlin in 1922, About 2 Squares presented a radical rethinking of what a book was, demonstrating a new way of organizing typography on a page and relating it to visual images. It marked the beginning of a new graphic art and is among the most important publications in the history of the avant-garde in typography and graphic design.  This facsimile limited edition is reproduced in letterpress with the English translation printed on a transparent overlay to register over the original Russian.  The commentary, More About 2 Squares, boxed in the same slipcase, provides a detailed analysis of this seminal work. Railing provides a brief historical survey of avant-garde poetry in Russia and shows how the letter/ sound was applied by Lissitzky in About 2 Squares as a corollary to the pictorial images - a relationship that forms the basis of abstract or nonobjective language and painting in Russia, and is the theoretical and creative source and device of Lissitzky's graphic design. Railing's is a study both of the philosophical idea of suprematism and the artistic content of Lissitzky's architectural extension of the suprematist painting of Kazimir Malevich, which he called the Proun, and of its particular role as a sequence of images used to create the story About 2 Squares.

About Two Squares and More About Two Squares: In 6 Constructions : A Suprematist Tale

Arts & Photography

LISSITZKY, El

Railing, Patricia

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

For the Voice, first published in 1923, has long been recognized as one of the finest achievements of Russian avant-garde bookmaking, a tradition in which poets and artists collaborated to create books that attained the status of art objects. By any reckoning, For the Voice is a landmark event in the history of modern graphic design. The book was inspired by the "new optics," where ideas are given form through printed letters, turning them into pictorial signs, and by "words that are seen and not heard," as Lissitzky wrote. This three-volume slipcased set consists of a facsimile volume that is faithful to the original in size, color, weight, and paper quality; a translation by Peter France of the original text; and Voices of Revolution, a collection of critical essays that analyze the character and significance of the original publication and describe the inner workings of the poet's "construction in sound" complemented by the designer's "constructions for the eye."

For the Voice (English, Russian and Russian Edition)

Mayakovsky, Vladimir

Lissitzky's book is a classic in architectural and planning theory, as well as an important document in social and intellectual history. It contains an appendix of excerpted writings by his contemporaries—M. J. Ginzburg, P. Martell, Bruno Taut, Ernst May, M. Ilyin, Wilm Stein, Martin Wagner, Hannes Meyer, Hans Schmidt, and others—all of whom illuminate the architecture and planning of Europe and Russia during the 1920s. There are over 100 plates and drawings.

Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution

Architecture

El Lissitzky, 1890-1941: Catalogue for an exhibition of selected works from North American collections, the Sprengel Museum Hanover, and the Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle

Busch-Reisinger Museum

Lissitzky (The Avant-garde in print)

Graphic Design

AGP Matthews

2 Squares/More About 2 Squares (Russian Edition)

Artists Bookworks

First published in 1922 in post-revolutionary Russia, a revolutionary children’s book by Russian avant-garde artist El Lissitzky (1890–1941) is available once more, for collectors and art and design enthusiasts. Imagination-stretching, radically simple, and yet beautifully sophisticated, About Two Squares tells the story of two squares that take on the mission of rebuilding the world. Inspired by Kazimir Malevich’s suprematist vision of a nonobjective art, About Two Squares stirred up the European art world with its publication in Theo van Doesburg’s avant-garde art journal, De Stijl, and redefined what an illustrated book could be. Left wonderfully open-ended, the book’s final words—“and then . . .”—encourage young readers to reinvent the world for themselves.

About Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale of Two Squares in Six Constructions

Children's Books

Tate

El Lissitzky

FAGE

El Lissitzky: Maler, Architekt, Typograf, Fotograf : Erinnerungen, Briefe, Schriften (German Edition)

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Büchergilde Gutenberg

The Paris of Ilya Ehrenburg knows no Louvre or Notre Dame and shows the Eiffel Tower crouching behind shabby facades and building timber. The Paris in which the Russian revolutionary lived from 1908 to 1940 was a place in which completely normal people with little money and hope struggled through life. Ehrenburg photographed them at their doors and in caf»s, at work and at rest, in their poverty and dignity, and wrote brief texts that describe them. My Paris is an impressive work of photographic social reporting, presenting portraits of the elderly and the young, workers and outcasts, standing in stark contrast to the glamorous Paris of so many idealized representations and memories. Originally published in Moscow in 1933 with an exceptionally clear typographic treatment by El Lissitzky that lends a gentle rhythm to the book, Moi Parizh / My Paris is an extremely rare object, presented here anew as a reprint.

Ilja Ehrenburg & El Lissitzky: My Paris

Individual Artists

Edition 7L

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Books by LISSITZKY, El