“El Lissitzky's Designs and Illustrations: Picturing National Form through the Modernist Universal”

Hybrid Modernities Workshop. University of Illinois at Chicago

Apr. 2023

In the seminal article “The Primitive Unconscious of Modern art,” American Art Historian Hal Foster proposes a scathing critique of the romanticized relationship between the modern and the “primitive.” Foster’s account focuses on the 1984 exhibition at MOMA that unambiguously claimed an affinity between the primitive and modern. Picasso’s work from 1909 serves as a point of departure for Foster’s argument, which arrives at a conclusion that the modernists, looking to the mythic, romanticized, and exoticized past of the faraway lands, find only what they look for—an echo of their own sensibilities, formal solutions for their expressive problems, and a need for an imaginative escape.

Foster critiques the claim to affinity, which is based only on visual similarity, appropriation, and misinterpretation of indigenous, geographically-specific objects to tap into or formulate a modernist sensibility. This line of thinking raises formal questions about the relationship between the Modern and national, between the ethnically-specific forms and universal pictorial language claimed by modernist art. Does indeed the Modern over-impose itself over the plurality of ethnic diversity, imposing itself and re-contextualizing? Or, is it possible that the Modernist Universal already contains elements of national forms, and serves not as an imposition, but as an underpinning of their formal logics?

Hoping to explore this question, I want to turn to the artistic practices of early Russian Avant-Garde, El Lissitzky’s work specifically, considering the two most distinctive trends in his early practice—Lissitzky’s work on Jewish national style and his Suprematist designs created for propagandistic purposes. Late-Imperial and Early-Soviet period lands itself to this investigation, as questions of form, content, the imperial past, and the future of the Socialist project are part and parcel of the artistic investigations undertaken at the time.

El Lissitzky, Chad Gadya illustrations: “The Fire Came and Burnt the Stick,” 1919.