El Lissitsky
El Lissitzky 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.
"..into this chaos [after the Bolshevik revolution] came suprematism extolling the square [referring to the Squares of Malevich] as the very source of all creative expression, and then came communism and extolled work as the true source of mans heartbeat."
El Lissitsky"Proun is the the Step-over from the art of painting to Architecture [original text in German:] (Umsteige-station von Malerei nach Architectur)."
El Lissitsky"New space neither needs nor demands pictures - it is not a picture transposed on a surface. This explains the painters hostility towards us [a. o.: Malevich ]: we are destroying the wall as the resting place for their pictures."
El Lissitsky"We have had enough perpetually hearing MACHINE MACHINE MACHINE MACHINE. In the repetition of the word MACHINE, we read the modern artists ambivalent relationship to mechanical reproduction: on the one hand, the rigorous linear order and uniform application of ink presented by the thrice-repeated type written line celebrates sterility; and on the other hand the content of the sentence itself bemoans the transformation of the industrial paradigm into an aesthetic cliché."
El Lissitsky"We have named PROUN [the art, stepping over from painting to architecture] a station on the path to the construction of the new form.. .From being a simple depicter the artist becomes a creator (builder) of forms for a new world — the world of objectivity. This does not mean the creation of a rivalry with the engineer. Art has not yet crossed paths with science."
El Lissitsky"For us [the young artists in Vitebsk, before 1920] Suprematism did not signify the recognition of an absolute form which was part of an already completed universal system, on the contrary; here stood revealed for the first time in all its purity the clear sign and plan for a definite new world never before experienced - a world which issues forth from our inner being and which is only now in the first stages of its formation, for this reason the square [ Malevichs Black and Red Square ] of suprematism became a beacon."
El Lissitsky
