22 November 1890 – 30 December 1941 (Russian: Эль Лисицкий; born Лазарь Маркович Лисицкий), was a Russian avant-garde artist who worked across painting, architecture, graphic design, typography, and photography, and played a key role in the development and dissemination of Constructivist ideas. After growing up in Smolensk, he was denied admission to the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts because he was Jewish and instead studied architecture and engineering from 1909 to 1914 at the Technical University in Darmstadt. He completed his diploma in Moscow in 1915.

Following the October Revolution of 1917, he aligned his artistic work with revolutionary social and political goals and became a member of the Fine Arts Section of NARKOMPROS in Moscow. From 1919 he taught at the art school in Vitebsk, where he worked closely with Kazimir Malevich, and from 1920 to 1921 he headed the architecture department at VKhUTEMAS in Moscow. During this period he developed the Proun works (“Project for the Affirmation of the New”), which translated Suprematist principles into spatial, architectonic compositions.

In 1922 he played a central role in the First Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin and co-founded the short-lived journal Gegenstand with Ilya Ehrenburg. Photography and the book as a medium became increasingly important in his practice. He rejected traditional letterpress typography and anticipated phototypesetting, integrating photographic elements into graphic design, exhibition layouts, and publications. He edited and designed the trilingual journal Weschtsch – Objet – Gegenstand in Berlin and collaborated with Kurt Schwitters on Merz.

After returning permanently to the Soviet Union in 1925, he taught at VKhUTEMAS until 1930 and worked extensively as an exhibition designer and book artist. He designed the Soviet sections for major international exhibitions, including Pressa in Cologne (1928) and Film und Foto (1929), where he presented Soviet photography and film through innovative spatial and graphic concepts. From 1932 onward he was a regular book designer for the magazine USSR in Construction.

He died in Moscow in 1941 from tuberculosis, after decades of moving between Germany and Russia, a transnational career that connected the Russian avant-garde with developments in Western European modernism.

Reference
Biography text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), German edition. Retrieved February 8, 2026.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Lissitzky