The Square Root of Revolution

“A Suprematist Story of Two Squares in Six Constructions” is an extraordinary book for children, designed by the great Russian artist El (Lazar) Lissitzky (1890-1941). In an abstract narrative, a red square and a black square are protagonists whose drama is played out in an infinite spatial void of white. The diminutive book, published in 1922, is a landmark of avant-garde graphic design.

A small but absorbing exhibition called “Monuments of the Future: Designs by El Lissitzky” in the gallery at the Getty Research Institute juxtaposes a copy of this radically adventurous book with a selection of other, only slightly earlier designs for books illustrating traditional Yiddish fables. Lissitzky’s drawings of goats and horses in these other children’s books are not exactly conventional, since they employ the fractured planes and interpenetrations of form and space found in Cubist and Futurist painting, which had been a hallmark of European avant-garde art for more than a decade. But two things about these Yiddish illustrations stand out.

One is the inescapably strange sight of rural folk tales about farm animals being depicted in a borrowed style that is a hallmark of urban sophistication. In these “citified” pictures of country life, a rambunctious sense of the transformation of one way of life into another is inescapable. After 1916, Lissitzky was involved in a movement toward creating a secular Jewish culture, and the conjunction of traditional folk stories and (for the layman) advanced visual style is symptomatic of his effort.

The other peculiarity is the near simultaneity of these Cubo-Futurist descriptions of frisky goats and plodding horses down on the farm with Lissitzky’s thoroughly abstract story of a flat red square and a flat black square floating through limitless crystalline space. What a huge--and hugely thrilling--artistic step the artist took, and in a very short time, to boot.

Much of the romance and excitement of Russian avant-garde art early in this century comes from the “onward and upward--don’t look back” drive of these gifted and ambitious men and women. Their seeming fearlessness in the face of wide-open possibility is daunting and inspirational.

Partly, of course, it is one with the fervor of a modern revolutionary age. Russia’s sweeping 1917 revolution meant that nothing would ever be the same again.

In the exhibition, however, the juxtaposition of those Cubo-Futurist books of rural Yiddish fables with “A Suprematist Story of Two Squares in Six Constructions” suggests something else that was crucial to the emergence of an artistic avant-garde. When the revolution happened, Russia was an agrarian society. Folk tales and rural imagery were the norm, not the exception. The Industrial Revolution that had long since transformed the agrarian societies of England, Germany, France and the United States had barely touched Russia.

Huge leaps not only could be taken but--in a very real sense--had to be. Russian artists meant to catapult their country into a future that had arrived without them.

The fusion of political revolution with industrial revolution gave artists opportunities they otherwise wouldn’t have had. Numerous talented individuals stepped right up to the plate. The show, which was organized by Nancy Perloff, the Getty Research Institute’s curator of manuscripts and archives, and by art historian and critic Eva Forgacs, includes 133 books, drawings, posters, photographs, documents and letters by Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, Marc Chagall, Hans Arp and several other artists, as well as the visionary examples by Lissitzky. All come from the Getty’s voluminous holdings in this area.

The handsome installation of the show was designed by architect John Frishman. His use of subtly dynamic graphics, structurally exposed metal, clear plastics and planes of visually interpenetrating space ably illustrates principles of Lissitzky’s avant-garde design.

In an extraordinary photographic self-portrait, Lissitzky gave remarkable visual form to the urgent sense of the artist’s essential role in building the future. The surface of the black-and-white picture is subdivided into a Modernist grid, recalling the orderly design of graph paper on which an architectural rendering might be drawn. A perfect circle, inscribed by a drafting compass, intervenes across the rectilinear grid.

The drafting compass is shown loosely cradled in the fingers of an open hand, a gesture as graceful and elegant as any taken by a dancer in the Russian ballet. The hand is, in turn, superimposed over Lissitzky’s face, which seems to emerge from a shadow. The artist’s eye is anchored in the center of the hand’s open palm, like a secular rendition of a spiritual and mystical sign. As surely as a Renaissance portrait of a prince might be adorned with symbols of power, or an Enlightenment portrait of a lady might show signs of fidelity and faith, a social role for the artist is being portrayed here.

From the artist’s eye to his hand to his compass inscribing a perfect circle on a world in the process of being built, Lissitzky’s self-portrait shows the artist as “The Constructor.” Notably, it’s photographic rather than painted, and thus mechanically assembled. Made in 1924, the picture is from a period of intense artistic experiment, when the dream of creative individuals constructing a new world seemed to be coming to reality.

The hopeful newness of it all is given an added charm when you realize that so many of Lissitzky’s earliest graphic designs were for children’s books. The show includes mostly later graphic art--work for the theater, designs for product displays and commercial advertisements, kiosks for international trade fairs, and other architectural visions. In a way, though, the audience for the children’s books is special because the audience really is the future. These designs work on behalf of what is yet to come.

Along related lines, perhaps the most moving item in the exhibition is a 1930 birth announcement, which heralds the arrival of Lissitzky’s son. The photomontage on the announcement shows the infant atop layered images of an industrial smokestack, a female worker and documents chronicling the Soviet five-year plan. In retrospect, its sweet but heady sense of optimistic transformation--the future is here!--is edged with poignancy too, since the Stalinist crackdown turned out to be barely two years off in that not-so-rosy future. *

“Monuments of the Future: Designs by El Lissitzky,” Research Institute Gallery, Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive. Dates: Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursdays-Fridays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Ends Feb. 21. Price: Free; parking reservation required. Phone: (310) 440-7300.