THE AVANT GARDE IN PRINT 2: LISSITZKY
Master Designers in Print 2
Arthur A. Cohen
Arthur A. Cohen: THE AVANT GARDE IN PRINT 2: LISSITZKY [Master Designers in Print 2]. New York: AGP Mathews/Ex Libris, 1981. First edition. Black paper portfolio with printed title label. 6 pp. explanatory text with small illustrations keyed to the plates. 10 loose facsimile plates. A couple of plates have a slight roughness to upper left-hand corner. Black portfolio lightly sunned and mildly edgeworn. A nearly fine set.
12.25 x 13 portfolio of heavy black paper with pasted title label and diagonal cut pocket inside to hold facsimile sheets. The prints are intended to be facsimiles are are printed by offset lithography to reproduce the size and colors of the orignals. The colors are printed in flat areas, giving the images a freshness and immediacy that four-color printing from color photographs could never provide. A highly recommended and sought-after artifact from Cohen and Elaine Lustig Cohen's legendary bookstore Ex-Libris.
As Cohen notes, this portfolio series acknowledges the debt paid the pioneers of modern typography for their bold inventivenss and the subtle mastery of the new visual vocabulary where the line between words and forms, type and painting, was diminished and the goal of direct communcation elevated as never before.
THE AVANT GARDE IN PRINT NO. 2: LISSITZKY Contents:
- El Lissitzky: Cover of Veshch-Gegenstand-Objet
- El Lissitzky:Page from Pro Dva Kvadrata (Of Two Squares)
- El Lissitzky: Announcement for 1923 Berlin Exhibition
- El Lissitzky: 2 photo-collage illustrations from Shest Provesti o Legkikh Kontsakh (Six Stories with Easy Endings)
- El Lissitzky: Wendingen cover
- El Lissitzky: Twopages from DLia Golosa (Forthe Voice)
- El Lissitzky: Cover for Merz 8/9
- El Lissitzky: Cover for Kunstismus (aka Kunstismen)
- El Lissitzky: Cover for Arkhitektura Vkhutemas
- El Lissitzky: Cover for Russland (Neues Bauen in der Welt, Vol. 1)
This is the only one of the five portfolios to showcase a single artist. Cohen points out that Lissitzky was the first to realize the importance of photography in revolutionizing the printed page. Photography released the typographer from the mechanical limitations of the hand press, making it possible to integrate words and images as never before. To Lissitzky, the new methods implied an approach to communication that transcended the traditional printed page.
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (1911 – 1941) made a career of utilizing art for social and political change. Although often highly abstract and theoretical, Lissitzky's work was able speak to the prevailing political discourse of his native Russia, and then the nascent Soviet Union. Following Kazimir Malevich in the Suprematist idiom, Lissitzky used color and basic shapes to make strong political statements. Lissitzky also challenged conventions concerning art, and his Proun series of two-dimensional Suprematist paintings sought to combine architecture and three-dimensional space with traditional, albeit abstract, two-dimensional imagery. A teacher for much of his career and ever an innovator, Lissitzky's work spanned the media of graphic design, typography, photography, photomontage, book design, and architectural design. The work of this cerebral artist was a force of change, deeply influencing movements and related figures such as De Stijl and the Bauhaus.
Ex Libris Rare Books was founded in 1973 by Elaine Lustig-Cohen and her husband Arthur A. Cohen (1928-1986). She was a graphic designer of no small renown, and he was a theologian, novelist, art and literary critic, who wrote extensively on Modern Art. The couple dealt in important and rare printed material and graphic documentation of International 20th-Century art. Much of their early inventory is now in Museums and international private collections.