id: 159104 accession number: 1995.3 share license status: Copyrighted url: https://clevelandart.org/art/1995.3 updated: 2022-10-29 16:21:22.304000 First Kestner Portfolio Proun, 1923. El Lissitzky (Russian, 1890–1941). Color lithograph; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund 1995.3 © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York title: First Kestner Portfolio Proun title in original language: series: series in original language: creation date: 1923 creation date earliest: 1923 creation date latest: 1923 current location: creditline: Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund copyright: © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York --- culture: Russia, 20th century technique: color lithograph department: Prints collection: PR - Lithograph type: Print find spot: catalogue raisonne: --- CREATORS * El Lissitzky (Russian, 1890–1941) - artist --- measurements: state of the work: edition of the work: support materials: inscriptions: --- CURRENT EXHIBITIONS title: From Rembrandt to Rauschenberg: Recently Acquired Prints opening date: 2000-09-17T00:00:00 From Rembrandt to Rauschenberg: Recently Acquired Prints. The Cleveland Museum of Art (organizer) (September 17-November 26, 2000). --- LEGACY EXHIBITIONS * Cleveland, Ohio: The Cleveland Museum of Art; September 17 - November 26, 2000. "From Rembrandt to Rauschenberg: Recently Acquired Prints." --- PROVENANCE --- fun fact: digital description: wall description: Lissitzky studied architectural engineering in Germany between 1909 and 1914, but returned to Russia at the outbreak of World War I. He embraced the Russian Revolution enthusiastically and in 1919 was appointed professor of Architecture and Graphic Art at the People's Art School in Vitebsk. Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) also joined the faculty and Lissitzky rapidly assimilated Malevich's revolutionary Suprematist language of abstract, geometrical forms floating in space. Lissitzky's Proun compositions (the term Proun was an invention---an abbreviation for "Project for the affirmation of the new" in Russian) were meant to represent "the interchange station between painting and architecture," something that "goes beyond painting and the artist on the one hand and the machine and the engineer on the other, and advances to the construction of space...[creating] a new, many-faceted unity as a formal representation of our nature." Frustrated by the flatness of two-dimensional supports, Lissitzky wanted the surface of a work to be like a construction that can be seen from all sides. The Prouns offer rotating perspectives in which the spatial limitations of the paper have been overcome. --- RELATED WORKS --- CITATIONS --- IMAGES