El Lissitzky on Paper

""Johnson's El Lissitzky on Paper delimits Lissitzky's activity mostly to paperwork. . . . Johnson opts for a poetic mode of narration. His book unfolds through a series of suggestive juxtapositions, presented diachronically. Each chapter offers a sequence of descriptive vignettes, arranged in such a way as to generate dialogue between them. For instance, Johnson's parallel discussion of Lissitzky's exhibition showrooms and typographic designs for printed media implicitly suggests that the artist's three-dimensional projects utilized the skills that were developed initially in his two-dimensional experiments. . . . A global artist in Stalin's isolationist times, he managed to remain both avant-garde architect and skillful propagandist, always proving his readiness to pivot."" * Times Literary Supplement * ""This book is a profound investigation of how Lissitzky’s thought transformed the disciplines in which he worked, pushing not only the borders between them but also their very ideological and epistemological grounds. Both specialists and general scholars of early twentieth-century art will appreciate this thorough and original presentation of the Lissitzky’s universe."" * H-Net Reviews * “El Lissitzky on Paper presents a significant contribution to the scholarship on Lissitzky, Constructivism, and Soviet art and architecture. Among its strengths are the book’s deep archival research and presentations—often for the first time—of material pertaining to Lissitzky’s career. Introducing reams of new material and fresh analyses, Johnson works to revise the long-held narrative on the relationship between pragmatism and utopianism in the historical avant-garde.” -- Noam Elcott, author of ""Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media"" “Johnson offers an original approach to the much-studied oeuvre of the artist El Lissitzky, considering his work in printing together with his work in architecture, rather than as separate areas of endeavor. Johnson’s careful, embedded analysis of Lissitzky’s practice throws down the gauntlet to previous scholarship that has fretted over a false division between Lissitzky’s early modernism and later ‘Stalinism.’ The result is a new understanding of the artist as both a communist and a modernist artist, effectively reframing both of those limiting terms. I believe it will become standard in the field.” -- Christina Kiaer, author of ""Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism""