El Lissitzky

inscription in Cyrillic script in pencil on the reverse, framed, an Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, label on the reverse, 1924

Houk Friedman Gallery, New York

Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1997

Sophie Lissitzky-Kuppers, El Lissitzky: Life-Letters-Texts (New York Graphic Society, 1968), p. 32

El Lissitzky: Experiments in Photography (Houk Friedman Gallery, 1991), pl. 9

Margarita Tupitsyn, El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet: Photography, Design, and Collaboration (Yale University Press, 1999), p. 78

This photograph is on single-weight paper with semi-glossy surface and a very slightly warm tonality. Light age-appropriate silvering can be seen in the print's dark areas. The print is essentially in excellent condition, with only very minor condition issues. When examined very closely in raking light, three faint raised points can be seen in the top portion of the subject's head – these do not break the emulsion. A small area of old retouching can be seen in the upper left corner. A faint crease that does not break the emulsion is present near the print's right edge. None of these issues is immediately apparent, and they do not detract in any way form the overwhelmingly fine appearance of this print.
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This self-portrait by El Lissitzky is the principal component of his famous photomontage, The Constructor.  El Lissitzky was one of the great triumvirate of artist/designer/photographers, along with Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Rodchenko, who championed photography’s primacy in the production of the art of their time.  The three were alert to photography’s ‘plastic’ nature—its ability to achieve a wide array of artistic effects, through creative use of light and novel vantage points, montage, collage, the photogram technique, and in combination with text—and understood its ability to function as a tool for mass communication and for personal expression. 

Lissitzky wrote: ‘The language of photography is not the language of painting, and photography possesses properties not available to painting.  These properties lie in the photographic material itself and it is essential for us to develop them in order to make photography truly into art’ (Sovetskoe foto, May 1929). 

In this portrait, Lissitzky has photographed himself against graph board – tabula rasa for the designer and artist.  He has manipulated the light in such a way as to emphasize the left side of his head and face, and highlight his eye, which gazes intently from the image.  This seemingly straightforward portrait encapsulates the artist’s most basic tools: the mind, the eye, and a surface on which to enact new ideas.   

Lissitzky incorporated this entire self-portrait into The Constructor, in which his eye is merged with a hand holding a draftsman’s compass.  This is one of several instances in which Lissitzky used self-portraiture as a starting point for further exploration.  A self-portrait in which the artist’s head is wrapped with a white bandage is part of another montage from this period.  Lissitzky incorporated another image of himself into the montage entitled I Want a Child, produced for the Sergei Tretyakov play of the same name in the late 1920s.   

As of this writing, it is believed that there is only one other print of this image extant: one in the same format sold by New York dealer Barry Friedman in 2006.

The Cyrillic script on the reverse of the present print, initialed ‘N. K.,’ suggests that the print may have been at one time in the possession of the critic Nikolai Khardzhiev (1903-1991), the great champion of Russian art and a friend to Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, and other major figures in the Suprematist, Constructivist and related movements.  Khardzhiev wrote extensively on Lissitzky, and described him as ‘a new kind of practitioner of the arts—both artist and inventor—who propagated the necessity for the most intensive collaboration between art and technology’ (quoted in El Lissitzky: Life-Letters-Texts, p. 379).