El Lissitzky

17 panels (8 7/8 x 158 in.: 225 x 4100 mm) +1 blank. Signed by both the artist and the author in 5678 (1918) on the first, blank panel. Hand-colored lithographic scroll on paper, laid down on cloth. 20 lines arranged in 17 single and double columns,  text within illustrated borders depicting Jewish life in sixteenth century Prague. Cloth wrapper attached to beginning  of the scroll. Cloth backing fraying; several panels lifting from backing; some cockling. The Hebrew name Shamir written by hand over Russian publisher's imprint on final panel

Ruth Apter-Gabriel, "Tradition and Revolution," The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-garde Art 1912-1928, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1987
Olga Sixtová, Form of the Scroll, Prague: 2006

This scroll is made from pieces of paper which have been illustrated by Lissitzky. The pages have subsequently been adhered to a piece of linen to create the scroll. While the pages are in quite healthy condition and the paper and the painted areas are all healthy, they are becoming delaminated in some areas from the linen. If this work is to be displayed, it will require some attention to re-adhere those areas which are currently unstable. One can either retain the existing support or replace the support with something archivally more correct. Overall however, the condition is respectable, although it does require further examination.
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This copy is number 8, and one of the only approximately twelve scrolls produced, in a deluxe limited edition of 110.

This lot is a rare example of the use of the scroll form used for a text of a secular rather than a religious character.  In 1917, the avant-garde Russian Jewish artist El Lissitzky produced Sichas Chulin  (Small Talk), a poetic Yiddish narration of a legend found "in the chronicles of the Prague Jewish Community." In fact, the text was written by the Russian poet and theatre director Moshe Broderzon and published in Moscow along with Lissitzky's illustrations. The story is located in the Prague ghetto and is illustrated with scenes and figures inspired by the art, architecture and inhabitants of an eastern European shtetl. Within a limited edition of 110 pieces, only a handful (variously estimated at between 12 and 20 copies), were issued in scroll form and hand-colored by the artist. The illustrations are nestled within and around the columns of text, the original of which was penned by a professional sofer (scribe) in the distinctive square Hebrew script used for Torah Scrolls and other sacred books. Lissitzky wanted to merge this familiar and immediately recognizable Hebrew script with his own highly ornamental drawing in order to achieve what he hoped would be a perfect harmony with the content and the style of narration.

El Lissitzky was born Lazar Markovich Lisitskii on November 23, 1890 in Pochinok in the Russian province of Smolensk, and he grew up in Vitebsk. As a Jew, he was refused admission to the Art Academy of St. Petersburg and studied architecture in Darmstadt, Germany.  At the outbreak of the First World War, he returned to Russia and two years later, began to exhibit with the celebrated painter Kazimir Malevich. When Marc Chagall was appointed the director of the school of art in Vitebsk, he invited El Lissitzky to join him as professor of architecture and graphics.

Actively interested in the revival of Jewish art in Russia, Lissitzky aspired to create a Jewish style by merging ideas in Jewish folk art with Western European modern art. His folkloristic images were influenced by the works of Chagall as well as the richly painted interiors of wooden synagogues in the Dneiper River region.  El Lisstzky, together with Issachar Ber Ryback, explored the art and architecture of close to two hundred of these synagogues on an expedition sponsored by the Jewish Ethnological Society in 1916.

In 1921 he was appointed professor at the Moscow Academy but soon left Russia to join other emigre artists who had left Russia for countries more receptive to radical aesthetic ideas. He lived and worked in Germany, France, Holland, and Switzerland, and at one time collaborated with Ilya Ehrenburg in the publication of a constructivist magazine. Lissitzky had however, maintained his links with the Soviet regime, and in 1928 returned to Russia where the government employed him to design pavilions at a number of international exhibitions abroad, as well as the restaurant at the Soviet section of the 1939 New World's Fair. In 1941 El Lissitzky died of tuberculosis at the age of 51.