Sichas Chulin (Small Talk), Illustrated by Eliezer (El) Lissitzky, Text by Moses Broderzon, Moscow: Nashe Iskkusstvo [Shamir?], 1917

17 pages (9 x 11 in.; 230 x 279 mm). NUMBER 88, IN A DELUXE LIMITED EDITION OF 110. Unbound. Title page hand colored. Text within illustrated borders, depicting Jewish life in 16th century Prague. Arranged in eight bifolia, one separated, and a single final page; each page with two sewing holes at gutter; loss to corner of final page not affecting text or image. Housed in a modern preservation quality portfolio.

Received from the artist by Boris Aronson, the celebrated Russian-American stage designer. Aronson met El Lissitsky when both were actively involved in the Culture League, a movement of Jewish artists, founded in Kiev by Lissitsky and Issachar Ber Ryback after the 1917 revolution. By descent to present owner.

Ruth Apter-Gabriel, "Tradition and Revolution," The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-garde Art 1912-1928, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1987

BASED ON A SIXTEENTH CENTURY JEWISH LEGEND FROM PRAGUE

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. 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.