Das Schwarze Quadrat und die jüdische Kunst: Chagall, Lisickij und Malevič in Vitebsk
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Sabine Koller
Abstract: Between 1917 and 1922, Vitebsk became a center of Jewish-Russian avantgarde painting. Thanks to Marc Chagall, who directed the Vitebsk Art School, leading avant-garde figures moved to Vitebsk, among them El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. This paper explores the influence of Malevich’s Suprematism on Lissitzky and Chagall. For a period of time, both artists were attracted to Suprematism. Using irony, Chagall subverted it, while Lissitzky faithfully followed Malevich’s worldview and artistic credo. Like many other Jewish students at Chagall’s Art School, Lissitzky felt extremely attracted to the messianic implications of Malevich and his art. Suprematism was perceived as an artistic system where Jewish thinking and Malevich’s redemptory vision merged. Nevertheless, in the mid-1920s Lissitzky abandoned his Jewishness and Suprematist fervor in favor of the Soviet utopia. After his Vitebsk commitment to the Socialist cause, Chagall, repelled by the suprematist doctrine, returned to Jewish themes and Yiddish texts.
© De Gruyter 2014
Articles in the same Issue
- 10.1515/asch-2014-frontmatter2
- Vorwort
- Das Schwarze Quadrat und die jüdische Kunst: Chagall, Lisickij und Malevič in Vitebsk
- The Yiddish »Children’s Republic« of Malakhovka. A Revolutionary Experiment in Education
- Referenz, Inter-Referenz, Interferenz: Jiddisch bei Babel
- The Stalin Constitution on Trial in the Yiddish Daily Newspaper Forverts, 1936–1937
- Positivist Romanticism on the Soviet Jewish Stage: Moyshe Goldblat ’s New Yiddish Theatre (1937–1938)
- In Search of a Soviet Yiddishland: The Poetics of Absence in Shmuel Gordon ’s Travelogue
- Moritz Goldsteins ›Deutsch-jüdischer Parnaß‹: Politische Kampfschrift und unpolitisches Bekenntnis
- Gertrud und Margarete Zuelzer
Articles in the same Issue
- 10.1515/asch-2014-frontmatter2
- Vorwort
- Das Schwarze Quadrat und die jüdische Kunst: Chagall, Lisickij und Malevič in Vitebsk
- The Yiddish »Children’s Republic« of Malakhovka. A Revolutionary Experiment in Education
- Referenz, Inter-Referenz, Interferenz: Jiddisch bei Babel
- The Stalin Constitution on Trial in the Yiddish Daily Newspaper Forverts, 1936–1937
- Positivist Romanticism on the Soviet Jewish Stage: Moyshe Goldblat ’s New Yiddish Theatre (1937–1938)
- In Search of a Soviet Yiddishland: The Poetics of Absence in Shmuel Gordon ’s Travelogue
- Moritz Goldsteins ›Deutsch-jüdischer Parnaß‹: Politische Kampfschrift und unpolitisches Bekenntnis
- Gertrud und Margarete Zuelzer
