Proun 5 A

Lissitzky coined the term Proun, an acronym from the Russian for 'Project for the Affirmation of the New', in 1919, the same year this work was made, as he took up a teaching post at the Vitebsk People's Art School under Kazimir Malevich. Immersed in Suprematism but already pulling away from its purely painterly concerns, Lissitzky began developing the Prouns as a bridge between painting and architecture, between the flat canvas and the built environment. Proun 5 A belongs to the earliest and most formally inventive phase of this project, produced at the precise moment when Lissitzky was theorizing that the artist could become an engineer of visual space. The series as a whole was exhibited across Europe throughout the early 1920s, including landmark presentations at the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung in Berlin in 1922, introducing Western audiences to the radical spatial thinking of the Soviet avant-garde. Within art history, the Prouns occupy a rare position: works that are simultaneously manifesto, architectural drawing, and autonomous composition, making them central documents of both Constructivism and early modernism in Europe.