(LISSITZKY, ELIEZER)

El Lissitzky’s Expressionist and Cubo-Futuristic style drawings here are full of poetic fantasy and playfulness and create a panoramic picture of life in the Jewish Shtetl. He depicts the buildings, the children playing, the busy housewife, the business activities of the men, the birds, the beasts, the Rebbe with his students and especially dramatic, the wild horse which carries Yingl Tsingl out into the big wide-world. Decorated typographic vignettes containing the page numbers depict the Priestly blessing, a goat, a fish, a bird and the cock crowing. Lissitzky incorporates the title letters of the text into his illustrations and in this way creates a symbiosis of text, illustration and even the page numbers. The illustrations merge with the lines or letters of the text to occupy the space of the verse, and the human figures fuse with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Lissitzky experiments with the decorative possibilities of the Hebrew letter is influenced from studies of the inscriptions on the walls of wooden synagogues and medieval illuminated Hebrew manuscripts. This edition duplicates the first (c. 1918), with the exception of the new title page which was presumably designed by Lissitzky during his brief stay in Warsaw in 1921. The new title with sharp angular lines, translates the text and the layout of the original title page into a “Proun” version, based on the expressivity of the Hebrew lettering combined with the dynamics of diagonal thrusts. The change in style and concept is reflective of Lissitzky’s changes in style towards Constructivist geometric abstraction, and gives 1918 as the date for the original drawings. See Israel Museum Catalogue, Tradition and Revolution, no. 104; A Summary Catalogue of Typographical Work by El Lissitzky in Harvard University Art Museums and Busch-Reisinger Museum Lissitzky Exhibition Catalogue (1987) no. 1922/1; and A. Kampf, Jewish Experiance in the Art of the Twentieth Century (1984), pp. 44-6. For an English translation of Mani-Leib’s poem, see Yingl Tsingl Khvat, Translated by Jeffrey Shandler, Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, (New York), n.d