El Lissitzky, Cover, 1919 by Atelier Liesjes

About "El Lissitzky, Cover, 1919"

by Atelier Liesjes

About the artwork

The Had Gadya, a charming ten verse Aramaic song based on a German ballad, is sung at the end of the Passover seder. This song has been interpreted in various ways, both textually and visually. The verses describe a young goat, recently purchased by a father (made personal to each individual singer by the pronoun "my" father).

Generally considered an allegory for the oppression and persecution of the Jewish people, the various villains in Jewish history have been compared to aggressor nations. But God's triumph leaves hope for Jewish survival. The poem was often illustrated as part of the Haggadah - the text for the seder ritual - a work that was an illustrator's favorite in its own right for its narrative simplicity and popular appeal.

El Lissitzky uses an architectural framework with imaginatively designed, human-influenced, modernist Hebrew typography as the boundary for each narrative sequence. The effect is a step in the development toward his classical, architecturally based abstraction. This culminates in El Lissitzky's remarkable artistic invention, which he referred to by the acronym PROUN (from the Russian words for "project for the affirmation of the new").

El Lissitzky, actually Lazar Markovich Lisitsky (Potshinok, Russia, November 22 or 23, 1890 - Moscow, December 30, 1941), was a Russian Jewish artist, painter, graphic artist, architect, typographer, and photographer.

Lissitzky was one of the leading artists in the