Page 34 - Studio International - October 1966

for the cover of the international art journal Broom, where He returned to Russia in 1929 and died there on
the letters were so arranged as to give the impression of December 30 1941. During the last twelve years of his
a moving broom. life—for many of which he was very ill—he concentrated
The last booklet Lissitzky designed in Yiddish was com- primarily on arranging exhibitions and designing posters
pleted late in 1922; in this he abandoned representational —he was, for example, responsible for the layout and
expression, and the Yiddish title page is based on the typography of U.S.S.R. in Construction, which appeared in
principle he followed when designing books in Russian. four languages. He also did a series of paintings never
Folk Tales from the Ukraine (Ukrainische Folk Maises) has exhibited and now stacked away in Moscow's Tretyakov
the Hebrew letters constructed in a purely architectural Gallery. (It is worth noting that no Lissitzky exhibition
design and, as in his Russian books, each letter repre- was held in the Soviet Union from 1933 until 1962, when
sents movement. for the first time a number of his typographical works
Before returning to Russia, he also designed a series of were shown.) He is also known to have done illustrations
books dealing with the theatre, in both Russian and for Ehrenburg's The Fall of Paris, though these have
German, being mainly responsible for title pages pre- never been published. To judge from photographs he
senting the theatre as a place whence flow ideas as well returned to a classical, representational style, and there
as acting. The most famous of these designs was for a is no trace of his constructivist style. Otherwise, little is
book by Tairoff, former head of the Moscow Chamber known of his activities during these years. But his repu-
Theatre. The title page conveys immediately that the tation has grown steadily in Europe and America, and
theme is the theatre trying to break from its traditional not least for his use of architectural design in typography
chains. and his development of photo-montage.

Left to right across the double-page spread
(top 1-5, bottom 6-10):

1. Title page of Jewish Passover song and story
Chad Gadya (The Story of a Goat), Kiev, 1919
lithographs, printed in 75 copies
2. And came a cat and ate the goat

3. And came a dog and ate the cat

4. And came a stick and hit the dog
5. And came a fire and burnt the stick
6. And came water and put out the fire

7. And came the ox and drank the water
8. And came the Shochet (the ritual slaughterer)
and killed the ox
9. And came the angel of death and killed the Shochet

10. And came God and killed the angel of death