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Lot Essay
“I considered Proun a transfer station from painting to architecture.”
-El Lissitzky, 1932 (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, folio 3145, inventory 1, document 556, p. 2).
Conceived by El Lissitzky in 1919 and formally articulated the following year, Proun—an acronym for Project for the Affirmation of the New—stands among the most decisive formal inventions of the twentieth-century Avant-Garde. Neither painting nor architecture, neither image nor object, Proun functioned as a transfer point between the pictorial plane and three-dimensional construction: a transitional system through which Lissitzky translated the radical innovations of Suprematism into spatial form.
Emerging from the revolutionary visual language of Kazimir Malevich, Proun retained the geometric rigor of Suprematism while fundamentally transforming its premises. Where Malevich’s compositions aspired toward a boundless metaphysical realm, Lissitzky reintroduced the principles of material construction—weight, balance, gravity, and structural tension—without relinquishing abstraction. Geometric forms no longer drifted in infinite space; they projected, rotated, intersected, and pressed against one another in dynamic equilibrium, establishing a new conception of pictorial space untethered from conventional orientation. Neither top nor bottom, front nor back, remained fixed. The viewer was no longer a passive observer, but an active participant, compelled to navigate the work mentally as an architect might inhabit a structure.
For El Lissitzky, color assumed a new structural function: "color became a barometer of the material," articulating density, force, and spatial relation rather than symbolic meaning. Perspective multiplied, axes dissolved, and the traditional stability of vision gave way to a profoundly modern condition of spatial instability and movement.
Though realized on paper and canvas, Proun was never conceived as an end in itself. It was, rather, a laboratory for architecture: an experimental ground upon which the formal principles of a new world could be tested before finding expression in buildings, exhibition environments, typography, and industrial design. In this, Proun marks a pivotal transformation in the role of the modern artist—from maker of images to constructor of systems, from representation to production.
The present work belongs to the formative moment of this revolutionary undertaking. In August 1920, Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich spent time in Orenburg, residing at the suburban kumis sanatorium Tevkelevo, where Lissitzky worked intensively on a sequence of Proun studies. The present Preliminary Study for Proun 2D bears the artist’s inscription 'Orenburg–Tevkelevo', locating it precisely within this critical period of experimentation and formal refinement.
Shortly thereafter, in late summer and early autumn of 1920, Lissitzky produced in Vitebsk his celebrated portfolio of eleven Proun lithographs, abandoning descriptive titles in favor of alphanumeric designations - among them Proun 2D. These lithographs codified his most significant painted compositions and brought to culmination the first phase of Proun’s formal and theoretical development. A lithographic version of Proun 2D from this portfolio is today held in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
By 1924, Lissitzky regarded the Proun experiment as complete: it had fulfilled its historical function as the necessary passage from painting into architecture. Yet its significance extends far beyond that transition. Proun remains one of modernism’s most radical conceptual achievements - an audacious dismantling of the boundaries between image, object, and built form, and a decisive redefinition of art itself.
Both the present work Preliminary Study for "Proun 2 D" and Study for Proun (lot 146) were acquired from El Lissitzky’s widow, Sophie Küppers-Lissitzky, by Ella Winter, the Australian-born British-American journalist and collector. Winter’s archive at Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library preserves correspondence with Sophie Küppers-Lissitzky, alongside her manuscript Abstract Art in Russia, in which she recounts her search for Lissitzky’s works in Soviet Russia. Returning to Moscow in 1944 as a war correspondent, Winter traced the artist’s widow and acquired a group of works from her, famously exchanging nylon stockings through the Soviet cultural agency VOKS. Winter later exhibited these studies, together with other works by El Lissitzky, in her landmark collection at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1961-1962, where both Proun studies were included and can be identified in archival installation photographs of the exhibition. A portfolio of lithographs for Victory over the Sun, also from the Winter collection and now held by Tate, further underscores her important role in preserving Lissitzky’s legacy beyond the Soviet Union.
-El Lissitzky, 1932 (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, folio 3145, inventory 1, document 556, p. 2).
Conceived by El Lissitzky in 1919 and formally articulated the following year, Proun—an acronym for Project for the Affirmation of the New—stands among the most decisive formal inventions of the twentieth-century Avant-Garde. Neither painting nor architecture, neither image nor object, Proun functioned as a transfer point between the pictorial plane and three-dimensional construction: a transitional system through which Lissitzky translated the radical innovations of Suprematism into spatial form.
Emerging from the revolutionary visual language of Kazimir Malevich, Proun retained the geometric rigor of Suprematism while fundamentally transforming its premises. Where Malevich’s compositions aspired toward a boundless metaphysical realm, Lissitzky reintroduced the principles of material construction—weight, balance, gravity, and structural tension—without relinquishing abstraction. Geometric forms no longer drifted in infinite space; they projected, rotated, intersected, and pressed against one another in dynamic equilibrium, establishing a new conception of pictorial space untethered from conventional orientation. Neither top nor bottom, front nor back, remained fixed. The viewer was no longer a passive observer, but an active participant, compelled to navigate the work mentally as an architect might inhabit a structure.
For El Lissitzky, color assumed a new structural function: "color became a barometer of the material," articulating density, force, and spatial relation rather than symbolic meaning. Perspective multiplied, axes dissolved, and the traditional stability of vision gave way to a profoundly modern condition of spatial instability and movement.
Though realized on paper and canvas, Proun was never conceived as an end in itself. It was, rather, a laboratory for architecture: an experimental ground upon which the formal principles of a new world could be tested before finding expression in buildings, exhibition environments, typography, and industrial design. In this, Proun marks a pivotal transformation in the role of the modern artist—from maker of images to constructor of systems, from representation to production.
The present work belongs to the formative moment of this revolutionary undertaking. In August 1920, Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich spent time in Orenburg, residing at the suburban kumis sanatorium Tevkelevo, where Lissitzky worked intensively on a sequence of Proun studies. The present Preliminary Study for Proun 2D bears the artist’s inscription 'Orenburg–Tevkelevo', locating it precisely within this critical period of experimentation and formal refinement.
Shortly thereafter, in late summer and early autumn of 1920, Lissitzky produced in Vitebsk his celebrated portfolio of eleven Proun lithographs, abandoning descriptive titles in favor of alphanumeric designations - among them Proun 2D. These lithographs codified his most significant painted compositions and brought to culmination the first phase of Proun’s formal and theoretical development. A lithographic version of Proun 2D from this portfolio is today held in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
By 1924, Lissitzky regarded the Proun experiment as complete: it had fulfilled its historical function as the necessary passage from painting into architecture. Yet its significance extends far beyond that transition. Proun remains one of modernism’s most radical conceptual achievements - an audacious dismantling of the boundaries between image, object, and built form, and a decisive redefinition of art itself.
Both the present work Preliminary Study for "Proun 2 D" and Study for Proun (lot 146) were acquired from El Lissitzky’s widow, Sophie Küppers-Lissitzky, by Ella Winter, the Australian-born British-American journalist and collector. Winter’s archive at Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library preserves correspondence with Sophie Küppers-Lissitzky, alongside her manuscript Abstract Art in Russia, in which she recounts her search for Lissitzky’s works in Soviet Russia. Returning to Moscow in 1944 as a war correspondent, Winter traced the artist’s widow and acquired a group of works from her, famously exchanging nylon stockings through the Soviet cultural agency VOKS. Winter later exhibited these studies, together with other works by El Lissitzky, in her landmark collection at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1961-1962, where both Proun studies were included and can be identified in archival installation photographs of the exhibition. A portfolio of lithographs for Victory over the Sun, also from the Winter collection and now held by Tate, further underscores her important role in preserving Lissitzky’s legacy beyond the Soviet Union.