In September 2009 the Van Abbemuseum launches the
three-year Lissitzky+ project, in which the museum will be casting new
light on its renowned Lissitzky collection. This takes the form of a triptych
of exhibitions, each exploring a particular theme, continuing through 2012.
The first part, Lissitzky+, Victory
over the Sun, opens on 19 September 2009. An entire floor of the museum has
been rearranged for these new presentations. The Van Abbemuseum has invited a
leading authority on the Russian avant-garde Professor John Milner of the
Courtauld Institute, London to curate Lissitzky+.
El (Lazar Markovich) Lissitzky (1890-1941) was an architect, painter, graphic
artist, a designer of furniture, books and posters, a writer, theatre producer
and photographer. He was also an indefatigable traveller, the official cultural
ambassador for the new Soviet Russia, and the prototype of the networking,
ubiquitously active artist.
Victory over the Sun, the futurist opera that received its premiere in
St. Petersburg in 1913, is the focal point of the first exhibition. After the
second staging of this opera in 1920, Lissitzky hatched plans to mechanize the
work and produced drawings and prints of his proposals that are held in the
museum's collection.
The Victory over the Sun exhibition draws extensively on the Van
Abbemuseum's collection and includes major works from other international
museums. This includes works by Malevich from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,
which have not been exhibited for many years. Some of his drawings are to be
shown in the Netherlands for the first time.
The Van Abbemuseum is the first institution ever to have rendered important
designs by Lissitzky as three-dimensional figures, wholly in keeping with
Lissitzky's ideological intentions. Milner about this: 'At one point, Lissitzky
writes "I am not going to do this. You can do this." I started
looking at his work and thinking: 'What is he suggesting? What is the potential
of these things?' When you look at a little lithograph for instance you begin
to see that it is essentially city planning or architecture, so this gave us
the chance to make some models to see what they would look like. We are not
making 'fake Lissitzkys'; but trying to convey the idea that there is a
proposition here, that you can change the world and this is how you can do it.
We're just taking it forward a step.'
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