Figurines: The Three-Dimensional Design of the Electro-Mechanical Show “Victory over the Sun"

Artist: El Lissitzky (Russian, active Germany, 1890–1941)

1920–21, published 1923

Prints and Drawings

By appointment, Duffy Study Room

El Lissitzky’s lithographic portfolio Victory over the Sun, like Jean (Hans) Arp’s 7 Arpaden (1953.6.137a–i), was executed on a visit to Kurt Schwitters’s house in Hanover, Germany, in 1923. Lissitzky based the prints on drawings he had made after a 1920 performance of the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, originally staged in Saint Petersburg in 1913 with set designs by Kazimir Malevich. As Lissitzky explained in the introductory essay, the portfolio serves as a blueprint for a musical "electro-mechanical spectacle": the first sheet, titled The Machinery, shows a dynamic, multilevel outdoor stage; the remaining sheets have designs for puppets of nine characters in the opera. A single operator would control the whole mechanism, giving the puppets full animation, or "every possibility of movement."

Medium

Lithograph

Dimensions

sheet (each approx.): 21 1/16 × 17 15/16 in. (53.5 × 45.5 cm)

Credit Line

Gift of the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier

Accession Number

1953.6.229a-l

Geography

Made in Russia

Culture

Russian

Period

20th century

Classification

Prints

Disclaimer

Note: This electronic record was created from historic documentation that does not necessarily reflect the Yale University Art Gallery’s complete or current knowledge about the object. Review and updating of records is ongoing.

Bibliography
  • Ruth L. Bohan et al., The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America, ed. Jennifer Gross, exh. cat. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 2006), 64–65, 178, fig. 21–30
  • Robert L. Herbert, Eleanor S. Apter, and Elise K. Kenney, The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 418, 419, no. 436A-K, fig. 436C, fig. 436H
Object copyright
No Copyright - United States
Additional information

Object/Work type

Subject

Inscriptions

each sheet signed, l.r. in pencil: "El Lissitzky" on 1/2 title page red crayon "70" and signed in pencil l.r. "El Lissitzky"

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