El Lissitzky and the West: Internationalism and Proun.

This is a substantial volume published on the occasion of a major exhibition of early Soviet experimental art from the Costakis Collection at the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, which includes important essays by leading scholars of Soviet art, architecture and design such as Christina Lodder, Martin Hammer, Boris Groys, and Selim Khan-Magomedov. My chapter examines the close links between the development of internationalist and modernist ideas and practices in architecture, art and design in Western Europe and in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. It focuses on the mediating role of the artist, architect and designer El Lissitzky, who lived and worked for some years in the West. I argue that the ‘western constructivism' Lissitzky encouraged – and to a large extent inspired – represents a parallel development , rather than being dependent on (or directly derived from) Soviet Constructivism. This essay is counterpoised by the arguments made in my essay The Whole Bad Taste of Our Period, Josef Frank, Adolf Loos and Gschnas, Home Cultures, 3(3), 2006; which are themselves developed in Re-inventing the Wheel. Speed in slow motion: The London Eye (Millennium Wheel) Visual Culture in Britain, 4(2) 2003, 21-40, ISSN: 1471-4787.