"The sun as the expression of old-world energy is torn down from the heavens by modern man, who by virtue of his technological superiority creates his own energy source."

—El Lissitzky

Though trained first as an architect, the avant-garde artist Laar Markovich (El) Lissitzky was immensely drawn to the art of designing books, newspapers and posters, as these allowed him to take full advantage of the possibilities offered by modern printing and photographic techniques. From 1916 to 1920, Lissitzky became a figure in the circle of Russian-Jewish art that included Marc Chagall, illustrating Yiddish children’s books, designing journals and co-founding a publishing house with the goal of advancing Jewish culture in Russia. At the encouragement of Chagall, Lissitzky joined the Vitebsk Art Institute to teach graphic arts, printing and architecture in 1919. Here, he would soon join forces with Kazimir Malevich, abandoning the figurative camp of Chagall to favor Malevich’s suprematism, focusing on the fundamentals of geometry and a limited range of colors as demonstrated in Ansager (Announcer).

Die Plastische Gestaltung der Elektro-Mechanischen Schau 'Sieg über die Sonne' (The Three-Dimensional Design of the Electro-Mechanical Show 'Victory over the Sun') was executed on a 1923 visit to Kurt Schwitters’ house in Hanover, Germany and as a commission for Hanover gallery and publishing house Kestner Gesellschaft. Lissitzky based the portfolio’s prints on drawings he had made after a 1920 performance of the groundbreaking Cubo-Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, originally staged in Saint Petersburg in 1913 with set and costume designs by Kazimir Malevich. In this first example of Futurist theater, the plot imagined a utopian and mechanized future, exemplified by its protagonists’ quest to capture the sun and replace it with a new technological source of light and energy, thus abolishing time and reason. As such, the opera encapsulated much of the avant-garde ethos of pre-war Russia: shocking form, anarchic presentation, and a nihilist message.  

A performance of Victory Over the Sun presented by Fondation Beyeler at Theater Basel, June 17, 2015, as part of Art Basel 2015. 

As Lissitzky explained in its introductory essay, the portfolio serves as a blueprint for a musical "electro-mechanical spectacle" rendition of Victory over the Sun in which a cast of mechanical puppets would play characters like the Announcer; following the opera’s own themes, Lissitzky imaged a new avenue of theater performed by machines, illustrated by transforming Malevich’s Suprematist shapes into figurative constructions. Although his designs were never realized theatrically, the portfolio itself was considerably impactful on his contemporaries, including at the Bauhaus in Weimar where it influenced the production of print portfolios by artist’s like Archipenko, Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy.

As its legacy continues, an impression of Ansager (Announcer) is presently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, in gallery 505 of the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Galleries themed around the notion of ‘Living in the Age of the Machine’. In this context, the print assists in exploring how artists across Europe, Russia, and the United States responded the period of increasing mechanization, industrialization, and awareness of machine’s destructive potential after World War I.