El Lissitzky - Later Years

Later Years

In 1932, Stalin closed down independent artists' unions; former avant-garde artists had to adapt to the new climate or risk being officially criticised or even blacklisted. El Lissitzky retained his reputation as the master of exhibition art and management into late thirties. The terminal disease gradually reduced his physical abilities, and he was becoming more and more dependent on his wife in actual completion of his work.

In 1937, Lissitzky served as the lead decorator for the upcoming All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, reporting to the master planner Vyacheslav Oltarzhevsky but largely independent and highly critical of him. The project was plagued by delays and political interventions. By the end of 1937 the "apparent simplicity" of Lissitzky's artwork aroused the concerns of the political supervisors, and Lissitzky responded: "The simpler the shape, the finer precision and quality of execution required... yet until now are instructed by the foremen (Oltarzhevsky and Korostashevsky), not the authors" (i.e. Vladimir Shchuko, author of the Central Pavillion, and Lissitzky himself). His artwork, as described in 1937 proposals, completely departed from the modernist art of 1920s in favor of socialist realism. The iconic statue of Stalin in front of the central pavillion was proposed by Lissitzky personally: "this will give the square its head and its face" (Russian: Это должно дать площади и голову и лицо).

In June 1938, he was only one of seventeen professionals and managers responsible for the Central Pavilion; in October 1938, he shared the responsibility for its Main Hall decoration with Vladimir Akhmetyev. He simultaneously worked on the decoration of the Soviet pavilion for the 1939 New York World's Fair; the June 1938 commission considered Lissitzky's work along with nineteen other proposals and eventually rejected it.

Lissitzky's work on the USSR im Bau (USSR in construction) magazine took his experimentation and innovation with book design to an extreme. In issue #2 he included multiple fold-out pages, presented in concert with other folded pages that together produced design combinations and a narrative structure that was completely original. Each issue focused on a particular issue of the time – a new dam being built, constitutional reforms, Red Army progress and so on. In 1941, his tuberculosis worsened, but he continued to produce works, one of his last being a propaganda poster for Russia's efforts in World War II, titled "Davaite pobolshe tankov!" (Give us more tanks!) He died on December 30, 1941, in Moscow.