A century after El Lissitzky’s stay in Switzerland, the Museo Villa dei Cedri is dedicating an exhibition to one of the most influential and multifaceted figures of the 20th century. Bruno Monguzzi invited us to collaborate with him on the design of the exhibition and its publication, released simultaneously in Italian, German, and English.
The months El Lissitzky spent in Ticino between 1924 and 1925 were an intense and pivotal period in his career.
With Mart Stam, he founded ABC. Beiträge zum Bauen, the first Swiss magazine about modernist architecture. In the fields of architecture and urban planning, he designed the Lenin Tribune and the Wolkenbügel (horizontal skyscrapers, also known as “cloud-irons”), in photography he produced his celebrated self-portrait The Constructor, and in publishing he edited and designed Nasci (a special issue of Kurt Schwitters’s Merz magazine) and the volume Die Kunstismen 1914–1924, written with Jean Arp.
The exhibition and publication offer a perspective on El Lissitzky through thematic chapters devoted to architecture, typography and graphic design, Lissitzky as artist and theorist, and his relationship with Switzerland. The common thread running through the exhibition is the work of Sophie Lissitzky Kuppers – his silent companion – who was the first to recognise his talent and then contributed to making his work known.