Bidspirit auction | El Lissitzky

El Lissitzky - 1890 - 1941. Eiffel Tower, 1928, Original negative, 6.1x9.9 cm. Attached is a document transferring the copyright in this negative to the buyer. Provenance: Jen Lissitzky Archive, the artist’s son. This unique negative of a fragment of the Eiffel Tower by El Lissitzky shows us how interesting and ahead of his time El Lissitzky was as a photographer and architect. Here we see an unusual photographic angle and the choice of a fragment that no photographer in Paris at the time would have taken of the Eiffel Tower. A further development of the theme of dynamic structures floating in space is the lack of support at the base of the tower. A virtuoso transformation of plane into volume and back again - the texture and multi-dimensionality of asphalt. The effect of transparency and interpenetration of volumetric and planar figures - refraction of shadows, like the refraction of an object in a water environment. A photograph made from this negative was sold at Christies auction house in New York (Christies sale, lot 124, 22.02.2024, provenance Jen Lissitzky). Historical note: El Lissitzky took photographs with the camera of Ilya Ehrenburg, whose family he and his wife Sophie met in Paris in 1928. Ilya Grigorievich Ehrenburg (1891-1967) was a Russian writer of Jewish origin, poet, publicist, journalist, war correspondent, translator, public figure and photographer. He lived in exile from 1908 to 1917 and from 1921 to 1940, and in the USSR from 1940. During the Second World War, Hitler declared him Germany's greatest enemy and his personal enemy. Doron Polak, International Artist Museum