Bidspirit auction | El Lissitzky

El Lissitzky - 1890 - 1941. Eiffel Tower, 1928, Original negative, 6.1x10 cm. Attached is a document transferring the copyright in this negative to the buyer. Provenance: Jen Lissitzky Archive, the artist’s son. One of the rare negatives of the Eiffel Tower taken by El Lissitzky and preserved in Jen Lissitzky's archive. The composition of the image is based on the artistic concept of Proun. Proun is a project of affirmation of the new, a neologism coined by El Lissitzky to denote a new artistic system that combines the idea of the geometric plane with the laws of constructive formation of volumetric form. This is very different from classical architectural photography, which was a documentary, often coldly detached representation of the reality that photographers of the time captured. El Lissitzky's photographs are dynamic constructions that float in space with no bottom or top, combining the effect of transparency and the interpenetration of volumetric and flat figures, a clear correspondence with Proun's philosophy, ”The conquest of space through form”. 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, essayist, journalist, war correspondent, translator, social activist 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