About Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale of Two Squares in Six Constructions
El Lissitzky
1922
- Medium
- Book with letterpress and offset lithography, in black and red, on cream wove paper, stapled along spine
- Dimensions
- 21.7 × 26.8 × 0.5 cm (8 9/16 × 10 9/16 × 1/4 in.)
- Genre
- book
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago
Styles
Tags
avant-gardeprints and drawingpaperbookpaper (fiber product)
About
About Two Squares is a children’s book about a black square and a red square that fly to earth from afar. For Lissitzky they symbolized the superiority of the new Soviet order (the red square) over the old (the black square). The artist’s abstract style was profoundly influenced by Kazimir Malevich's Suprematism, but after 1921 he aligned himself with Russian Constructivist principles and sought to move Suprematism’s abstract language into the service of the new social and political order.
