Lissitzky Prouns

El Lissitzky was a Russian artist who, from 1919 to 1925, created pieces of artwork that he called prouns. But after 1925, Lissitzky switched from creating prouns, the L2 stage, to creating heavily Stalinist and propagandistic works, the L3 stage. This abrupt switch seems like a great disparity from Lissitzky’s earlier works, but Yve-Alain Bois, an art historian, claims that this switch is not as unanticipated as it seems.
Prouns, though never explicitly defined, exist somewhere in the realm between paintings and architectural blueprints. Lissitzky wanted his prouns to break away from the illusionism that existed in the art of the bourgeois, so he played with axonometry, which displays three-dimensional objects that exist neither in a foreground nor background, and do not have receding lines, so parallel lines would, in theory, run parallel forever. This puts the viewer’s sole focus on the objects themselves, rather than where the objects are going. And through this, prouns cast off the notion that there is a right and a wrong way to view a piece of work. Lissitzky’s prouns can and are encouraged to be displayed horizontally as well as vertically, and should be viewed from any and all angles.
Prouns, at first, may seem confusing, but Lissitzky wants the viewer to be confused. He believed that …show more content…
He was trying to rally them, give them a new hope, but Lissitzky, and Suprematist artists like him, were ultimately unsuccessful because their art didn’t appeal to the masses. Art wouldn’t change the dismal lives of the proletariat, and they were not educated enough to recognize Lissitzky’s ideology and theory that he could jolt the viewer into a new state of consciousness. It was naive of Lissitzky to assume that the uneducated masses wanted to solve a riddle or have an inner philosophical debate over the meaning of a piece of