About Two Squares: The Unusual Children’s Literature of El Lissitzky

How would you simultaneously explain the social and astrophysical revolutions of the early twentieth century to a child? If you were El Lissitzky (1890-1941), a Russian artist and co-founder of Suprematism who no doubt required a capacious closet for his many hats (architect, designer, typographer, teacher), the answer would involve two squares and an approach to children’s literature that was itself revolutionary. In the protean post-war period, Lissitzky re-imagined how text and pictures could be used together to tell a story through the bold abstraction of geometry.     

From the description:

“El Lissitzky’s first suprematist book is a story about how two squares, one red, one black, transform a world. It is Lissitzky’s “scientific romance,” an allegory of the fourth dimension and its effect on the three-dimensional world […] It marked the beginning of a new graphic art and is among the most important publications in the history of the avant-garde in typography and graphic design.”

Lissitzky’s book was recently featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s Century of the Child exhibition; in it, the curators noted that “the obtuse poetic terseness and unflinching abstraction, unfamiliar to children’s eyes, didn’t connect with its target audience.”

To better see why children didn’t enjoy the book, an online version is available here — but perhaps they would have preferred the animated version.  

- Alex Tesar

(Source: artandsciencejournal.com)