Andrei Nakov – Forms in Dissolution / Kazimir Malevich, Carré rouge / El Lissitzky, Proun

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Hannover for the Kestnergesellschaft, of which he was cashier, he created
a second Proun portfolio in 1923. Composed of six compositions, this
Kestnermappe was much more elegant and lavish than the 1920 series,
but had not quite the visionary force of the first set. The Proun
compositions created during this era contributed greatly to Lissitzky’s
international reputation and were, so to say, Suprematism’s spearhead
beyond the Russian border. They were greatly appreciated by the German
architects and first collectors of non-objective Russian art, such as
Katherine Dreier in the United States. In her role as director of the Société
Anonyme, Dreier would present to the American public (at the Brooklyn
Museum) Lissitzky’s Proun series in 1926.
In 1923, Lissitzky created a Proun space in three dimensions at the
Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung which was an immediate success. In
1925, the Kühl & Kühn gallery in Dresden presented an important
Lissitzky exhibition where the Prouns were up front. We can safely say
that this exhibition was the trigger for the only neo-plastic space planned
by Piet Mondrian, an almost mythical installation today that was created
one year later (1926) in the same city of Dresden for a private collector.
It was destroyed during the tragic 1945 bombardments.
In 1927, Lissitzky received from Alexander Dorner, the audacious
custodian of Landesmuseum Hannover, the commission to create an
abstract interior, a museum installation destined to present solely abstract
art and which referred manifestly to the Berlin Prounenraum of 1923.
Called Cabinet des Abstraits, this installation, destroyed by the Nazis and
reconstructed today at the same place, is one of the truly unavoidable
witnesses to the inscription of abstract art within European society of
the twentieth century.
Being a protean creator and of great emotional, thus existential, fragility,
Lissitzky would dedicate a good deal of his strength to the field of architectural
prospective all through the 1920s up to the beginning of the 1930s.
Owing to his German contacts (the Hannover Kestnergesellschaft), the
first and only foreign Malevich retrospective would see the light of day—an
event organized in 1927 by the Kartell der Vereinigten Verbände