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El Lissitzky was one of the leading figures of the Russian avant garde before the dawn of Socialist Realism and was one of the most multi talented and cosmopolitan artists of Revolutionary Russia. Lissitzky had studied engineering and architecture in Germany and was the figure who bridged the two movements of Suprematism and Constructivism in Russia as well as linking these and the other European avant garde movements.
Lissitzky came to abstract art through the influence of Malevich's Suprematist ideas although he soon abandoned them as he considered them excessively mystical. His enthusiasm for combining painting and architecture led him to create his first Proun works around 1919, an invention which was to be his most important contribution to the history of art. The word "Proun," which has no apparent meaning, refers to the initials in Russian for "Project for the Affirmation of the New," which the artist defined as "a stage on the route to the construction of a new configuration (Gestaltung) which arises from a land abandoned by the corpses of its paintings and of its artists."
Prouns are geometrical compositions with pronounced spatial and architectural effects in which all traditional perspectival rules have been abandoned. The forms are delineated with a ruler and compass which creates a drawing of sober geometry, however each one of the compositional elements is depicted from different angles of vision, creating an extremely dynamic spatial play dominated by asymmetry. Ideas of balance and gravity are replaced by a new weightlessness and lack of scale. As the artist himself explained in one of his theoretical texts: "Proun was no longer a painting, but became rather a building which had to be seen (by moving around its outside) from all angles."
Proun Ic in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, was one of the first compositions in the series. Bowlt and Misler (1993) published a photograph of the artist in his studio in Vitebsk in 1919 in which the present painting appears, hung next to other Proun works, proving that it was painted in the small city of Vitebsk where Lissitzky worked in the People's Art School in close collaboration with Malevich. The numbering given to the various Proun works corresponds to the serial numbers which appear in the artist's inventories while the letters may refer to possible owners; in this case the "c" refers to its original Moscow owner Costakis.
Lissitzky also undertook important work as an architect and a graphic designer, constantly spurred on by his desire to integrate art into society. His aggressive iconoclasm led him to become one of the pioneers in the search for a new language which could be used in a new era, a collective and neutral language which would break with all earlier ones and which would be understood by people of all classes of society. This willingness to start from zero using a new art form built from "the corpses of paintings and of their artists" was shared by all the Russian avant garde artists at that time and is a mood which is also found in the work of the Revolutionary poets such as Mayakovsky:
"Onward!
Let the missiles of time
explode behind.
And may the wind carry back
to the past only
The tresses of long hair."
Paloma Alarcó
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