El Lissitzky (1890-1941), Russian painter, sculptor, typographer, and designer who was one of the best-known abstract artists in the West and a pioneer of Russian Constructivism. He was born near Smolensk. He studied engineering in Darmstadt from 1909 to 1914, and architecture in Moscow during World War I. In 1919 he became Professor of Architecture and Graphic Design at the school of art in Vitebsk of which Marc Chagall was head.

Lissitzky's involvement in the Constructivist movement began in 1919, when he met the Russian abstract painter Kasimir Malevich, who four years earlier had launched Suprematism, a highly geometrical style of abstract painting. In the same year, Lissitzky began a series of Constructivist paintings—abstract geometrical compositions which he called Proun (an acronym of “Projects for the Affirmation of the New” in Russian). In 1920 he created The Story of Two Squares, a symbolic narrative in which the protagonists are a red square and a black square, the setting is the earth (a red circle), and the enemy is chaos (a jumble of geometric shapes). Like Lissitzky's political poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1920), The Story of Two Squares was a powerful demonstration that art could be used as a graphic means of communication.

In 1922, after a brief period of teaching at the Moscow state art school, Lissitzky went to Berlin, where, through an exhibition that he organized, he introduced Russian abstract art to a Western audience. While there he met Theo van Doesburg and other members of De Stijl, becoming an influential member of the movement. In 1923, with Gerhard Richter and László Moholy-Nagy, he was one of the founders of the Constructivist group. While in Weimar in 1923 he also met Walter Gropius, and for the Provinzial Museen in Hanover designed a gallery for abstract art. In 1925 he returned to Russia, where he concentrated on typography and industrial design.