Pro Dva Kvadrata: Suprematicheskii Skaz v 6-ti postroikakh [About Two Sqaures: A Suprematist Tale in Six Constructions].

The best-known and most seminal avant-garde artist's book of the era' (Mansbach). Pro Dva Kvadrata is Lissitzky's groundbreaking book for children about two squares, black and red, that fly to earth from afar. The red square represents modern Soviet order and the black represents the chaos of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Lissitzky, Malevich and Ermolaeva along with other artists at the UNOVIS workshop in Vitebsk included squares in their official table of Suprematist symbols which one could apply to decorating streets and designing posters, books, textile, porcelain, and other objects. A UNOVIS leaflet of 1919 proclaimed, 'Wear the black square as a mark of the world economy. Draw the red square in
your workshops as a mark of the world revolution in the arts.'

Designed two years earlier in Vitebsk but printed in Berlin, A Suprematist Tale unites the cosmic ideas of Suprematism and the Constructivist techniques of book design. Lissitzky compared a book to an architectural structure that should be built with the aid of typographic machinery. The idea of constructing pages, using letter forms, instead of rows of words, and placing them in space with geometric forms originates in this book. This radical approach to book design marked the beginning of a new graphic art and is important not just in the history of the Russian avant-garde but twentieth century art in general.

First edition; 4to (28 x 22.2 cm); text and illustrations printed letterpress in black, grey & red, spotting to a few leaves, more so to the verso of the first leaf, original staples removed leaving some rust, resewn; original printed wrappers, small stains, a very good copy.

Rowell and Wye, 405.