He was an important figure of the Russian avant-garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the Soviet Union.

[10][d] Lissitzky spent his childhood and youth near the Pale of Settlement; art historian Nancy Perloff noted that it influenced him because of "a powerful Jewish solidarity, the community-wide response to the knowledge that Jews would never be considered true Russians".

The master of this work, Segal, says in his inscription, full of the most noble enthusiasm: "Long already have I wandered through the world of the living..."Lissitzky's first book design was Moishe Broderzon's 1917 Sikhes khulin: Eyne fun di geshikhten (An Everyday Conversation: A Story, also called The Legend of Prague), created in a form of a Torah scroll.

[11] Visual representations of the hand of God would recur in numerous pieces throughout his entire career, most notably with his 1924 self-portrait The Constructor,[26] but also in 1922 illustration for Shifs-Karta, and 1927 VKhUTEMAS book cover.

[32] In April 1919 a decree issued by the new Soviet state (by Joseph Stalin with support of Yevsektsiya leader Samuil Agurskii), "abolished the elected local communal units of Jewish life, the kehillas in the Ukraine".

"[36] Jewish themes and symbols sometimes appeared in his later works: scholars found connections between his photomontage called The Constructor and Kabbalah,[37] his Figurinnenmappe (Traveler All Over the Time) was linked to Ahasver, "the everlasting Jew",[38] Hebrew letters were used in a number of Prouns and book covers he made, such as an illustration for Ilya Ehrenburg's story Shifs-Karta (Yiddish: שיפֿס קאַרטע; Passenger Ticket).

[43] According to Forgács, "Suprematism ... as Lissitzky saw it, straddled loyalty to the communist Soviet state and the desire to not betray Jewish culture: its vision of the future was distant and universal, projected far ahead into the cosmos ..."[45] In May 1919 Lissitzky returned to Vitebsk when Marc Chagall invited him to teach graphic arts, printing, and architecture at the newly formed People's Art School – a school that Chagall created after being appointed Commissioner of Artistic Affairs for Vitebsk in 1918.

Lissitzky was engaged in designing and printing propaganda posters and illustrations for a local Vitebsk newspaper; later, he never mentioned his works of this period, probably because he portrayed Leon Trotsky and other early revolutionaries, who later became enemies of the Soviet state.

"[52] On 17 January 1920, Malevich and Lissitzky co-founded short-lived Molposnovis group (Russian: МОЛодые ПОСледователи НОВого Искусства, Young followers of a new art), a proto-suprematist association of artists.

[55] Under the leadership of Malevich UNOVIS worked on a "suprematist ballet", choreographed by Nina Kogan and on the remake of a 1913 futurist opera Victory Over the Sun by Mikhail Matyushin and Aleksei Kruchenykh.

[66] Art historian Maria Elena Versari connected Lissitzky's poster with Italian Futurism manifesto Futurist Synthesis of War, published in 20,000 copies in 1914, and signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Ugo Piatti.

[71] Post-war Berlin was a cultural center, with an enormous number of Russian émigrés, estimated between 300,000 and 560,000 in 1920–1921, with Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Blok, Aleksey Tolstoy, Ilya Ehrenburg, Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Biely, Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Ivan Puni, Ksenia Boguslavskaya, Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, Vasily Kandinsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lily and Osip Brik, and Sergei Esenin among them.

Besides Russians, articles by Blaise Cendrars, Le Corbusier, van Doesburg, Viking Eggeling, Carl Einstein, Fernand Léger, Lajos Kassák, and Ljubomir Micić were published in the first issue.

[80] In 1919–1920, Lissitzky proceeded to develop a suprematist style of his own, a series of abstract, geometric paintings which he called Proun (pronounced "pro-oon", "UNOVIS Project", Russian: ПРОект УНовиса).

[89][n] Art historian Alan C. Birnholz noted that "the Proun compositions gradually turned away from color, displayed a growing sense of clarity and economy, and/or tended to diffuse the areas of tension in the formal interrelationship over the entire picture surface."

[108] Nisbet notes that the idea behind the Vitruvian Man—"evocation of an ideal, transformed humanity"—is close to Lissitzky's vision of "utopian renewal of the world", and so the connection of two works is plausible.

He sees the book as a reference for a real history through anstract figures, and writes that "precisely because the scenario of this "story" is known in advance – a characteristic of the epic genre, where the emphasis on the codes is enhanced by a previous knowledge of the depicted facts – that Lissitzky is able to graft his ideological work onto the fundamentally abstract level of his semiological investigation".

[120] Klaus Pollmeier wrote that "He seems to have visualized many aspects of the final image before the exposure of the negative in the camera, compensating for the shortcomings of his limited technology with a sharp and almost boundless imagination.

[126] Rosalind Krauss compares Lissitzky's work with that of Herbert Bayer's (1937), and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's to "establish the hand as an indexical signifier of 'new vision' in early 20th century photographs".

[37] Kamczycki concludes, that The motif of an incomplete circle containing a wedge in its outline, present in Lissitzky's art, is an illustrative, kabbalistic, cosmogonic metaphor for the process of creating the world through the act of "breaking up" or "cutting through".

[144][63] It presented the works of Piet Mondrian, László Moholy-Nagy, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Mies van der Rohe, Kurt Schwitters, Alexander Archipenko, and others.

... As for Russia, we have to recognise the grandeur in the exhibition of social conditions, with truly mechanised equipment, conveyor belts forming large, Cubist-style zigzags, unnerving with the great steps they take in the name of progress, which are presented in a bold, brash manner, always in a dazzling red.

"[164][163] In 1937, Lissitzky served as the lead decorator for the upcoming All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (Vsesoyuznaya Selskokhozyaistvennaya Vystavka), reporting to the master planner Vyacheslav Oltarzhevsky but largely independent and highly critical of him.

4–5),[167] and "Arctica",[166] "Fifteen Years of the Red Army", "Dneprostroy", "Polar Ship Chelyuskin", "The Korobov Family" (with Isaac Babel as writer), "Kaberdino-Balkaria", "The Soviet Fleet", and "The Far East".

[160] In 1941, Lissitzky's tuberculosis worsened, but he continued to work; one of his last pieces was a propaganda poster for USSR's efforts in World War II, titled "Davaite pobolshe tankov!"

Perloff describes it as "A poignant and enigmatic image [...] the infant Jen is superimposed upon photographs of a smiling female worker, a smoking factory chimney and whistle, and a newspaper celebrating Stalin's First Five-Year Plan".

Despite his thesis that "The words on the printed sheet are learnt in by sight, not by hearing", he dedicated a lot of work designing Mayakovsky's poetry book For the Voice, published in Berlin in the same year.

[187] Nisbet have found multiple allusions to Francé in Lissitzky's works, most notably in August 1924 issue of the journal Merz, published together with Kurt Schwitters, titled Nasci.

[188][193][194] Lissitzky, an architect by education, was one of a small number of avant-garde artists who can understand modern science and mathematics; in his Prouns and articles he was interested in concepts of infinity and relativity.

[70] Lissitzky's works are now exhibited in many major museums, including Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow),[207][208] Vitebsk Center of Contemporary Art,[209] MoMA (New York),[210] Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven),[211] Stedelijk (Amsterdam)[212] and others.