Lissitzky was rejected from the St Petersburg Art Academy in 1909 because of a quota limiting Jewish students. He went to Darmstadt, Germany, to study architecture instead. The detour shaped everything: his Prouns (Project for the Affirmation of the New), begun around 1919, sit between painting and architecture, abstract compositions that suggest three-dimensional space without depicting it.

He was born Lazar Markovich Lissitzky in 1890. After returning to Russia, he worked alongside Malevich at the UNOVIS art school in Vitebsk, where Suprematism and the revolution were supposed to be the same thing. He became one of the most influential graphic designers of the twentieth century, his poster designs, book layouts, and exhibition installations connecting Russian avant-garde art to the Bauhaus and De Stijl in western Europe.

He contracted pulmonary tuberculosis and continued working as a book artist and photomonteur because he could do it lying down. His sister Jenta committed suicide in Vitebsk in 1925 while he was hospitalised in Switzerland. He married Sophie Kuppers, a German woman whose family disapproved of the match; she had to leave her sons behind to move to Moscow. He died in Moscow in 1941, the year Germany invaded Russia.