Die Kunstismen Cover
1 / 8

Hans Arp and El Lissitzky (eds.)

Die Kunstismen

1914–1924, Facsimile Edition 1990

This surprising collection of “isms” ranks among the most important publications on avant-garde art in the 1920s. Hans Arp and El Lissitzky took a refreshing, frankly opinionated inventory of artistic attitudes and movements from 1914 to 1924. Lissitzky’s exuberant design of the book epitomizes the style of the times.

This surprising collection of “isms” ranks among the most important publications on avant-garde art in the 1920s. Hans Arp and El Lissitzky took a refreshing, frankly opinionated inventory of artistic attitudes and movements from 1914 to 1924. Lissitzky’s exuberant design of the book epitomizes the style of the times.

"The typography of Die Kunstismen … makes it one of the strongest and most exciting statements of twentieth-century book design."
–  Type & Typography: Highlights from the Matrix (anthology)

"Both ironic and analytic, it is like a (fictitious) exhibition catalogue or tourist guide, a brochure ... introducing an exotic, but closed, finished (artistic) territory to the eager beholder of the time." 
– ARS 47 (2014), no. 2

Originally published: 1925 
Facsimile edition (rare title): 1990
Forthcoming reprint: 2026

Edited by Hans Arp, El Lissitzky

With photographs by El Lissitzky

With a contribution by Alois M. Müller (commentary)

20.5 × 26.5, 8 ¾ × 10 ½ in

60 pages, 75 illustrations

hardback

1990, 978-3-906700-28-1, German
English
French
Design History XX The Century of Print Avant-Garde
CHF 450.00

Hans Arp

HANS PETER WILHELM ARP, also JEAN ARP (1886–1966) was a French-German painter, graphic artist, sculptor and lyricist. Arp moved in the artistic circles of the Constructivists and the Paris Surrealists, co-founding Dadaism in Zurich in 1916 as a literary and artistic movement in response to World War I and against its social conventions. He worked closely with his wife Sophie Taeuber-Arp and at times with other artists.

El Lissitzky

EL LISSITZKY (1890–1941) was a Russian architect and painter, who from 1919/20 onward was involved with Suprematism. Between 1919 and 1927 he produced a large body of paintings, prints and drawings that he referred to by the word Proun, an acronym for “project for the affirmation of the new” in Russian. Lissitzky’s versatile body of work includes poster and theater set design, typography and architecture.

cover

Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Bettina Richter (eds.)

Avant-Garde

CHF 25.00
New
Poster Collection, vol. 38
CHF 450.00