El Lissitzky's first suprematist book is a story about how two squares, one red, one black, transform a world. It is Lissitzky's "scientific romance," an allegory of the fourth dimension and its effect on the three-dimensional world. When it was first published in Berlin in 1922, About 2 Squares presented a radical rethinking of what a book was, demonstrating a new way of organizing typography on a page and relating it to visual images. It marked the beginning of a new graphic art and is among the most important publications in the history of the avant-garde in typography and graphic design.  This facsimile limited edition is reproduced in letterpress with the English translation printed on a transparent overlay to register over the original Russian.  The commentary, More About 2 Squares, boxed in the same slipcase, provides a detailed analysis of this seminal work. Railing provides a brief historical survey of avant-garde poetry in Russia and shows how the letter/ sound was applied by Lissitzky in About 2 Squares as a corollary to the pictorial images - a relationship that forms the basis of abstract or nonobjective language and painting in Russia, and is the theoretical and creative source and device of Lissitzky's graphic design. Railing's is a study both of the philosophical idea of suprematism and the artistic content of Lissitzky's architectural extension of the suprematist painting of Kazimir Malevich, which he called the Proun, and of its particular role as a sequence of images used to create the story About 2 Squares.

About Two Squares and More About Two Squares: In 6 Constructions : A Suprematist Tale

Arts & Photography

LISSITZKY, El

Railing, Patricia

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

For the Voice, first published in 1923, has long been recognized as one of the finest achievements of Russian avant-garde bookmaking, a tradition in which poets and artists collaborated to create books that attained the status of art objects. By any reckoning, For the Voice is a landmark event in the history of modern graphic design. The book was inspired by the "new optics," where ideas are given form through printed letters, turning them into pictorial signs, and by "words that are seen and not heard," as Lissitzky wrote. This three-volume slipcased set consists of a facsimile volume that is faithful to the original in size, color, weight, and paper quality; a translation by Peter France of the original text; and Voices of Revolution, a collection of critical essays that analyze the character and significance of the original publication and describe the inner workings of the poet's "construction in sound" complemented by the designer's "constructions for the eye."

For the Voice (English, Russian and Russian Edition)

Mayakovsky, Vladimir

Book by Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich, Railing, Patricia

Malevich on Suprematism: Six Essays 1915-1926

Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich

Univ of Iowa Office of State

The French Impressionist painters discovered new means for painting light – they used a “solar palette”, the pigments matched to the colours the eyes see. They are the colours of a ray of light. This little book reproduces palettes by several of the plein-air painters, describes the pigments they used, and includes short excerpts by the scientists whose work was the foundation of the new painting – complementary colors, optical mixing, and the pigment-color correspondences. It closes with color swatches of the pigments, provided by the London artists’ colormen, L. Cornelissen &amp; Son. This book will be of interest to art historians, collectors, students, conservators, and museum-goers.

Impressionists' Palettes of Light

Graphic Design

Artists Bookworks

2 Squares/More About 2 Squares (Russian Edition)

A facsimile edition of Kazimir Malevich, SUPREMATISM 34 Drawings, was published in 1990 by Artists Bookworks accompanied by an introduction to the drawings by Patricia Railing; it is now out-of-print. This 2014 reprint of Malevich’s little book contains a new translation from the Russian and a new introductory text by Patricia Railing, “Reading the 34 Drawings”. The Russian text and plates were scanned from an original copy and the size of this little book conforms to the lithographed Russian edition of 1920.

Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism: 34 Drawings (1920)

From Science to Systems of Art

Collection of 30 texts, 1915-1928, &amp; 3 facsimiles, some in first English translation, plus Nina Kogan on Cubism and Ilya Chashnik on Suprematism. Chronological sections trace Malevich’s analyses of Cubism and Futurism, the Supremus Society of Artists, Suprematism Triumphant, UNOVIS, Theory of Creativity as Artistic Culture, and the Non-Objective World of Sensations. A presentation of sensations from Cézanne to Suprematism is followed by a discussion of how consciousness and the environment influence artistic creativity in P. Railing, Malevich on Creativity.

Malevich Writes: A Theory of Creativity Cubism to Suprematism

Individual Artists

A collection of 16 essays on the artist’s painting and works for the theatre between 1910 and 1924. The essays explore the colour theories that gave rise to her abstract painting and the basic laws of structure that gave order to her Cubist, Simultaneist, Non-Objective painting and her stage and costume design. Contemporary accounts of her three plays, Famira Kifared, Salome, and Romeo and Juliet are included together with extracts from Alexander Tairov’s, Notes of a Director (1921). The book closes with a detailed and illustrated Chronology of Exter’s exhibitions and paintings.

Alexandra Exter Paints

This is the first study to investigate the sources of the creative processes in the painting of Kazimir Malevich, from Neo-Primitivism to Suprematism, 1911-1920. These sources are found in 19th century scientific investigations into optics, especially those of Hermann von Helmholtz, the artist adapting the laws of optical light and colour and the laws of optical structures of seeing in space and in depth to his painting. Malevich’s creative processes culminated in his non-objective canvases, Suprematism, between 1915 and 1920, the painting of pure seeing.

Malevich Paints: The Seeing Eye

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Books by Railing, Patricia