Stylogeny combining Kultur-Lige × Suprematism

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Style combination · Pairs well

Kultur-Lige × Suprematism

Lissitzky moved from one to the other in 1919, giving Had Gadya a Suprematist inner jacket; set a folk figure and a drawn verse against a few floating planes to keep a story inside an abstract page.

From the research on Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design

Mix them and make something Kultur-Lige Suprematism

RiseKultur-Lige × Suprematism1917 · 1915
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Kultur-Lige, their arrangement from Suprematism, the finish from Kultur-Lige. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design Suprematism

Type from Kultur-Lige
Colour from Suprematism
Form from Kultur-Lige

Suprematism avoids stylised figuration: this is where the two pull against each other.

Composition from Suprematism
Surface from Kultur-Lige

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The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Kultur-Lige

Rise

Archivo Black; Kultur-Lige used The scribe's square Hebrew script (ktav ashuri), written by a sofer for Sikhes khulin (1917), whose 'wonderful' style Lissitzky set out to match in his illustrations and Lissitzky's hand-drawn Yiddish verses lithographed into each picture of Had Gadya (1919), the refrain running along the margins and closing in a circle at the foot

Text · Suprematism

Kazimir Malevich's non-objective art, unveiled with the Black Square at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd in 1915, reduced painting to pure geometric planes floating in white, infinite space. Through the UNOVIS collective in Vitebsk and El Lissitzky's books it became a graphic language of squares, bars and circles tilted on dynamic diagonals, the seedbed of Constructivist layout.

Hanken Grotesk; Suprematism used Russian grotesques (rubleny shrift) as set by Lissitzky and Hand-drawn lithographic lettering of UNOVIS publications

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The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Suprematism, with a counter-accent from Kultur-Lige. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design Suprematism

  • #f4f1e8 ground · 36%
  • #121212 ink · 14%
  • #e9b824 accent · 18%
  • #cf2a27 accent · 14%
  • #2a4d8f accent · 10%
  • #3f7d4e accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f4f1e8;
  --ink: #121212;
  --accent-1: #e9b824;
  --accent-2: #cf2a27;
  --accent-3: #2a4d8f;
  --accent-4: #3f7d4e;
  --font-display: "Archivo Black", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Hanken Grotesk", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design: These books quote sacred forms: Hebrew letters, the divine name (written in Had Gadya), scroll formats and scribal square script, synagogue art and tombstone inscriptions. Do not use the letters as decorative glyphs or mirror them; have any Yiddish or Hebrew written and checked by a fluent reader, and keep divine names and scroll and tombstone forms off throwaway or commercial items. The movement was secular and Yiddishist, a modern Jewish culture in Yiddish backed by Jewish socialist parties, Folkists and left-wing Zionists, not the Hebrew, Zionist art of Bezalel and not religious art, so do not present it as a generic 'Jewish look', and do not reduce its folk figures to stereotyped shtetl types. Many of its people were persecuted: Ryback's father was killed in the pogroms, and Hofshteyn, Markish, Bergelson and Kvitko were executed in Moscow on 12 August 1952. Chagall (d. 1985) and Chaikov (d. 1979) are still in copyright: draw your own letters and figures rather than reproducing their pages.

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The two styles

Three angular, stylized figures stride forward carrying books, with the foremost figure raising a red book toward a radiant yellow sun. Large red Hebrew-script lettering tops a colorful landscape of buildings, winding paths, flowers, a fruit tree with a bird, and a leaping goat. 1917–1924 · Eastern Europe, Central Europe Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design The Yiddish modernist book of the Kultur-Lige, the secular Jewish culture league founded in Kyiv in 1918, and its circle: El Lissitzky, Issachar Ber Ryback, Iosif Chaikov, Boris Aronson and others, who sought a new Jewish art in the shtetl synagogues and tombstones they had recorded and in Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism. In children's books and poetry, hand-drawn Hebrew-alphabet letters are built into faceted folk pictures in flat lithographic colour or black line. An off-white cover features a large red circle crossed by a thick diagonal black bar, with a red square, blue triangle, yellow bar, and small green circle. The black uppercase word “DRIFT” angles upward across the upper portion. 1915–1925 · Eastern Europe Suprematism Kazimir Malevich's non-objective art, unveiled with the Black Square at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd in 1915, reduced painting to pure geometric planes floating in white, infinite space. Through the UNOVIS collective in Vitebsk and El Lissitzky's books it became a graphic language of squares, bars and circles tilted on dynamic diagonals, the seedbed of Constructivist layout.

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More combinations

With Kultur-Lige

With Suprematism

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