"We consider the triumph of art to be not in the emotional or the psychological spheres, but rather in the constructive"

El Lissitzky shifts the measure of artistic success from private feeling to public making. What matters is not the cultivation of emotion or the probing of psychology, but the capacity of art to build: to organize space, materials, and visual language into structures that function, propagate ideas, and shape collective life. “Constructive” here is both a method and an ethic. It implies analysis, precision, modularity, and reproducibility; it privileges clarity over sentiment and system over subjectivity.

This stance arises from the revolutionary project of the Russian avant-garde, where art was tasked with helping to engineer a new social order. Lissitzky’s Proun works, “Projects for the Affirmation of the New”, illustrate the shift from easel painting toward architecture and design. They operate as spatial studies, prototypes for how form can be organized to direct perception and movement. The goal is not to mirror an inner state but to model new realities, to prefigure environments where modern life can unfold.

Typography and book design become exemplary fields for this constructive ideal. Letters become planes and vectors; the page becomes a site of engineering. Legibility is treated as an ethical imperative, and layout as a choreography of attention. The book becomes a machine for seeing, distributing knowledge efficiently and persuasively, with photomontage and geometry as tools aligned to industrial means of production.

By dismissing emotional and psychological primacy, Lissitzky does not deny feeling altogether; he subordinates it to purpose. Affect should emerge from the integrity of structure, from the economy of means, from the encounter with lucid organization. The triumph he seeks is transformative effectiveness, the ability of art to coordinate human activity, encode rational principles, and enable new forms of social coordination. Art succeeds when it becomes a laboratory and a prototype, when it fuses aesthetics with engineering, and when its beauty is inseparable from its capacity to construct the world we inhabit.