El Lissitzky and the Biocentric Project “1=1”

This article retraces the sources that influenced the ideas that Russian artist El Lissitzky held about the encounter between human beings and nature during his stay in Europe in the early 1920s. Notes and private correspondence held in the Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute detail an interest in Austro-Hungarian biologist Raoul Heinrich Francé’s concepts from Die Pflanze als Erfinder (1920; Plants as Inventors, 1923) and Bios: Die Gesetze der Welt (1921; Bios: The laws of the world), along with other new sources that relate to the philosophical debate around Albert Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity. A close reading of these sources and Lissitzky’s interest in them enables a reconsideration of what Oliver A. I. Botar describes as Lissitzky’s “biocentric turn” and the artist’s closely connected book project “1=1.”