A completion: El Lissitzky's 66

This is our completion of a set of cards prefigured by El Lissitzky (1890-1941) in a series of collage paintings from the 1920s:

Lissitzky 66 Pack lined up to show pattern

The great Russian Suprematist El Lissitzky was a passionately innovative designer, being the originator of so much that is considered modern in typography, design, and communicative art. Many modern type mannerisms (non-linearity and contradictory form) have their origins in his UNOVIS project.

Very little seems to be known about these 6 sketches for a set of cards that combined painting and the collage of painted flats. They have a stylistic similarity (reusing many of the elements) to his famous lithograph of 1919 "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge", so they may well have been a product of the same hours spent in his studio, and constructed from the same materials.*

Here are the six pictures and the poster for comparison:

Lissitzky's 6 playing card collages and the poster for comparison

Perhaps it is a puzzle that he left for us to solve. If so, we can surmise how to get to a set of 24 cards by filling in the blanks in a matrix.

The design space of his paintings

Interestingly, he had two Diamonds and Spades, representing the ruling classes and the military in the original semiotics of French card suit design, with only 1 each for the peasants and clergy. He also made the traditionally black suits grey (to contrast with the black and white diagonal divide) but the Aces are outlined in a shade midway between them and the black. The Aces themselves occupy the battlefield area of the original design: do they depict the battle, or do they show a victory? Given the times it was composed in (the Russian Civil War), the design would have left nothing to chance. But what exactly his intention was is left as an exercise for the reader.

Following the UNOVIS principles, we can reduce these to their design components and reassemble them to a full set. We have no indication of how a series descending from 8-spot to 2-spot might work, so we can set those aside. The Red Wedge on the 9-spot is larger than the one on the 10-spot, and a similar expansion to 8 would break the design. Perhaps he wanted a 24-card deck: part of his vision of art was its availability and affordability, and these cards are art for the pocket.

We have a pattern for 9- and 10-spot, for Jack, Queen, King and Ace. The cards use Roman lettering, which was a common card convention for Russian cards at the time. We can reconstruct the ace shapes from the expansion of the index pip to the Ace of Spades.

The design for the King is especially clever: the Queen faces forward, the Jack looks to the right, but we can Necker the King to be facing forward or to the right.

Here are the Spades reconstructed:

Ace through to 9-spot of Spades

These are the Hearts:

Ace through to 9-spot of Hearts

Here are the Diamonds:

Ace through to 9-spot of Diamonds

And the Clubs:

Ace through to 9-spot of Clubs

Since we can only reconstruct 24 cards, you will have to play 24-card games with it. But nicely, the game of 66, or Paderbörnern, is perfect for it. And the stylistics that Lissitzky dreamed up are reflected in the plaque where the game was purported to have been invented in 1652.

The plaque

If you want to play 66 with our Lissitzky set, you can get one printed on demand at Make Playing Cards here.

To learn more about 66, or Paderbörnern you can read about it at Pagat here.

To learn more about Lissitzky, you can read about him at the Art Story here.

To learn more about Supremacism, UNOVIS, and their place in art history, the Khan Academy have an excellent study article here.

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* Fans of the sci-fi series Farscape will recognise the Peacekeepers Flag which is a simplification of the design.

Peacekeepers Flag design