Troublemaker (Zankstifter)

After seeing a 1920 production of Victory over the Sun, a Russian Futurist opera by Aleksei Kruchenykh and Mikhail Matyushin with costumes and set designs by Kazimir Malevich, the avant-garde artist El Lissitzky was inspired to restage it entirely with mechanical puppets, or automatons. The performance was not realized, but he published a portfolio of ten large lithographs depicting his vision for the main characters. His vocabulary of abstracted architectonic forms shows the influence of Suprematism, which rejected traditional perspectival illusionism in favor of geometric shapes floating against a white space.