Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers
Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 1932
Ruwim Lissitzky, El Lissitzky, Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, Dziga Vertov, 1932
Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 1930
Those, known and famous in our Socialist Country, poster, 1938
As a close collaborator with her second husband El Lissitzky, Sophie Küppers-Lissitzkys role in art history is unfortunately less known. However she contributed significantly to his work through ideas and realizing numerous projects in Moscow, while El Lissitzky was elsewhere to cure his increasingly weak health. Before moving with El Lissitzky to Moscow in 1927, she was an early supporter of avantgarde artists along Paul Küppers (director of the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover). In 1944 she was deported as enemy foreigner to Novosibirsk, where she continued to live under difficult conditions. Her son Jen tries to restitute paintings (by Klee, Kandinsky a.o.), which she left in Germany when moving to the Soviet Union, and which were later sold to collectors and museums after being marked as Entartete Kunst in 1937 by the Nazis.