Tracing Fannina Halle in El Lissitzky’s Letters

This article seeks to make visible the affective and immaterial labor that women performed in the 1920s within the male-dominated circuits of the avant-gardes. It centers on a long-forgotten agent of the European and Soviet avant-gardes—the Russian-speaking, Vienna-based Jewish art historian Fannina Halle (1881–1963). Although the whereabouts of most of Halle’s documents are unknown today, her name regularly appears in the letters that the Soviet artist El Lissitzky wrote to his manager and later wife, Sophie Küppers, in 1924. Yet the edited volume of Lissitzky’s letters published in 1967, which has served as a predominant source for scholars interested in the artist’s primary documents, elided most mentions of Halle. In order to recover the fragments that relate to Halle, I read the published volume of Lissitzky’s letters against his archive. Although the artist’s mentions of Halle might appear to be mundane, they reveal the many forms of invisible labor that mostly women performed in support of the avant-garde. In addition to offering her care, Halle sold and distributed Lissitzky’s work in Vienna as well as organized lectures and a major exhibition for him and his Russian comrades.