A small Moscow auction house, 12th Chair, sold a cache of books, photographs and archival material from the family of El Lissitzky this week. For one of the most coveted artists of the Russian avant-garde, genuine works remain extraordinarily elusive on the art market.

There is something approaching a cult following among collectors for El Lissitzky (1890–1941). Appreciation of his work has become something of a mark of connoisseurship. He is also one of the relatively few Russian avant-garde artists for whom works on paper, books and printed matter inspire an intensity of desire more commonly reserved for paintings. Few figures of the avant-garde generate such a strong urge not only to own something he made, but even something directly associated with him: to acquire a fragment of his aura.

These thoughts occupied my mind as I shuffled online back and forth through a modest group of just thirty-two lots that came up at auction in Moscow this week. The name of the auction house itself puts one in the mood for buying books: 12th Chair, after the classic 1928 novel by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, in which an aristocrat and a conman embark on a wild hunt for jewels hidden in the upholstery of one of twelve chairs, buying chairs at auction along the way.

Here there were no flashy jewels. When I asked Ekaterina Kukhto the expert in charge of the sale for some images – “something bright,” by which I meant visually expressive – she gave an audible WhatsApp shrug. “That will be difficult,” she admitted, but sent me what she had. The worn condition of many of the lots told its own story of a difficult life. Normally this might be off-putting; here it somehow added to their appeal.

These modest paper objects – rare publications, photographs and prints – are becoming, as we enter the most digitised and technologically advanced era the world has ever known, a kind of gold dust of materiality. I may have many doubts about prices and market trends – my crystal ball exists only in dreams – but one thing seems increasingly certain: the physical presence of art, in all its forms and disciplines, feels more precious than ever.

It transpired that the thirty-odd books, photographs and papers came from a family member and had previously belonged to Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers. A fascinating figure in her own right, Sophie was an art historian, dealer, collector and cultural mediator, as well as a mother of three (two children with her first husband, and Jen her only son with El Lissiztky), Lissitzky’s biographer and the guardian of his legacy. Much of her later life was spent in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, where she had been exiled in 1944 and where she remained until her death in 1978. Her name appears repeatedly in the story of her husband’s work, always with a palpable sense of respect.

While the Russian market for rare books and printed material has long been strong, it remains particularly active in Moscow today, where much of the specialist knowledge resides with bukinisty – independent antiquarian book dealers – rather than within state institutions. There were once dedicated Russian book auctions in London, but these have largely disappeared; both the market and the expertise are now concentrated inside Russia.

That expertise is badly needed – at least until AI learns to do the job in a way that so far eludes both it and us. The headline lot of the group was a book that, on an ordinary day, would not be worth very much at all: Boris Denike’s China, published in Moscow by the All-Union Academy of Architecture in 1935. Yet on the half-title appeared Lissitzky’s own signature, dated 22 November 1939, together with the word “Mutti” – the affectionate family name for Sophie.

The auction house said that Sophie had given the book to Lissitzky for his birthday. The consignor was not publicly identified, but the house relied on what it presented as direct family provenance. In the late 1950s much of the Lissitzky archive eventually entered the Russian state archives, while some of the most personal material remained with the family. This book was therefore something quite different from an ordinary copy of Denike’s publication: an intimate gift between spouses. And it was an architectural book given to an artist for whom architecture occupied a central place in his thinking, and whose work repeatedly sought to collapse the boundary between painting and architectural space. An extraordinary amount of meaning was contained in one rather sorry-looking, worn, black-and-white publication.

Inside was another surprise: a loose sheet bearing a pencil architectural sketch. The auction-house experts deliberately refrained from suggesting that the drawing was by Lissitzky himself. But its presence inside such a book, preserved by the family, is tantalising.

Two other lots carried the same intimate family quality as Boris Denike’s China. A copy of Mikhail Alpatov’s History of Art had been translated by Sophie’s son Kurt Küppers and was later inscribed to her by his widow and daughter as part of his legacy. Another book, on miniatures from the Baburnama, was given to Sophie by her son Boris for her 80th birthday in 1971. Neither object is important for its market value; their charm lies in the way they quietly map the family around Lissitzky and Sophie, turning an otherwise modest group of books into something much more personal.

Born Lazar, or Eleazar, Markovich Lissitzky, the artist adopted the name El as part of his artistic identity. One authoritative account suggests that he did so in conscious imitation of El Greco; the name may also have resonated with Eleazar, a form of his given name. By the Vitebsk years, working in the extraordinarily charged environment around Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) and Marc Chagall (1887–1985) and developing his celebrated Prouns, Lazar Lissitzky had become simply El.

What distinguishes El Lissitzky from many of his peers is that he was trained as an architect. This gave his experiments a spatial logic quite different from the “architectonics” of painters such as Lyubov Popova (1889–1924). Popova’s architectonics remain fundamentally pictorial: an organisation of planes, tensions and forces across the surface. Lissitzky’s Prouns suggest an entire imaginary spatial environment. He is asking not simply how a painting can be constructed architectonically, but how 2D painting or drawing might become architecture.

The market for Lissitzky is constrained by extraordinary scarcity and by long-running problems of attribution. Drawings without documented provenance face an especially difficult reception, however plausible they may appear, while auction databases can obscure rather than clarify the market by grouping together works with radically different provenance, edition status and degrees of certainty.

When provenance is secure, however, results can be exceptional. In June 2025, Grisebach sold a complete 1923 ‘Kestnermappe’ Proun – six signed lithographs, including collaged sheets – for €340,000 against an estimate of €150,000–€250,000. In March of the same year, Sotheby’s sold a 1924 zincograph of Self-Portrait (The Constructor) for £889,000 including premium. That example had impeccable provenance and had been exhibited in the major 1991 El Lissitzky retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

The artist’s overall auction record remains another vintage print of The Constructor, sold at Christie’s in London in 2019 for £947,250 – then €1.098 million. For an artist whose greatest ideas so often circulated through paper, photography, typography and print, it seems somehow appropriate that some of his most coveted objects on the market are not paintings.