Soviet Russia · Vitebsk / 1919–1920 · lithograph
Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge
A diagonal that takes sides
A reproduction of a historical lithographic poster, not a photograph of daily life.
Converted to WebP, auto-oriented, maximum width 1200 pixels, quality 82; no content retouching.
Lissitzky’s poster turns a civil war into geometry. A red wedge cuts into a white circle; the diagonal pulls the eye and asks the viewer to take a side. That force is political, not a universal property of diagonals. The poster belongs to the history of revolutionary print and to the history of propaganda’s simplifications. Looking at it beside later campaign images asks what a graphic device can make visible—and what it asks us to stop asking.
- Date
- 1919–1920 · lithograph
- Maker / designer
- El Lissitzky
- Material
- Lithograph on paper
- Context
- Civil-war propaganda by a constructivist artist; a designed object, not a neutral illustration.
Evidence: Date is a period or later photograph · Place established
Historical record
- Commons dates the poster to 1919; some institutional records use 1920.
