Lissitzky's wide-ranging innovations in painting, architecture, typography, and photography emanate from his earliest venture into abstract art, the body of works he called "Prouns," created between 1919 and 1923. Named after the Russian acronym for "Project for the Establishment of a New Art," this series of paintings, prints, and drawings was produced in the climate of utopian expectation immediately following the Russian revolution, when many artists believed in the power of art to change the world. Lissitzky did not attach his art to concrete political goals, a position that eventually brought him into conflict with his colleagues. But he was committed to the idea that society could be modernized through the transformation of perception, a vision expressed in the Prouns.

All the Prouns have in common an organization of geometric shapes dispersed as if seen from an aerial perspective. Proun 2 (Construction), comprised of overlapping rectangles, squares, triangles, and semicircles arranged along a variety of axes, recalls an architectural drawing or a model set in motion. Its textured materials include paper, metal, and oil paint on a wooden panel. These serve as a concrete counterpoint to the dynamic, floating spatial arrangement and refer to the realm of architectural construction, which guided the artist's conception of the Prouns. Lissitzky's interest in architecture soon led him to extend the Proun aesthetic into three dimensions. The pioneering models of exhibition design that he realized in the 1920s, a period when he lived in Berlin, were but one manifestation of the vital link he was able to forge between avant-garde artists working in Russia, Germany, France, and Holland. Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2000), p. 56.