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Constructivism (art)

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Art

   Tatlin Tower. Model of the Monument to the Third International
   Tatlin Tower. Model of the Monument to the Third International

   Constructivism was an artistic and architectural movement in Russia
   from 1919 onward (especially present after the October Revolution)
   which dismissed "pure" art in favour of an art used as an instrument
   for social purposes, specifically the construction of a socialist
   system. Constructivism as an active force lasted until around 1934,
   having a great deal of effect on developments in the art of the Weimar
   Republic and elsewhere, before being replaced by Socialist Realism. Its
   motifs have sporadically recurred in other art movements since.

Beginnings

   Photograph of the first Constructivist Exhibition, 1921
   Photograph of the first Constructivist Exhibition, 1921

   The term Construction Art was first used as a derisive term by Kazimir
   Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917.
   Constructivism first appears as a positive term in Naum Gabo's
   Realistic Manifesto of 1920. Constructivism was a post- First World War
   outgrowth of Russian Futurism, and particularly of the 'corner-counter
   reliefs' of Vladimir Tatlin, which had been exhibited in 1915. The term
   itself would be coined by the sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo,
   who developed an industrial, angular approach to their work, while its
   geometric abstraction owed something to the Suprematism of Kasimir
   Malevich. The teaching basis for the new movement was laid by The
   Commissariat of Enlightenment (or Narkompros) the Bolshevik
   government's cultural and educational ministry headed by Anatoliy
   Vasilievich Lunacharsky who suppressed the old Petrograd Academy of
   Fine Arts and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture
   in 1918. IZO, the Commissariat's artistic bureau was run during the
   Russian Civil War mainly by Futurists, who published the journal Art of
   the Commune. The focus for Constructivism in Moscow was VKhUTEMAS, the
   school for art and design established in 1919. Gabo later stated that
   teaching at the school was focused more on political and ideological
   discussion than art-making. Despite this, Gabo himself designed a radio
   transmitter in 1920 (and would submit a design to the Palace of the
   Soviets competition in 1930).

   Constructivism as theory and practice derived itself from a series of
   debates at INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) in Moscow, from
   1920-22. After deposing its first chairman, Wassily Kandinsky for his
   'mysticism', The First Working Group of Constructivists (including
   Liubov Popova, Alexander Vesnin, Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and the
   theorists Alexei Gan, Boris Arvatov and Osip Brik) would arrive at a
   definition of Constructivism as the combination of faktura: the
   particular material properties of the object, and tektonika, its
   spatial presence. Initially the Constructivists worked on
   three-dimensional constructions as a first step to participation in
   industry: the OBMOKhU (Society of Young Artists) exhibition showed
   these three dimensional compositions, by Rodchenko, Stepanova, Karl
   Ioganson and the Stenberg Brothers. Later the definition would be
   extended to designs for one-dimensional works such as books or posters,
   with montage and factography becoming important concepts.

Art in the service of the Revolution

   Agitprop poster by Mayakovsky
   Agitprop poster by Mayakovsky

   As much as involving itself in designs for industry, the
   Constructivists worked on public festivals and street designs for the
   post-October revolution Bolshevik government. Perhaps the most famous
   of these was in Vitebsk, where Malevich's UNOVIS Group painted
   propaganda plaques and buildings (the best known being El Lissitzky's
   poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919)). Inspired by Vladimir
   Mayakovsky's declaration 'the streets our brushes, the squares our
   palettes', artists and designers participated in public life throughout
   the Civil War. A striking instance was the proposed festival for the
   Comintern congress in 1921 by Alexander Vesnin and Liubov Popova, which
   resembled the constructions of the OBMOKhU exhibition as well as their
   work for the theatre. There was a great deal of overlap in this period
   between Constructivism and Proletkult, the ideas of which concerning
   the need to create an entirely new culture struck a chord with the
   Constructivists. In addition some Constructivists were heavily involved
   in the 'ROSTA Windows', a Bolshevik public information campaign of
   around 1920. Some of the most famous of these were by the poet-painter
   Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vladimir Lebedev.

   As a part of the early Soviet youth movement, the constructivists took
   an artistic outlook aimed to encompass cognitive, material activity,
   and the whole of spirituality of mankind. The artists tried to create
   works that would take the viewer out of the traditional setting and
   make them an active viewer of the artwork. In this it had similarities
   with the Russian Formalists' theory of 'making strange', and
   accordingly their leading theorist Viktor Shklovsky worked closely with
   the Constructivists, as did other formalists like Osip Brik. These
   theories were tested in the theatre, particularly in the work of
   Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had set up what he called 'October in the
   theatre'. Meyerhold developed a 'biomechanical' acting style, which was
   influenced both by the circus and by the 'scientific management'
   theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Meanwhile the stage sets by the
   likes of Vesnin, Popova and Stepanova tested out Constructivist spatial
   ideas in a public form. A more populist version of this was developed
   by Alexander Tairov, with stage sets by Aleksandra Ekster and the
   Stenberg Brothers. These ideas would go on to influence German
   directors like Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, as well as the early
   Soviet cinema.

Tatlin, 'Construction Art' and Productivism

   Photomontage by Tatlin showing his clothing designs, 1924
   Photomontage by Tatlin showing his clothing designs, 1924

   The canonical work of Constructivism was Vladimir Tatlin's proposal for
   the Monument to the Third International (1919) which combined a machine
   aesthetic with dynamic components celebrating technology such as
   searchlights and projection screens. Gabo publicly criticized Tatlin's
   design saying Either create functional houses and bridges or create
   pure art, not both. This had already led to a major split in the Moscow
   group in 1920 when Gabo and Pevsner's Realistic Manifesto asserted a
   spiritual core for the movement. This was opposed to the utilitarian
   and adaptable version of Constructivism held by Tatlin and Rodchenko.
   Tatlin's work was immediately hailed by artists in Germany as a
   revoltion in art: a 1920 photo shows George Grosz and John Heartfield
   holding a placard saying 'Art is Dead - Long Live Tatlin's Machine
   Art', while the designs for the tower were published in Bruno Taut's
   magazine Fruhlicht.

   Tatlin's tower started a period of exchange of ideas between Moscow and
   Berlin, something reinforced by El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg's
   Soviet-German magazine Veshch-Gegenstand-Objet which spread the idea of
   'Construction art', as did the Constructivist exhibits at the 1922
   Russische Ausstellung in Berlin, organised by Lissitzky. A
   'Constructivist international' was formed, which met with Dadaists and
   De Stijl artists in Germany in 1922. Participants in this short-lived
   international included Lissitzky, Hans Richter, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
   However the idea of 'art' was becoming anathema to the Russian
   Constructivists: the INKhUK debates of 1920-22 had culminated in the
   theory of Productivism propounded by Osip Brik and others, which
   demanded direct participation in industry and the end of easel
   painting. Tatlin was one of the first to answer this and attempt to
   transfer his talents to industrial production, with his designs for an
   economical stove, for workers' overalls and for furniture. The Utopian
   element in Constructivism was maintained by his 'letatlin', a flying
   machine which he worked on until the 1930s.

Constructivism and Consumerism

   An advertising construction
   An advertising construction

   In 1921, a New Economic Policy was set in place in the Soviet Union,
   which reintroduced a limited state capitalism into the Soviet economy.
   Rodchenko, Stepanova, and others made advertising for the co-operatives
   that were now in competition with commercial businesses. The
   poet-artist Vladimir Mayakovsky and Rodchenko worked together and
   called themselves "advertising constructors". Together they designed
   eye-catching images featuring bright colours, geometric shapes, and
   bold lettering. The lettering of most of these designs was intended to
   create a reaction, and function on emotional and substantive levels -
   most were designed for the state-run department store Mosselprom in
   Moscow, for pacifiers, cooking oil, beer and other quotidian products,
   with Mayakovsky claiming that his 'nowhere else but Mosselprom' verse
   was one of the best he ever wrote.

   In addition, several artists tried to work in clothes design with
   varying levels of success: Varvara Stepanova designed dresses with
   bright, geometric patterns that were mass-produced, although workers'
   overalls by Tatlin and Rodchenko never achieved this and remained
   prototypes. The painter and designer Lyubov Popova designed a kind of
   Constructivist flapper dress before her early death in 1924, the plans
   for which were published in the journal LEF. In these works
   Constructivists showed a willingness to involve themselves in fashion
   and the mass market, which they tried to balance with their Communist
   beliefs.

LEF and Constructivist Cinema

   The Soviet Constructivists organised themselves in the 1920s into the
   'Left Front of the Arts', who produced the influential journal LEF,
   (which had two runs, from 1923-5 and from 1927-9 as New LEF). LEF was
   dedicated to maintaining the avant-garde against the critiques of the
   incipient Socialist Realism, and the possibility of a capitalist
   restoration, with the journal being particularly scathing about the
   'NEPmen', the capitalists of the period. For LEF the new medium of
   cinema was more important than the easel painting and traditional
   narratives that elements in the Communist Party were trying to revive
   at that point. Leading Constructivists were heavily involved in film,
   with Mayakovsky starring in The Young Lady and the Hooligan (1919),
   Rodchenko's designs for the intertitles and animated sequences of Dziga
   Vertov's Kino Eye (1924), and Aleksandra Ekster designed the sets and
   costumes for the science fiction film Aelita (1924).

   The Productivist theorists Osip Brik and Sergei Tretyakov also wrote
   screenplays and intertitles, for films such as Vsevolod Pudovkin's
   Storm over Asia (1928) or Victor Turin's Turksib (1929). The filmmakers
   and LEF contributors Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein as well as the
   documentarist Esfir Shub also regarded their fast-cut, montage style of
   filmmaking as Constructivist. The early Eccentrist films of Grigori
   Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg (New Babylon, Odna) had similarly
   avant-garde intentions, as well as a fixation on jazz-age America which
   ran through the movement, with its praise of slapstick directors like
   Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, as well as of Fordist mass
   production. Like the photomontages and designs of Constructivism, early
   Soviet film concentrated on creating an agitational effect through
   Montage and 'making strange'.

Photography and Photomontage

   'Stairway' by Rodchenko, 1930
   'Stairway' by Rodchenko, 1930

   The Constructivists were early pioneers of the techniques of
   photomontage. Gustav Klutsis' 'Dynamic City' and 'Lenin and
   Electrification' (1919-20) are the first examples of this method of
   montage, which had in common with Dadaism the collaging together of
   news photographs and painted sections. However Constructivist montages
   would be less 'destructive' than in Dada. Perhaps the most famous of
   these montages was Rodchenko's illustrations to the Mayakovsky poem
   About This.

   LEF also helped popularise a distinctive style of photography,
   involving jagged angles and contrasts and an abstract use of light,
   which paralleled the work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in Germany: the leading
   lights of this included, along with Rodchenko, Boris Ignatovich and Max
   Penson, among others. This also shared many characteristics with the
   early documentary movement. Meanwhile LEF produced an architectural
   offshoot, the OSA group led by Alexander Vesnin and Moisei Ginzburg -
   for more information see Constructivist architecture.

Constructivist Graphic Design

   Poster by Gustav Klutsis, 1930
   Poster by Gustav Klutsis, 1930

   The book designs of Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and others such as Solomon
   Telingater and Anton Lavinsky were a major inspiration for the work of
   radical designers in the west, particularly Jan Tschichold. Many
   Constructivists worked on the design of posters for everything from
   film to political propaganda: the former best represented by the
   brightly coloured, geometric jazz-age posters of the Stenberg brothers,
   and the latter by the agitational photomontage work of Gustav Klutsis
   and Valentina Kulagina.

   The Constructivists' main political patron early on was Leon Trotsky,
   and it began to be regarded with suspicion after the expulsion of
   Trotsky and the Left Opposition in 1927-8. The Communist Party would
   gradually come to favour realist art over the course of the 1920s (as
   early as 1918 Pravda had complained that government funds were being
   used to buy works by untried artists). However it wasn't until around
   1934 that the counter-doctrine of Socialist Realism was instituted in
   Constructivism's place. Many Constructivists continued to produce
   avantgarde work in the service of the state, such as in Lissitzky,
   Rodchenko and Stepanova's designs for the magazine USSR In
   Construction.

Legacy

   A number of Constructivists would teach or lecture at the Bauhaus, and
   some of the VKhUTEMAS teaching methods were taken up and developed
   there. Gabo established a version of Constructivism in England in the
   1930s and 1940s that was taken up by architects, designers and artists
   after World War II (see Victor Pasmore), and John McHale. Joaquin
   Torres Garcia and Manuel Rendón were instrumental in spreading the
   Constructivist Movement throughout Europe and Latin America. The
   Constructivist Movement had an enormous impact on the modern masters of
   Latin America such as: Carlos Merida, Enrique Tábara, Aníbal Villacís,
   Theo Constanté, Oswaldo Viteri, Estuardo Maldonado, Luis Molinari,
   Carlos Catasse, and Oscar Niemeyer, to name just a few. There have also
   been disciples in Australia, the painter George Johnson being the most
   widely known. See also Constructivist architecture on the architectural
   avantgarde of the 1920s and 30s in the USSR.

   In the 1980s graphic designer Neville Brody used styles based on
   Constructivist posters that sparked a revival of popular interest.

   Deconstructivist architecture by architects Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas
   and others takes constructivism as a point of departure for works in
   the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Zaha Hadid in her sketches and
   drawings of abstract triangles and rectangles evokes the aesthetic of
   constructivism. Though formally similar, the socialist political
   connotations of Russian constructivism are de emphasized in Hadid's
   deconstructivism. Rem Koolhaas' projects recall another aspect of
   constructivism. The scaffold and crane-like structures represented by
   many constructivist architects, return in the finished forms of his
   designs and buildings.

Artists Associated with Constructivism

     * Ella Bergmann-Michel - (1896-1971)
     * Norman Carlberg, sculptor (1928 - )
     * Carlos Catasse - (1944-Present)
     * Theo Constanté - (1934-Present)
     * Avgust Černigoj - (1898-1985)
     * John Ernest - (1922-1994)
     * Naum Gabo - (1890-1977)
     * Moisei Ginzburg, architect
     * Erwin Hauer - (1926- )
     * Gustav Klutsis - (1895-1938)
     * El Lissitzky - (1890-1941)
     * Ivan Leonidov
     * Louis Lozowick - (1892-1973)
     * Berthold Lubetkin
     * Estuardo Maldonado - (1930-Present)
     * Vsevolod Meyerhold
     * Vladimir Shukhov - (1853-1939)
     * Konstantin Melnikov - (1890-1974)
     * Vadim Meller - (1884-1962)


     * John McHale - (1922-1978)
     * László Moholy-Nagy - (1895-1946)
     * Tomoyoshi Murayama - (1901-1977)
     * Victor Pasmore - (1908-1998)
     * Antoine Pevsner - (1886-1962)
     * Lyubov Popova - (1889-1924)
     * Manuel Rendón Seminario - (1894-1982)
     * Aleksandr Rodchenko - (1891-1956)
     * Oskar Schlemmer - (1888-1943)
     * Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg
     * Varvara Stepanova - (1894-1958)
     * Enrique Tábara - (1930-Present)
     * Vladimir Tatlin - (1885-1953)
     * Joaquin Torres Garcia - (1874-1949)
     * Vasiliy Yermilov - (1894-1967)
     * Dziga Vertov - filmmaker (1896-1954)
     * Alexander Vesnin
     * Aníbal Villacís - (1927-Present)
     * Oswaldo Viteri - (1931-Present)


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