Constructivism From Fine Art Into Design Russia 19131933

Artistic and architectural philosophy originating in Ukraine

Constructivism (fine art)
El Lissitzky'southward poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919).
Years active	1915
State	Russia
Major figures	Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko.
Influences	Russian folk art, Suprematism, Cubism and Futurism
Influenced	Bauhaus and De Stijl

Constructivism is an early twentieth-century art movement founded in 1915 by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko.^[1] Abstract and austere, constructivist art aimed to reflect modern industrial society and urban space.^[ane] The motion rejected decorative stylization in favor of the industrial aggregation of materials.^[1] Constructivists were in favour of art for propaganda and social purposes, and were associated with Soviet socialism, the Bolsheviks and the Russian avant-garde.^[two]

Constructivist architecture and art had a great result on modernistic art movements of the 20th century, influencing major trends such every bit the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements. Its influence was widespread, with major effects upon architecture, sculpture, graphic design, industrial pattern, theatre, film, dance, fashion and, to some extent, music.

Beginnings [edit]

The cover of Konstruktivizm past Aleksei Gan, 1922

Constructivism was a post-World War I evolution of Russian Futurism, and peculiarly of the 'counter reliefs' of Vladimir Tatlin, which had been exhibited in 1915. The term itself was invented past the sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo, who adult an industrial, angular style of piece of work, while its geometric abstraction owed something to the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich. Constructivism outset appears as a term in Gabo'southward Realistic Manifesto of 1920. Aleksei Gan used the word as the title of his book Constructivism, printed in 1922.^[3]

Constructivism as theory and practice was derived largely from a series of debates at the Found of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) in Moscow, from 1920 to 1922. Afterward deposing its first chairman, Wassily Kandinsky, for his 'mysticism', The Commencement Working Group of Constructivists (including Liubov Popova, Alexander Vesnin, Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and the theorists Aleksei Gan, Boris Arvatov and Osip Brik) would develop a definition of Constructivism equally the combination of faktura: the detail material properties of an object, and tektonika, its spatial presence. Initially the Constructivists worked on iii-dimensional constructions as a ways of participating in manufacture: the OBMOKhU (Society of Young Artists) exhibition showed these three dimensional compositions, past Rodchenko, Stepanova, Karl Ioganson and the Stenberg brothers. Later the definition would be extended to designs for two-dimensional works such equally books or posters, with montage and factography becoming important concepts.

Art in the service of the Revolution [edit]

As much as involving itself in designs for manufacture, the Constructivists worked on public festivals and street designs for the mail service-October revolution Bolshevik government. Mayhap the most famous of these was in Vitebsk, where Malevich's UNOVIS Group painted propaganda plaques and buildings (the best known existence El Lissitzky's poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919)). Inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky'south proclamation 'the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes', artists and designers participated in public life during the Civil War. A striking example 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 piece of work for the theatre. There was a great bargain of overlap during 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 add-on some Constructivists were heavily involved in the 'ROSTA Windows', a Bolshevik public data campaign of around 1920. Some of the most famous of these were by the poet-painter Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vladimir Lebedev.

The constructivists tried to create works that would make the viewer an agile viewer of the artwork. In this it had similarities with the Russian Formalists' theory of 'making foreign', and accordingly their principal theorist Viktor Shklovsky worked closely with the Constructivists, every bit did other formalists like the Arch Bishop. These theories were tested in theatre, particularly with the work of Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had established 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 Constructivist spatial ideas in a public form. A more populist version of this was developed by Alexander Tairov, with phase sets by Aleksandra Ekster and the Stenberg brothers. These ideas would influence High german directors like Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, as well every bit the early Soviet movie theater.

Tatlin, 'Construction Art' and Productivism [edit]

The central piece of work of Constructivism was Vladimir Tatlin'south proposal for the Monument to the 3rd International (Tatlin's Belfry) (1919–20)^[four] which combined a auto aesthetic with dynamic components celebrating technology such as searchlights and projection screens. Gabo publicly criticized Tatlin's blueprint saying, "Either create functional houses and bridges or create pure fine art, not both." This had already acquired a major controversy in the Moscow grouping in 1920 when Gabo and Pevsner's Realistic Manifesto asserted a spiritual core for the motion. This was opposed to the utilitarian and adaptable version of Constructivism held by Tatlin and Rodchenko. Tatlin's piece of work was immediately hailed past artists in Frg as a revolution in art: a 1920 photo shows George Grosz and John Heartfield holding a placard saying 'Fine art is Dead – Long Alive Tatlin's Machine Fine art', while the designs for the belfry were published in Bruno Taut'southward mag Frühlicht. The tower was never built, all the same, due to a lack of money following the revolution.^[5]

Tatlin's tower started a menses of commutation 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', every bit 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 László Moholy-Nagy. Withal 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 past Osip Brik and others, which demanded straight participation in industry and the cease of easel painting. Tatlin was one of the showtime to attempt to transfer his talents to industrial product, with his designs for an economical stove, for workers' overalls and for piece of furniture. The Utopian chemical element in Constructivism was maintained by his 'letatlin', a flying machine which he worked on until the 1930s.

Constructivism and consumerism [edit]

In 1921, the New Economic Policy was established in the Soviet Union, which opened up more than market opportunities in the Soviet economy. Rodchenko, Stepanova, and others made advertizing for the co-operatives that were at present in competition with other commercial businesses. The poet-artist Vladimir Mayakovsky and Rodchenko worked together and called themselves "advertising constructors". Together they designed center-catching images featuring bright colours, geometric shapes, and bold lettering. The lettering of about of these designs was intended to create a reaction, and office emotionally – most were designed for the state-endemic department shop Mosselprom in Moscow, for pacifiers, cooking oil, beer and other quotidian products, with Mayakovsky challenge that his 'nowhere else simply Mosselprom' verse was one of the best he ever wrote. Additionally, several artists tried to piece of work with wearing apparel blueprint with varying success: Varvara Stepanova designed dresses with vivid, 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 decease 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 remainder with their Communist beliefs.

LEF and Constructivist movie house [edit]

The Soviet Constructivists organised themselves in the 1920s into the 'Left Front of the Arts', who produced the influential journal LEF, (which had two series, from 1923 to 1925 and from 1927 to 1929 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 peculiarly scathing near the 'NEPmen', the capitalists of the period. For LEF the new medium of movie house was more of import than the easel painting and traditional narratives that elements of the Communist Party were trying to revive and then. Important Constructivists were very involved with cinema, with Mayakovsky acting in the film The Young Lady and the Hooligan (1919), Rodchenko'southward designs for the intertitles and blithe sequences of Dziga Vertov'southward Kino Eye (1924), and Aleksandra Ekster designs for the sets and costumes of 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'south Storm over Asia (1928) or Victor Turin'south Turksib (1929). The filmmakers and LEF contributors Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein too as the documentarist Esfir Shub as well regarded their fast-cut, montage way of filmmaking as Constructivist. The early Eccentrist movies of Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg (The New Babylon, Lonely) had similarly advanced intentions, as well every bit a fixation on jazz-historic period America which was feature of the philosophy, with its praise of slapstick-comedy actors like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, as well as of Fordist mass production. Like the photomontages and designs of Constructivism, early Soviet movie theater full-bodied on creating an agitating effect by montage and 'making foreign'.

Photography and photomontage [edit]

The Constructivists were early on developers of the techniques of photomontage. Gustav Klutsis' 'Dynamic City' and 'Lenin and Electrification' (1919–xx) 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 exist less 'destructive' than those of Dadaism. Perhaps the most famous of these montages was Rodchenko's illustrations of the Mayakovsky poem Well-nigh This.

LEF also helped popularise a distinctive mode of photography, involving jagged angles and contrasts and an abstract use of low-cal, which paralleled the work of László Moholy-Nagy in Germany: The major practitioners of this included, along with Rodchenko, Boris Ignatovich and Max Penson, amidst others. This also shared many characteristics with the early documentary motility.

Constructivist graphic design [edit]

The volume 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 pattern of posters for everything from cinema to political propaganda: the former represented best past the brightly coloured, geometric posters of the Stenberg brothers (Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg), and the latter past the agitational photomontage piece of work of Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina.

In Cologne in the late 1920s Figurative Constructivism emerged from the Cologne Progressives, a group which had links with Russian Constructivists, particularly Lissitzky, since the early twenties. Through their collaboration with Otto Neurath and the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum such artists as Gerd Arntz, Augustin Tschinkel and Peter Alma afflicted the development of the Vienna Method. This link was nearly clearly shown in A bis Z, a periodical published by Franz Seiwert, the primary theorist of the group.^[6] They were active in Russian federation working with IZOSTAT and Tschinkel worked with Ladislav Sutnar earlier he emigrated to the US.

The Constructivists' main early political patron was Leon Trotsky, and it began to be regarded with suspicion after the expulsion of Trotsky and the Left Opposition in 1927–28. The Communist Party would gradually favour realist fine art during the form of the 1920s (as early on as 1918 Pravda had complained that government funds were beingness used to purchase works by untried artists). However it was not until about 1934 that the counter-doctrine of Socialist Realism was instituted in Constructivism'southward place. Many Constructivists connected to produce avant-garde piece of work in the service of the state, such as Lissitzky, Rodchenko and Stepanova's designs for the mag USSR in Construction.

Constructivist architecture [edit]

Constructivist architecture emerged from the wider constructivist art movement. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, it turned its attentions to the new social demands and industrial tasks required of the new regime. Two distinct threads emerged, the start was encapsulated in Antoine Pevsner's and Naum Gabo'due south Realist manifesto which was concerned with space and rhythm, the 2nd represented a struggle within the Commissariat for Enlightenment between those who argued for pure fine art and the Productivists such every bit Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova and Vladimir Tatlin, a more socially oriented group who wanted this art to be absorbed in industrial product.^[7]

A carve up occurred in 1922 when Pevsner and Gabo emigrated. The movement and then adult along socially utilitarian lines. The productivist majority gained the support of the Proletkult and the magazine LEF, and later became the dominant influence of the architectural group O.S.A., directed by Alexander Vesnin and Moisei Ginzburg.

Legacy [edit]

A number of Constructivists would teach or lecture at the Bauhaus schools in Federal republic of germany, and some of the VKhUTEMAS educational activity methods were adopted and developed there. Gabo established a version of Constructivism in England during the 1930s and 1940s that was adopted past architects, designers and artists after Earth War I (run across Victor Pasmore), and John McHale. Joaquín Torres García and Manuel Rendón were instrumental in spreading Constructivism throughout Europe and Latin America. Constructivism had an result on the mod masters of Latin America such as: Carlos Mérida, Enrique Tábara, Aníbal Villacís, Theo Constanté, Oswaldo Viteri, Estuardo Maldonado, Luis Molinari, Carlos Catasse, João Batista Vilanova Artigas and Oscar Niemeyer, to name just a few. There have as well been disciples in Commonwealth of australia, the painter George Johnson being the best known. In New Zealand, the sculptures of Peter Nicholls show the influence of constructivism.

In the 1980s graphic designer Neville Brody used styles based on Constructivist posters that initiated a revival of popular involvement. Also during the 1980s designer Ian Anderson founded The Designers Republic, a successful and influential design company which used constructivist principles.

Deconstructivism [edit]

So-chosen Deconstructivist architecture shares elements of approach with Constructivism (its name refers more to the deconstruction literary approach). It was developed by architects Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and others during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Zaha Hadid by her sketches and drawings of abstruse triangles and rectangles evokes the aesthetic of constructivism. Though similar formally, the socialist political connotations of Russian constructivism are deemphasized by Hadid's deconstructivism. Rem Koolhaas' projects revive another aspect of constructivism. The scaffold and crane-like structures represented by many constructivist architects are used for the finished forms of his designs and buildings.

Artists closely associated with Constructivism [edit]

Ella Bergmann-Michel – (1896–1971)
Norman Carlberg, sculptor (1928–2018)
Avgust Černigoj – (1898–1985)
John Ernest – (1922–1994)
Naum Gabo – (1890–1977)
Moisei Ginzburg, architect (1892–1946)
Hermann Glöckner, painter and sculptor (1889–1987)
Erwin Hauer – (1926–2017)
Hildegard Joos, painter (1909–2005)
Gustav Klutsis – (1895–1938)
Katarzyna Kobro – (1898–1951)
Srečko Kosovel – (1904–1926)
January Kubíček – (1927–2013)
El Lissitzky – (1890–1941)
Ivan Leonidov – architect (1902–1959)
Richard Paul Lohse – painter and designer (1902–1988)
Peter Lowe – (1938–)
Louis Lozowick – (1892–1973)
Berthold Lubetkin – builder (1901–1990)
Thilo Maatsch – (1900–1983)
Estuardo Maldonado – (1930–)
Kenneth Martin – (1905–1984)
Mary Martin – (1907–1969)
Konstantin Medunetsky – (1899–1935)
Konstantin Melnikov – architect (1890–1974)
Vadim Meller – (1884–1962)
László Moholy-Nagy – (1895–1946)
Murayama Tomoyoshi – (1901–1977)
Victor Pasmore – (1908–1998)
Laszlo Peri – artist and architect (1899–1967)
Antoine Pevsner – (1886–1962)
Lyubov Popova – (1889–1924)
Alexander Rodchenko – (1891–1956)
Willi Sandforth (1922-2017)
Kurt Schwitters – (1887–1948)
Manuel Rendón Seminario – (1894–1982)
Willi Sandforth - (1922-2017) - German painter and designer
Vladimir Shukhov – architect (1853–1939)
Anton Stankowski – painter and designer (1906–1998)
Jeffrey Steele – (1931–)
Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg – poster designers and sculptors (1900–1933, 1899–1982)
Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958)
Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953)
Joaquín Torres García (1874–1949)
Vasiliy Yermilov (1894–1967)
Alexander Vesnin – builder, painter and designer (1883–1957)

References [edit]

^ ^a ^b ^c "Constructivism". Tate Modern . Retrieved ix Apr 2020.
^ Hatherley, Owen. "The constructivists and the Russian revolution in fine art and achitecture". The Guardian . Retrieved 9 Apr 2020.
^ Catherine Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde: Theories of Art, Architecture and the Metropolis, Academy Editions, 1995, folio 106.
^ Honour, H. and Fleming, J. (2009) A World History of Art. 7th edn. London: Laurence King Publishing, p. 819. ISBN 9781856695848
^ Janson, H.W. (1995) History of Art. 5th edn. Revised and expanded by Anthony F. Janson. London: Thames & Hudson, p. 820. ISBN 0500237018
^ Benus B. (2013) 'Figurative Constructivism and sociological graphics' in Isotype: Pattern and Contexts 1925-71 London: Hyphen Printing, pp.216–248
^ Oliver Stallybrass; Alan Bullock; et al. (1988). The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (Paperback). Fontana press. p. 918 pages. ISBN0-00-686129-6.

External links [edit]

Resource on constructivism, focusing primarily on the motion in Russia and east-central Europe
Documentary on Constructivist compages
Constructivist Book Covers
Russian Constructivism. MoMA.org
International Constructivism. MoMA.org
The Influence of Interpersonal Relationships on the Functioning of the Constructivist Network – an commodity by Michał Wenderski
Collection: "Soviet Constructivist Film Posters" from the University of Michigan Museum of Art

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_%28art%29

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