Constructivism

Artistic movement formed in Russia between the end of the 1910s and the early 1920s, before and after the Russian Revolution, from which it absorbed both problems and ideology aiming — as Nicolas Pounine would state — at “the production of material values and objects destined to transform a lifestyle.” From this would arise a strong commitment to the applied arts, including clothing, creating a style of dressing suitable to the proletariat, to the new times, and to the new society. Basically, the constructivist artist wanted to finalize the results of his thought and work on behalf of the masses. It dealt, therefore, with social uses, or rather, with the uses of art, even of that art apparently quite far from such purposes, as, for example, abstract, suprematist and symbolist art. Vladimir Tatlin held that art is communication. His idea of constructivism was a synthesis of art and technology. Thus his 1919 project of a Monument to the 3^rd International, a distorted spiral pyramid, higher than the Eiffel Tower, in three parts in steel and crystal, meant to host meetings of the Comintern, was at the same time a building, a sculpture, and an ideological expression. Others would follow in this direction. It is important to remember, in particular, besides the brothers Anton and Naum Gabo Pevsner (who would soon detach themselves from it), the three Vesnin brothers, architects, town planners, and set decorators, famous designers of projects for the Palace of Soviets, for Pravda, and for various workers’ clubs and auto factories. The official birthday of the movement was in 1921, the year of the New Economic Policy, or NEP, which replaced the war economy. That is when the Constructivist Labor Group of Moscow was formed, composed of Gan, Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Joganson, Medunecky, and the Stenberg brothers. These last three organized the exhibition Constructivists, presenting spatial works and sculpture similar to engineering structures. Both within the movement and among its precursors, for example those belonging to the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow, or the Inchuk, opposition currents immediately began to form. Kandinsky, accused of subjectivism, because he was more interested in the psychological effects of artistic creation, was forced to resign as director of the Institute. The concept of “composition,” affecting the “aesthetic domain” of taste, was considered anachronistic: the aesthetic object, they said, has to be scientifically examined in a laboratory. For Rodchenko, even “every new approach to art comes from technology and engineering and moves towards organization and construction.” His exhibition of folding geometric elements cut in concentric circles, presented in May 1921 at the 3^rd Convention of Young Architects, is a sort of Constructivist Manifesto. In that same year the exhibit 5×5=25′ opened in Moscow, and in it Rodchenko presented his work together with Stepanova, Aleksandr Vesnin, Ljubov Popova, and Aleksandra Ekster. In 1922, the theoretical and practical essay Constructivism by A. Gan was published. In 1923, Ekster (she would flee to Paris the following year), Vera Moukhina, and the designer Lamanova, who by 1919 had already claimed that artists must commit themselves to fashion, started an atelier for mass production as well as a magazine. Rodchenko, Nadejda Oudaltsova, Olga Rozanova, and Varvara Stepanova all participated in this initiative, designing fabrics, work clothes, and sportswear. It was the birth of overalls. In that same year 1923, Popova became the director of the First State Factory of Printed Fabrics. Literature also had its constructivists: the literary movement was founded in Moscow in 1922 by a theoretician, K.L. Zelinsky, and a poet, I.L. Sel’vinsky, and it enjoyed a certain success for some years. In 1924, Vertov shot the constructivist film Cine-Eye. Wrapped in the coils of Stalinist politics, with divisions between realists and productivists, accusations of deviationism and bureaucracy, and the flight to the West of artists such as Kandinsky, Gabo, and other intellectuals, the movement faded away in the 1930s.