1.
Zuev Workers' Club
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The Zuyev Workers Club in Moscow is a prominent work of constructivist architecture. It was designed by Ilya Golosov in 1926 and finished in 1928, the building was designed to house various facilities for Moscow workers, and utilises an innovative glazing treatment at its corner which has proved very photogenic. Golosov was an enthusiast for expressive, dynamic form rather than the logics of Constructivist design methods, the building facade consists of cylindrical glazed staircases intersecting with stacked rectangular floor planes to create a dramatic composition. A sequence of rooms and open foyers lead to an 850-seat auditorium. Since Golosovs time some of the fenestration has been bricked over, reducing the original perforated cubic mass into a more solid box
2.
Art
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In their most general form these activities include the production of works of art, the criticism of art, the study of the history of art, and the aesthetic dissemination of art. The oldest documented forms of art are visual arts, which include creation of images or objects in fields including painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and other visual media. Music, theatre, film, dance, and other performing arts, as well as literature, until the 17th century, art referred to any skill or mastery and was not differentiated from crafts or sciences. Art may be characterized in terms of mimesis, expression, communication of emotion, during the Romantic period, art came to be seen as a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science. Though the definition of what art is disputed and has changed over time, general descriptions mention an idea of imaginative or technical skill stemming from human agency. The nature of art, and related such as creativity. One early sense of the definition of art is related to the older Latin meaning. English words derived from this meaning include artifact, artificial, artifice, medical arts, however, there are many other colloquial uses of the word, all with some relation to its etymology. Several dialogues in Plato tackle questions about art, Socrates says that poetry is inspired by the muses, and is not rational. He speaks approvingly of this, and other forms of divine madness in the Phaedrus, and yet in the Republic wants to outlaw Homers great poetic art, in Ion, Socrates gives no hint of the disapproval of Homer that he expresses in the Republic. For example, music imitates with the media of rhythm and harmony, whereas dance imitates with rhythm alone, the forms also differ in their object of imitation. Comedy, for instance, is an imitation of men worse than average. Lastly, the forms differ in their manner of imitation—through narrative or character, through change or no change, Aristotle believed that imitation is natural to mankind and constitutes one of mankinds advantages over animals. The second, and more recent, sense of the art as an abbreviation for creative art or fine art emerged in the early 17th century. The creative arts are a collection of disciplines which produce artworks that are compelled by a drive and convey a message, mood. Art is something that stimulates an individuals thoughts, emotions, beliefs, works of art can be explicitly made for this purpose or interpreted on the basis of images or objects. Often, if the skill is being used in a common or practical way, likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way, it may be considered commercial art instead of fine art. On the other hand, crafts and design are considered applied art
3.
Architecture
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Architecture is both the process and the product of planning, designing, and constructing buildings and other physical structures. Architectural works, in the form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural symbols. Historical civilizations are often identified with their surviving architectural achievements, Architecture can mean, A general term to describe buildings and other physical structures. The art and science of designing buildings and nonbuilding structures, the style of design and method of construction of buildings and other physical structures. A unifying or coherent form or structure Knowledge of art, science, technology, the design activity of the architect, from the macro-level to the micro-level. The practice of the architect, where architecture means offering or rendering services in connection with the design and construction of buildings. The earliest surviving work on the subject of architecture is De architectura. According to Vitruvius, a building should satisfy the three principles of firmitas, utilitas, venustas, commonly known by the original translation – firmness, commodity. An equivalent in modern English would be, Durability – a building should stand up robustly, utility – it should be suitable for the purposes for which it is used. Beauty – it should be aesthetically pleasing, according to Vitruvius, the architect should strive to fulfill each of these three attributes as well as possible. Leon Battista Alberti, who elaborates on the ideas of Vitruvius in his treatise, De Re Aedificatoria, saw beauty primarily as a matter of proportion, for Alberti, the rules of proportion were those that governed the idealised human figure, the Golden mean. The most important aspect of beauty was, therefore, an inherent part of an object, rather than something applied superficially, Gothic architecture, Pugin believed, was the only true Christian form of architecture. The 19th-century English art critic, John Ruskin, in his Seven Lamps of Architecture, Architecture was the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by men. That the sight of them contributes to his health, power. For Ruskin, the aesthetic was of overriding significance and his work goes on to state that a building is not truly a work of architecture unless it is in some way adorned. For Ruskin, a well-constructed, well-proportioned, functional building needed string courses or rustication, but suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good. I am happy and I say, This is beautiful, le Corbusiers contemporary Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. The notable 19th-century architect of skyscrapers, Louis Sullivan, promoted an overriding precept to architectural design, function came to be seen as encompassing all criteria of the use, perception and enjoyment of a building, not only practical but also aesthetic, psychological and cultural
4.
Russia
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Russia, also officially the Russian Federation, is a country in Eurasia. The European western part of the country is more populated and urbanised than the eastern. Russias capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world, other urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a range of environments. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, the East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, in 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus ultimately disintegrated into a number of states, most of the Rus lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion. The Soviet Union played a role in the Allied victory in World War II. The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the worlds first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the second largest economy, largest standing military in the world. It is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic, the Russian economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2015. Russias extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the producers of oil. The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. The name Russia is derived from Rus, a state populated mostly by the East Slavs. However, this name became more prominent in the later history, and the country typically was called by its inhabitants Русская Земля. In order to distinguish this state from other states derived from it, it is denoted as Kievan Rus by modern historiography, an old Latin version of the name Rus was Ruthenia, mostly applied to the western and southern regions of Rus that were adjacent to Catholic Europe. The current name of the country, Россия, comes from the Byzantine Greek designation of the Kievan Rus, the standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is Russians in English and rossiyane in Russian. There are two Russian words which are translated into English as Russians
5.
Vladimir Tatlin
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Vladimir Yevgraphovich Tatlin was a Soviet painter and architect. With Kazimir Malevich he was one of the two most important figures in the Soviet avant-garde art movement of the 1920s, and he became an important artist in the Constructivist movement. He is most famous for his design for The Monument to the Third International, more known as Tatlins Tower. Tatlin was born in Kharkiv, the son of a railway engineer and he worked as a merchant sea cadet and spent some time abroad. He began his art career as a painter in Moscow. He also sang in Ukrainian and was a professional musician-bandurist, Tatlin became familiar with the work of Pablo Picasso during a trip to Paris in 1913. Tatlin achieved fame as the architect who designed the huge Monument to the Third International, planned from 1919, the monument was to be a tall tower in iron, glass and steel which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Inside the iron-and-steel structure of twin spirals, the design envisaged three building blocks, covered with windows, which would rotate at different speeds. For financial and practical reasons, however, the tower was never built, Tatlin conceived these sculptures in order to question the traditional ideas of art, though he did not regard himself as a Constructivist and objected to many of the movements ideas. Later prominent constructivists included Varvara Stepanova, Alexander Rodchenko, Manuel Rendón Seminario, Joaquín Torres García, László Moholy-Nagy, Antoine Pevsner and this led Malevich to develop his ideas further in the city of Vitebsk, where he found a school called UNOVIS. Tatlin also dedicated himself to the study of clothes, objects, at the end of his life he started to research bird flight, in order to pursue one of the great dreams of humanity, to fly. In the year of 1930 he taught in Kiev where one of his students was Joseph Karakis, Tatlin was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. Media related to Vladimir Tatlin at Wikimedia Commons Tatlin Playing The Bandura, special Project of the Library of Ukrainian Art. Exhibition of Russian-Soviet artist Vladimir Tatlin in Basel — Tatlin’s “new art for a new world”
6.
Bauhaus
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The Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. Nonetheless, it was founded with the idea of creating a work of art in which all arts, including architecture. The Bauhaus style later became one of the most influential currents in modern design, Modernist architecture and art, design, the Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. Although the school was closed, the continued to spread its idealistic precepts as they left Germany. The changes of venue and leadership resulted in a constant shifting of focus, technique, instructors, many Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural experimentation that followed the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism. Such influences can be overstated, Gropius did not share these radical views, thus, the Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design. In its first seven years, the Werkbund came to be regarded as the body on questions of design in Germany. The entire movement of German architectural modernism was known as Neues Bauen, beginning in June 1907, Peter Behrens pioneering industrial design work for the German electrical company AEG successfully integrated art and mass production on a large scale. Behrens was a member of the Werkbund, and both Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer worked for him in this period. The Bauhaus was founded at a time when the German zeitgeist had turned from emotional Expressionism to the matter-of-fact New Objectivity, beyond the Bauhaus, many other significant German-speaking architects in the 1920s responded to the same aesthetic issues and material possibilities as the school. They also responded to the promise of a minimal dwelling written into the new Weimar Constitution, ernst May, Bruno Taut, and Martin Wagner, among others, built large housing blocks in Frankfurt and Berlin. The acceptance of modernist design into everyday life was the subject of publicity campaigns, well-attended public exhibitions like the Weissenhof Estate, films, the Vkhutemas, the Russian state art and technical school founded in 1920 in Moscow, has been compared to Bauhaus. Founded a year after the Bauhaus school, Vkhutemas has close parallels to the German Bauhaus in its intent, organization, the two schools were the first to train artist-designers in a modern manner. Vkhutemas was a school than the Bauhaus, but it was less publicised outside the Soviet Union. With the internationalism of modern architecture and design, there were exchanges between the Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus. In addition, El Lissitzkys book Russia, an Architecture for World Revolution published in German in 1930 featured several illustrations of Vkhutemas/Vkhutein projects there. The school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919 as a merger of the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. Its roots lay in the arts and crafts founded by the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in 1906
7.
De Stijl
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De Stijl, Dutch for The Style, also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917 in Amsterdam. The De Stijl consisted of artists and architects In a narrower sense, De Stijl is also the name of a journal that was published by the Dutch painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Doesburg that served to propagate the groups theories. Next to van Doesburg, the principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian, Vilmos Huszár, and Bart van der Leck, and the architects Gerrit Rietveld, Robert van t Hoff. The artistic philosophy that formed a basis for the work is known as neoplasticism—the new plastic art. Mondrian sets forth the delimitations of neoplasticism in his essay Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art and he writes, this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour. With these constraints, his art allows only primary colours and non-colours, only squares and rectangles, only straight, in general, De Stijl proposed ultimate simplicity and abstraction, both in architecture and painting, by using only straight horizontal and vertical lines and rectangular forms. Furthermore, their vocabulary was limited to the primary colours, red, yellow, and blue. The works avoided symmetry and attained aesthetic balance by the use of opposition and this element of the movement embodies the second meaning of stijl, a post, jamb or support, this is best exemplified by the construction of crossing joints, most commonly seen in carpentry. This feature can be found in the Rietveld Schröder House and the Red, De Stijl was influenced by Cubist painting as well as by the mysticism and the ideas about ideal geometric forms in the neoplatonic philosophy of mathematician M. H. J. Schoenmaekers. The De Stijl movement was influenced by Neopositivism. The works of De Stijl would influence the Bauhaus style and the style of architecture as well as clothing. However, it did not follow the guidelines of an -ism, nor did it adhere to the principles of art schools like the Bauhaus, it was a collective project. In music, De Stijl was an only on the work of composer Jakob van Domselaer. Between 1913 and 1916, he composed his Proeven van Stijlkunst and this minimalistic—and, at the time, revolutionary—music defined horizontal and vertical musical elements and aimed at balancing those two principles. Van Domselaer was relatively unknown in his lifetime, and did not play a significant role within the De Stijl group. From the flurry of new art movements that followed the Impressionist revolutionary new perception of painting, Cubism arose in the early 20th century as an important, in the Netherlands, too, there was interest in this new art. During that period, painter Theo van Doesburg started looking for artists to set up a journal
8.
Graphic design
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Graphic design is the process of visual communication and problem-solving using one or more of typography, photography and illustration. The field is considered a subset of visual communication and communication design, Graphic designers create and combine symbols, images and text to form visual representations of ideas and messages. They use typography, visual arts and page layout techniques to create visual compositions, common uses of graphic design include corporate design, editorial design, wayfinding or environmental design, advertising, web design, communication design, product packaging and signage. The term graphic design was coined by William Addison Dwiggins in 1922, however, graphic design-like activities span human existence, from the caves of Lascaux, to Romes Trajans Column to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, to the neon lights of Ginza, Tokyo. In Babylon, artisans pressed cuneiform inscriptions into clay bricks or tablets which were used for construction, the bricks gave information such as the name of the reigning monarch, the builder, or some other dignitary. This was the first known road sign announcing the name of the governor of a state or mayor of the city, the Egyptians developed communication by hieroglyphics that used picture symbols dating as far back as 136 B. C. found on the Rosetta Stone. During the Dark Ages, from 500 AD to 1450 AD, monks created elaborate and they share many elements, theories, principles, practices, languages and sometimes the same benefactor or client. In advertising, the objective is the sale of goods. In graphic design, the essence is to order to information, form to ideas, expression. Graphic design in the United States began with Benjamin Franklin who used his newspaper The Pennsylvania Gazette, to master the art of publicity to promote his own books and his invention is still sold today and is known as the Franklin stove. American advertising initially imitated British newspapers and magazines, advertisements were printed in scrambled type and uneven lines that made it difficult to read. Franklin better organized this by adding 14-point type for the first line of the advertisement, although later shortened and centered it, Franklin added illustrations, something that London printers had not attempted. Franklin was the first to utilize logos, which were early symbols that announced such services as opticians by displaying golden spectacles, Franklin taught advertisers that the use of detail was important in marketing their products. Some advertisements ran for 10-20 lines, including color, names, varieties, during the Tang Dynasty wood blocks were cut to print on textiles and later to reproduce Buddhist texts. A Buddhist scripture printed in 868 is the earliest known printed book, beginning in the 11th century, longer scrolls and books were produced using movable type printing, making books widely available during the Song dynasty. During the 17th-18th century movable type was used for handbills or trade cards which were printed from wood or copper engravings and these documents announced a business and its location. English painter William Hogarth used his skill in engraving was one of the first to design for business trade, in Mainz Germany, in 1448, Johann Gutenberg introduced movable type using a new metal alloy for use in a printing press and opened a new era of commerce. Previously, most advertising was word of mouth, in France and England, for example, criers announced products for sale just as ancient Romans had done
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Industrial design
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Industrial design is a process of design applied to products that are to be manufactured through techniques of mass production. This distinguishes industrial design from craft-based design, where the form of the product is determined by the creator at the time of its creation. The role of a designer is to create and execute design solutions for problems of form, function, usability, physical ergonomics, marketing, brand development, sustainability. The division of labour that underlies the practice of design did have precedents in the pre-industrial era. The use of drawing to specify how something was to be constructed later was first developed by architects and shipwrights during the Italian Renaissance. The emergence of industrial design is linked to the growth of industrialisation and mechanisation that began with the industrial revolution in Great Britain in the mid 18th century. The first use of the industrial design is often attributed to the industrial designer Joseph Claude Sinel in 1919. Christopher Dresser is considered among the first independent industrial designers, Industrial designs origins lie in the industrialization of consumer products. The earliest use of the term may have been in The Art Union, the Practical Draughtsmans Book of Industrial Design by Jacques-Eugène Armengaud was printed in 1853. The subtitle of the work explains, that it wants to offer a course of mechanical, engineering. The study of those types of drawing, according to Armengaud. This work paved the way for a big expansion in the drawing education in France, the United Kingdom. Robert Lepper helped to establish one of the countrys first industrial design programs at Carnegie Institute of Technology. Product design and industrial design overlap in the fields of user interface design, information design, except for certain functional areas of overlap between industrial design and engineering design, educational programs in the U. S. Most industrial designers complete a design or related program at a school or university. Diplomas and degrees take two to four years of study, the study results in a Bachelor of Industrial Design, Bachelor of Science or Bachelor of Fine Arts. Afterwards, the programme can be extended to postgraduate degrees such as Master of Design, Master of Fine Arts. Industrial design studies function and form—and the connection between product, user, and environment, generally, industrial design professionals work in small scale design, rather than overall design of complex systems such as buildings or ships
10.
Kazimir Malevich
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Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian painter and art theoretician. He was a pioneer of abstract art and the originator of the avant-garde Suprematist movement. He was a devout Christian mystic who believed the central task of an artist was that of rendering spiritual feeling, Kazimir Malevich was born Kazimierz Malewicz to a Polish family, who settled near Kiev in Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire during the partitions of Poland. His parents, Ludwika and Seweryn Malewicz, were Roman Catholic like most ethnic Poles and they both had fled from the former eastern territories of the Commonwealth to Kiev in the aftermath of the failed Polish January Uprising of 1863 against the tsarist army. His native language was Polish though he spoke Ukrainian in public, subsequently, Malevich even wrote a series of articles about art in Ukrainian. Kazimirs father managed a sugar factory, Kazimir was the first of fourteen children, only nine of whom survived into adulthood. His family moved often and he spent most of his childhood in the villages of Ukraine, amidst sugar-beet plantations, until age twelve he knew nothing of professional artists, although art had surrounded him in childhood. He delighted in peasant embroidery, and in decorated walls and stoves and he was able to paint in the peasant style. He studied drawing in Kiev from 1895 to 1896, from 1896 to 1904 Kazimir Malevich lived in Kursk. In 1904, after the death of his father, he moved to Moscow and he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture from 1904 to 1910 and in the studio of Fedor Rerberg in Moscow. In the same year he participated in an exhibition by the collective, by that time his works were influenced by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, Russian avant-garde painters, who were particularly interested in Russian folk art called lubok. Malevich described himself as painting in a Cubo-Futuristic style in 1912, in March 1913 a major exhibition of Aristarkh Lentulovs paintings opened in Moscow. Already in the year the Cubo-Futurist opera, Victory Over the Sun, with Malevichs stage-set. In 1914 Malevich exhibited his works in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris together with Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay, Aleksandra Ekster, Malevich also co-illustrated, with Pavel Filonov, Selected Poems with Postscript, 1907–1914 by Velimir Khlebnikov and another work by Khlebnikov in 1914 titled Roar. In 1915, Malevich laid down the foundations of Suprematism when he published his manifesto, in 1915–1916 he worked with other Suprematist artists in a peasant/artisan co-operative in Skoptsi and Verbovka village. In 1916–1917 he participated in exhibitions of the Jack of Diamonds group in Moscow together with Nathan Altman, David Burliuk, Aleksandra Ekster, famous examples of his Suprematist works include Black Square and White On White. Malevich exhibited his first Black Square, now at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, a black square placed against the sun appeared for the first time in the 1913 scenery designs for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. The second Black Square was painted around 1923, some believe that the third Black Square was painted in 1929 for Malevichs solo exhibition, because of the poor condition of the 1915 square
11.
Alexander Rodchenko
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Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko was a Russian artist, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design, Rodchenko was one of the most versatile Constructivist and Productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and his photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or down below—to shock the viewer. Rodchenko was born in St. Petersburg to a family who moved to Kazan after the death of his father. He became an artist without having had any exposure to the art world, in 1910, Rodchenko began studies under Nicolai Fechin and Georgii Medvedev at the Kazan Art School, where he met Varvara Stepanova, whom he later married. After 1914, he continued his training at the Stroganov Institute in Moscow. The following year, he participated in The Store exhibition organized by Vladimir Tatlin, Rodchenkos work was heavily influenced by Cubism and Futurism, as well as by Malevichs Suprematist compositions, which featured geometric forms deployed against a white background. He utilized a compass and ruler in creating his paintings, with the goal of eliminating expressive brushwork, Rodchenko worked in Narkompros and he was one of the organizers of RABIS. Rodchenko was appointed Director of the Museum Bureau and Purchasing Fund by the Bolshevik Government in 1920, responsible for the reorganization of art schools and museums. He became secretary of the Moscow Artists Union and set up the Fine Arts Division of the Peoples Commissariat for Education and he taught from 1920 to 1930 at the Higher Technical-Artistic Studios, a Bauhaus organization with a checkered career. In 1921 he became a member of the Productivist group, with Stepanova and Aleksei Gan and he gave up painting in order to concentrate on graphic design for posters, books, and films. He was deeply influenced by the ideas and practice of the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, impressed by the photomontage of the German Dadaists, Rodchenko began his own experiments in the medium, first employing found images in 1923, and from 1924 on, shooting his own photographs as well. His first published photomontage illustrated Mayakovskys poem, About This, in 1923, from 1923 to 1928 Rodchenko collaborated closely with Mayakovsky on the design and layout of LEF and Novy LEF, the publications of Constructivist artists. Many of his photographs appeared in or were used as covers for these journals and his images eliminated unnecessary detail, emphasized dynamic diagonal composition, and were concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space. During this period, he and Stepanova did the well-known painted panels of the Mosselprom building in Moscow and their daughter, Varvara Rodchenko, was born in 1925. Throughout the 1920s, Rodchenkos work was very abstract, in the 1930s, with the changing Party guidelines governing artistic practice, he concentrated on sports photography and images of parades and other choreographed movements. Rodchenko joined the October Group of artists in 1928 but was expelled three years later, charged with formalism and he returned to painting in the late 1930s, stopped photographing in 1942, and produced abstract expressionist works in the 1940s
12.
Naum Gabo
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Naum Gabo, born Naum Neemia Pevsner was a prominent Russian sculptor in the Constructivism movement and a pioneer of Kinetic Art. Gabo grew up in a Jewish family of six children in the provincial Russian town of Bryansk and his older brother was fellow Constructivist artist Antoine Pevsner, Gabo changed his name to avoid confusion with him. Gabo was a fluent speaker and writer in German, French and his command of several languages contributed greatly to his mobility during his career. “As in thought, so in feeling, a communication is no communication at all. After school in Kursk, Gabo entered Munich University in 1910, first studying medicine, then the natural sciences, in 1912 Gabo transferred to an engineering school in Munich where he discovered abstract art and met Wassily Kandinsky and in 1913-14 joined his brother Antoine in Paris. Gabos engineering training was key to the development of his work that often used machined elements. During this time he won acclamations by many critics and awards like the $1000 Mr and Mrs Frank G. Logan Art Institute Prize at the annual Chicago and Vicinity exhibition of 1954. After the outbreak of war, Gabo moved first to Copenhagen then Oslo with his older brother Alexei and these earliest constructions originally in cardboard or wood were figurative such as the Head No.2 in the Tate collection. He moved back to Russia in 1917, to become involved in politics and art, Gabo contributed to the Agit-prop open air exhibitions and taught at VKhUTEMAS the Higher Art and Technical Workshop, with Tatlin, Kandinsky and Rodchenko. During this period the reliefs and construction became more geometric and Gabo began to experiment with kinetic sculpture though the majority of the work was lost or destroyed. Gabos designs had become increasingly monumental but there was opportunity to apply them, as he commented, It was the height of civil war. To find any part of machinery … was next to impossible, Gabo wrote and issued jointly with Antoine Pevsner in August 1920 a Realistic Manifesto proclaiming the tenets of pure Constructivism – the first time that the term was used. In the manifesto Gabo criticized Cubism and Futurism as not becoming fully abstract arts, Gabo and Pevsner promoted the manifesto by staging an exhibition on a bandstand on Tverskoy Boulevard in Moscow and posted the manifesto on hoardings around the city. In Germany Gabo came into contact with the artists of the de Stijl, during this period he realised a design for a fountain in Dresden. Gabo and Antoine Pevsner had a joint exhibition at the Galerie Percier, Paris in 1924, to escape the rise of the Nazis in Germany the pair stayed in Paris in 1932–35 as members of the Abstraction-Creation group with Piet Mondrian. Gabo visited London in 1935, and settled in 1936, where he found a spirit of optimism, while in Cornwall he continued to work, albeit on a smaller scale. In 1946 Gabo and his wife and daughter emigrated to the United States, where they resided first in Woodbury, Gabo died in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1977. The essence of Gabos art was the exploration of space, which he believed could be done without having to depict mass and his earliest constructions such as Head No.2 were formal experiments in depicting the volume of a figure without carrying its mass
13.
Aleksei Gan
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Aleksei Gan was a Russian anarchist avant-garde artist, art theorist and graphic designer. Gan was a key figure in the development of Constructivism after the Russian Revolution, Gan was the first to write on art in the anarchist newspaper Anarkhiia when it introduced an art section in early 1918. In March 1921, Gan was one of the seven artists, including Alexander Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova, the group rejected fine art in favour of graphic design, photography, posters, and political propaganda. Gan collaborated with Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova on a Constructivist manifesto in 1922 and he also founded the first Soviet film journal, Kino-Fot, in 1922. In 1928 he was one of the founders of the October Group, Gan is believed to have died in a Russian labour camp. The Island of the Young Pioneers,1924, sources of a radical mission in the early Soviet profession, Alexei Gan and the Moscow anarchists. Architecture and Revolution, Contemporary Perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe
14.
Russian Futurism
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Russian Futurism was a movement of Russian poets and artists who adopted the principles of Filippo Marinettis Futurist Manifesto. Russian Futurism may be said to have born in December 1912. Other members included artists Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, although Hylaea is generally considered to be the most influential group of Russian Futurism, other groups were formed in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa. Like their Italian counterparts, the Russian Futurists were fascinated with the dynamism, speed and they purposely sought to arouse controversy and to gain publicity by repudiating the static art of the past. The likes of Pushkin and Dostoevsky, according to them, should be heaved overboard from the steamship of modernity, in contrast to Marinettis circle, Russian Futurism was primarily a literary rather than a plastic philosophy. Although many poets dabbled with painting, their interests were primarily literary, the poets and painters collaborated on such innovative productions as the Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, with music by Mikhail Matyushin, texts by Kruchenykh and sets contributed by Malevich. Members of Hylaea elaborated the doctrine of Cubo-Futurism and assumed the name of budetlyane and they found significance in the shape of letters, in the arrangement of text around the page, in the details of typography. They considered that there is no difference between words and material things, hence the poet should arrange words in his poems like the artist arranges colors. Grammar, syntax, and logic were often discarded, many neologisms and profane words were introduced, khlebnikov, in particular, developed an incoherent and anarchic blend of words stripped of their meaning and used for their sound alone, known as zaum. With all this emphasis on experimentation, some Futurists were not indifferent to politics. In particular, Mayakovskys poems, with their lyrical sensibility, appealed to a range of readers. He vehemently opposed the meaningless slaughter of World War I and hailed the Russian Revolution as the end of that mode of life which he. War correspondent Arthur Ransome and five other foreigners were taken to see two of the Bolshevik propaganda trains in 1919 by their organiser, Burov. Its pictures are ‘art for arts sake’, and can not have more than astonish, and perhaps terrify, the peasants. The Red Cossack is quite different, as Burov put it with deep satisfaction, At first we were in the artists’ hands, and now the artists are in our hands. Initially the Department of Proletarian Culture had delivered Burov bound hand and foot to a number of Futurists, after the Bolsheviks gained power, Mayakovskys group—patronized by Anatoly Lunacharsky, Bolshevik Commissar for Education—aspired to dominate Soviet culture. Their influence was paramount during the first years after the revolution, by the time OBERIU attempted to revive some of the Futurist tenets during the late 1920s, the Futurist movement in Russia had already ended. The most militant Futurist poets either died or preferred to adjust their very individual style to more conventional requirements, Cubo-Futurism Russian avant-garde Ego-Futurism Russian cosmism Universal Flowering References Sources Markov, Vladimir Russian Futurism
15.
Antoine Pevsner
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Antoine Pevsner was a Russian-born sculptor and the older brother of Alexii Pevsner and Naum Gabo. Both Antoine and Naum are considered pioneers of twentieth-century sculpture, Pevsner was born in Klimavichy, Russian Empire, into a Jewish family. Among the originators of and having coined the term, Constructivism, Pevsner said, Art must be inspiration controlled by mathematics. I have a need for peace, symphony, orchestration, pevsners studio was on the outskirts of Paris and housed his sculptures. He was one of the first to use the blowtorch in sculpture, welding copper rods onto sculptural forms and along with his brother, Naum, Pevsner died in Paris, age 76. Antoine Pevsner in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website
16.
Suprematism
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Suprematism is an art movement, focused on basic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines, and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colors. The term suprematism refers to an art based upon the supremacy of pure artistic feeling rather than on visual depiction of objects. In Suprematism, Malevich clearly stated the concept of Suprematism. He created a suprematist grammar based on geometric forms, in particular, the square. In the 0.10 Exhibition in 1915, Malevich exhibited his early experiments in suprematist painting, the centerpiece of his show was the Black Square, placed in what is called the red/beautiful corner in Russian Orthodox tradition, the place of the main icon in a house. Black Square was painted in 1915 and was presented as a breakthrough in his career, Malevich also painted White on White which was also heralded as a milestone. White on White marked a shift from polychrome to monochrome Suprematism, Malevichs Suprematism is fundamentally opposed to the postrevolutionary positions of Constructivism and materialism. Constructivism, with its cult of the object, is concerned with utilitarian strategies of adapting art to the principles of functional organization, under Constructivism, the traditional easel painter is transformed into the artist-as-engineer in charge of organizing life in all of its aspects. Suprematism, in sharp contrast to Constructivism, embodies a profoundly anti-materialist, Suprematism does not embrace a humanist philosophy which places man at the center of the universe. Malevich also credited the birth of suprematism to Victory Over the Sun, Kruchenykhs Futurist opera production for which he designed the sets, the aim of the artists involved was to break with the usual theater of the past and to use a clear, pure, logical Russian language. Malevich put this to practice by creating costumes from simple materials, flashing headlights illuminated the figures in such a way that alternating hands, legs or heads disappeared into the darkness. The stage curtain was a black square, one of the drawings for the backcloth shows a black square divided diagonally into a black and a white triangle. Because of the simplicity of basic forms they were able to signify a new beginning. These give some indications towards an understanding of the Suprematic compositions produced between 1915 and 1918, Malevich conceived of the journal as the contextual foundation in which he could base his art, and originally planned to call the journal Nul. In a letter to a colleague, he explained, We are planning to put out a journal and have begun to discuss the how, since in it we intend to reduce everything to zero, we have decided to call it Nul. Afterward we ourselves will go beyond zero, Malevich conceived of the journal as a space for experimentation that would test his theory of nonobjective art. However, despite a year spent planning and writing articles for the journal, the most important artist who took the art form and ideas developed by Malevich and popularized them abroad was the painter El Lissitzky. Lissitzky worked intensively with Suprematism particularly in the years 1919 to 1923 and he was deeply impressed by Malevichs Suprematist works as he saw it as the theoretical and visual equivalent of the social upheavals taking place in Russia at the time
17.
Wassily Kandinsky
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Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting one of the first recognised purely abstract works, born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art school. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics, successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat—Kandinsky began painting studies at the age of 30. In 1896 Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbes private school and he returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Kandinsky was unsympathetic to the theories on art in Communist Moscow. There, he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939 and he died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944. Kandinskys creation of work followed a long period of development. He called this devotion to beauty, fervor of spirit. Kandinsky was born in Moscow, the son of Lidia Ticheeva and Vasily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, Kandinsky learned from a variety of sources while in Moscow. He studied many fields while in school, including law and economics, later in life, he would recall being fascinated and stimulated by colour as a child. His fascination with colour symbolism and psychology continued as he grew, in 1889, he was part of an ethnographic research group which travelled to the Vologda region north of Moscow. In Looks on the Past, he relates that the houses and churches were decorated with such shimmering colours that upon entering them and this experience, and his study of the regions folk art, was reflected in much of his early work. The artist is the hand plays, touching one key or another. Kandinsky was also the uncle of Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, in 1896, at the age of 30, Kandinsky gave up a promising career teaching law and economics to enroll in the Munich Academy where his teachers would eventually include Franz von Stuck. He was not immediately granted admission, and began learning art on his own and that same year, before leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of paintings by Monet. He was particularly taken with the style of Haystacks, this. Later, he would write about this experience, That it was a haystack the catalogue informed me and this non-recognition was painful to me
18.
Lyubov Popova
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Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova was a Russian avant-garde artist, painter and designer. Lyubov Sergeyevna had two brothers and a sister, Sergei was the eldest, then Lyubov, Pavel and Olga, Pavel became a philosopher and the guardian of his sisters artistic legacy. She grew up with a strong interest in art, especially Italian Renaissance painting, at eleven years old she began formal art lessons at home, she was first enrolled in Yaltinskaias Womens Gymnasium, then in Arsenevas Gymnasium in Moscow. By the age of 18 she was studying with Stanislav Zhukovsky, in 1912 to 1913, she began attending the studios of the Cubist painters Henri Le Fauconnier and Jean Metzinger. In 1909 she traveled to Kiev, then in 1910 to Pskov, the following year she visited other ancient Russian cities, including St. Petersburg, to study icons. In 1912 she worked in a Moscow studio known as The Tower with Ivan Aksenov and Vladimir Tatlin, in 1912–1913 she studied art with Nadezhda Udaltsova in Paris, where she met Alexander Archipenko and Ossip Zadkine in 1913. After returning to Russia that same year, she worked with Tatlin, Udaltsova, in 1914 she traveled in France and Italy at the development of Cubism and Futurism. Popova was one of the first female pioneers in Cubo-Futurism, through a synthesis of styles she worked towards what she termed painterly architectonics. From 1914–1915 her Moscow home became the meeting-place for artists and writers, in 1914–1916 Popova together with other avant-garde artists contributed to the two Knave of Diamonds exhibitions, in Petrograd Tramway V and the 0.10, The Store in Moscow. Her painting The Violin of 1914 suggests the development from Cubism towards the painterly architectonics series of 1916–1918 and this series defined her distinct artistic trajectory in abstract form. The canvas surface is a field of overlapping and intersecting angular planes in a constant state of potential release of energy. At the same time the elements are held in a balanced and proportioned whole as if linking the compositions of the classical past to the future, color is used as the iconic focus, the strong primary color at the center drawing the outer shapes together. The creation of a new kind of painting was part of the urge of the Russian avant-garde to remake the world. The term supreme refers to a non-objective or abstract world beyond that of everyday reality. However, there was a tension between those who, like Malevich, saw art as a spiritual quest, and others who responded to the need for the artist to create a new physical world. Popova embraced both of these ideals but eventually identified herself entirely with the aims of the Revolution working in poster, book design, fabric and theatre design, at 0.10 she had exhibited a number of figurative painted cardboard reliefs in a cubist derived style. Popovas superimposed planes and strong color have the presence of actual space. In 1918 Popova married the art historian Boris Eding, and gave birth to a son, von Eding died the following year of typhoid fever
19.
Alexander Vesnin
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Alexander Aleksandrovic Vesnin, together with his brothers Leonid and Viktor, was a leading light of Constructivist architecture. He is best known for his meticulous perspectival drawings such as Leningrad Pravda of 1924, in addition to being an architect, he was a theatre designer and painter, frequently working with Lyubov Popova on designs for workers festivals, and for the theatre of Tairov. He was one of the exhibitors in the pioneering Constructivist exhibition 5x5=25 in 1921 and he was the head, along with Moisei Ginzburg, of the Constructivist OSA Group. Vesnin was a supporter of the works of Le Corbusier. After the return to Classicism in the Soviet Union, Vesnin had no major projects. N Khan-Magomedov, Alexander Vesnin
20.
Varvara Stepanova
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Varvara Fyodorovna Stepanova was a Russian artist associated with the Constructivist movement. Varvara Stepanova came from peasant origins but was able to get an education at Kazan Art School, there she met her husband and collaborator Alexander Rodchenko. In the years before the Russian Revolution of 1917 they leased an apartment in Moscow and these artists became some of the main figures in the Russian avant-garde. The new abstract art in Russia which began around 1915 was a culmination of influences from Cubism, Italian Futurism, in the years following the revolution, Stepanova involved herself in poetry, philosophy, painting, graphic art, stage scenery construction, and textile and clothing designs. She contributed work to the Fifth State Exhibition and the Tenth State Exhibition, also in 1921, Stepanova declared in her text for the exhibition 5x5=25, held in Moscow, Composition is the contemplative approach of the artist. Technique and Industry have confronted art with the problem of construction as an active process, the sanctity of a work as a single entity is destroyed. The museum which was the treasury of art is now transformed into an archive, the term Constructivist was by then being used by the artists themselves to describe the direction their work was taking. The theatre was another area where artists were able to communicate new artistic, Stepanova designed the sets for The Death of Tarelkin in 1922. In 1921, Stepanova moved almost exclusively into the realm of production, Russian Constructivist clothing represented the destabilization of the oppressive, elite aesthetics of the past and, instead, reflected utilitarian functionality and production. Gender and class distinctions gave way to functional, geometric clothing, in line with this objective, Stepanova sought to free the body in her designs, emphasizing clothing’s functional rather than decorative qualities. Stepanova deeply believed clothing must be looked at in action, in addition, she sought to develop expedient means of clothing production through simple designs and strategic, economic use of fabrics. Stepanova, thus, identified clothing as occupying two groups, prodezodezhda and sportodezhda, within these categories, she attended to logical, efficient production and construction of the garments. However, war-induced poverty placed economic restrictions on the Russian Constructivists’ industrial fervor, thus, most of her designs were not mass-produced and circulated. The first, prodezodezhda, or production/working clothing in basic styles, within this category, Stepanova began designing spetsodezhda, or clothing specialized for a specific occupation. Regardless of the context, her working clothing carried a distinctive geometric and linear edge, rendering the body into a graphic composition and boxy. Stepanova even rendered the team’s emblem into a graphic design, the sports arena offered a context for Stepanova to realize an idealized bodily neutralization, and her uniforms were often unisex with pants and a belted tunic that obscured the human form. As a constructivist, Stepanova not only transposed bold graphic designs onto her fabrics, Stepanova only worked a little over a year at The First Textile Printing Factory, but she designed more than 150 fabric designs in 1924. Although she was inspired to new types of fabric, the current technology restricted her to printed patterns on monotone surfaces
21.
Osip Brik
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Osip Maksimovich Brik, Russian avant garde writer and literary critic, was one of the most important members of the Russian formalist school, though he also identified himself as one of the Futurists. Brik grew up in Moscow, the son of a wealthy Jewish jeweler, all the prostitutes there knew him, and he always defended them, for free, in all their affairs, in their confrontations with the police and so on. He was also interested in photography and film, In 1918, Brik was especially close to Alexander Rodchenko and did much to make his photographic work known. He was also active in films and wrote screenplays, including one for Potomok Cingis-khana. He met his wife, Lilya Kagan, when he was 17 and she 14. The two made a pact to love each other in the Chernyshevsky manner – a reference to one of nineteenth-century Russias most famous radical thinkers, who was an early advocate of open marriages. Living at the heart of an artistic bohemia and receiving the intelligentsia in the salon of his wife, Osip Brik, true to his promise. In fact, upon hearing his wife confess that she had gone to bed with the young poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1918, when Mayakovsky and the Briks became inseparable, he moved in with them. Throughout the rest of his life, he made his home at a succession of flats that the Briks occupied, Brik was not only a literary modernist, he was strongly left-wing in politics, and on 8 June 1920 he joined the Cheka. Jakobson wrote of this period, It was from Bogatyrev, who visited me in Prague in December 1921, and he told me that Pasternak, who often visited the Briks, had said to him, Still, its become rather terrifying. You come in, and Lili says, Wait a while, at the end of 1922 I met the Briks in Berlin. Osja said to me, Now theres an institution where a man loses his sentimentality and this was the first time he made a rather repulsive impression on me. Working in the Cheka had ruined him, most avant garde artists and thinkers suffered persecution, and Brik did not escape this fate. In the 1930s he eked out a living writing articles on Mayakovsky and book reviews and his works were not republished in Russia until the mid-1990s. Edward J. Brown summed his career up thus, He wrote little, are brilliant formalist analyses of poetic language. And he was probably the most articulate exponent in Lef of the theories of social demand, a man of surpassing intelligence, he was apparently not strong either in performance or in principle. Two Essays on Poetic Language, Ann Arbor,1964
22.
Vitebsk
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Vitebsk or Vitsebsk, is a city in Belarus. The capital of the Vitebsk Region, in 2004 it had 342,381 inhabitants and it is served by Vitebsk Vostochny Airport and Vitebsk air base. Vitebsk developed from a harbor where the Vitba River flows into the larger Western Dvina. Archaeological research indicates that at the mouth of Vitba there were settlements by Baltic tribes, according to the Chronicle of Michael Brigandine, Vitebsk was founded by Princess Olga of Kiev in 974. Other versions give 947 or 914, academician Boris Rybakov and historian Leonid Alekseyev, based on the chronicles, have come to the conclusion that Princess Olga of Kiev could have established Vitebsk in 947. Leonid Alekseyev suggested that the chroniclers, moving the date from the account of the Byzantine era to a new era, got the year 947, but later mistakenly written in copying manuscripts 974. In the 12th and 13th centuries Vitebsk was the capital of the Principality of Vitebsk, in 1320 the city was incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a dowry of the Princess Maria, the first wife of Grand Duke of Lithuania Algirdas. By 1351 the city had erected a stone Upper and Lower Castle, in 1410 Vitebsk participated in the Battle of Grunwald. In 1597, the townsfolk of Vitebsk were privileged with Magdeburg rights, however, the rights were taken away in 1623 after the citizens revolted against the imposed Union of Brest and killed Archbishop Josaphat Kuntsevych. During the First Partition of Poland in 1772, Vitebsk was annexed by the Russian Empire, under the Russian Empire the historic centre of Vitebsk was rebuilt with Neoclassical architecture. By World War II, Vitebsk had a significant Jewish population, according to Russian census of 1897, out of the population of 65,900. The most famous of its Jewish natives was the painter Marc Chagall, in 1924, it was returned to the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. During World War II, the city was under Nazi Germany occupation, much of the old city was destroyed in the ensuing battles between the Germans and the Red Army soldiers. Most of the local Jews perished in the Vitebsk Ghetto massacre, in the first postwar five-year period the city was rebuilt. In the structure of its industrial complex stands machinery and light industry, in 1959, a TV tower was commissioned and started broadcasting the 1st Central Television program. In the same year during excavations on the Liberation Square, a scroll was found dating from the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries. It read, From Stpana to Nezhilovi, also, if hast sold trousers, buy me rye for 6 hryvnia. And if some didst not sold, send to my person, and if thou hast sold, do good to buy rye for me In January 1991, Vitebsk celebrated the first Marc Chagall Festival
23.
UNOVIS
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UNOVIS was a short-lived but influential group of artists, founded and led by Kazimir Malevich at the Vitebsk Art School in 1919. Initially formed by students and known as MOLPOSNOVIS, the group formed to explore and develop new theories, in its short history, the group underwent many changes. First founded as MOLPOSNOVIS, the groups started to include some of the schools professors. The group was active, working on numerous projects and experiments. In January 1920, Malevich was invited to teach at the school in 1919 by Marc Chagall and immediately appointed by the director of the school at the time, Vera Ermolaeva, following the production, POSNOVIS underwent more changes and was renamed UNOVIS on February 14,1920. In early 1920, Marc Chagall selected Malevich to succeed him as director, Malevich accepted and radically reorganized not only UNOVIS but the entire schools curriculum. He transformed UNOVIS into a structured organization, forming the UNOVIS Council. Still, Malevich had more plans and he urged his students to do bigger. Ilia would go on to succeed Lissitzky as head of the facility along with his fellow student. Embracing the Communist ideal, the group chose to share credit and they signed all works with a solitary black square, a homage to a previous artwork by Malevich. This would become the de facto seal of UNOVIS and took the place of names or initials. UNOVIS students who made the trip from Vitebsk to Moscow rapidly distributed artworks, newsletters, manifestos, flyers, UNOVIS succeeded in achieving recognition and became respected as an established and influential movement. While their influence on art lasted for generations, their popularity immediately following the conference was short-lived, by 1922, the core group splintered and two contrasting, adverse factions formed. Malevich and his followers championed practical, productive methods of changing society while the rest favored a more philosophical Suprematism, working on furthering Suprematist theory, by this time most of the native artists associated with UNOVIS had moved on to other schools, cities, and movements. Even after the dissolution, publications bearing the UNOVIS black square appeared for years. Soviet art Suprematism VKhUTEMAS Malevich, Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910-1930 Shishanov V. A. Vitebsk museum of the art history of creation and collection. Vitebsk budetlyane / V. Shishanov / / Malevich, regina Khidekel, and Charlotte Douglas, Magdalena Dabrowsky, Tatiana Goriatcheva, Alla Rosenfeld, Constantin Boym, Boris Kirikov, Margarita Shtiglits. All Paintings of Kazimir Malevich Essay on UNOVIS Brief history and list of notable works Information on UNOVIS and pages on most notable members
24.
El Lissitzky
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Lazar Markovich Lissitzky, known as El Lissitzky, was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect. His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus and constructivist movements, and he experimented with production techniques, Lissitzkys entire career was laced with the belief that the artist could be an agent for change, later summarized with his edict, das zielbewußte Schaffen. Lissitzky, of Lithuanian Jewish оrigin, began his career illustrating Yiddish childrens books in an effort to promote Jewish culture in Russia, when only 15 he started teaching, a duty he would maintain for most of his life. Over the years, he taught in a variety of positions, schools and this continued until his deathbed, where in 1941 he produced one of his last works – a Soviet propaganda poster rallying the people to construct more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany. Lissitzky was born on November 23,1890 in Pochinok, a small Jewish community 50 kilometres southeast of Smolensk, former Russian Empire. Always expressing an interest and talent in drawing, he started to receive instruction at 13 from Yehuda Pen, a local Jewish artist, in 1909, he applied to an art academy in Saint Petersburg, but was rejected. While he passed the exam and was qualified, the law under the Tsarist regime only allowed a limited number of Jewish students to attend Russian schools. Like many other Jews then living in the Russian Empire, Lissitzky went to study in Germany and he left in 1909 to study architectural engineering at a Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany. Also in 1912 some of his pieces were included for the first time in an exhibit by the St. Petersburg Artists Union, a notable first step. During this work, he took an active and passionate interest in Jewish culture which, the new Provisional Government repealed a decree that prohibited the printing of Hebrew letters and that barred Jews from citizenship. These books were Lissitzkys first major foray in book design, a field that he would greatly innovate during his career and his first designs appeared in the 1917 book, Sihas hulin, Eyne fun di geshikhten, where he incorporated Hebrew letters with a distinctly art nouveau flair. His next book was a retelling of the traditional Jewish Passover song Had gadya. In the book, he integrated letters with images through a system that matched the color of the characters in the story with the word referring to them. In the designs for the page, Lissitzky depicts the mighty hand of God slaying the angel of death. This representation links the redemption of the Jews with the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, an alternative view asserts that the artist was wary of Bolshevik internationalization, leading to destruction of traditional Jewish culture. The quantity of these posters is sufficient to them as a separate genre in the artists output. Chagall also invited other Russian artists, most notably the painter and art theoretician Kazimir Malevich and Lissitzkys former teacher, however, it was not until October 1919 when Lissitzky, then on an errand in Moscow, persuaded Malevich to relocate to Vitebsk. The move coincided with the opening of the first art exhibition in Vitebsk directed by Chagall, Malevich would bring with him a wealth of new ideas, most of which inspired Lissitzky but clashed with local public and professionals who favored figurative art and with Chagall himself
25.
Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge
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In the poster, the intrusive red wedge symbolizes the Bolsheviks, who are penetrating and defeating their opponents, the White movement, during the Russian Civil War. It is an example of Constructivism, the image became popular in the West when Lissitzky moved to Germany in 1921. It is considered symbolic of the Russian Civil War in Western publications, a simplified version lacking the smaller details is used by the Peacekeepers in the television series Farscape. English doom metal band Witchfinder General employ the red wedge motif in the artwork accompanying their 1982 EP Soviet Invasion, a similar simplified version was appropriated by the German post-punk band Mekanik Destruktiw Komandoh for their 198312 single Berlin, released on the sixth international label. The Australian Trotskyist organization Socialist Alternative incorporates the red wedge in its logo, the German/Austrian Marxist organization Gruppen gegen Kapital und Nation uses a simplified version of the poster as its logo. Franz Ferdinand used the image as inspiration for the cover of their single This Fire. The logo and the name was used by a socialist music and arts organisation in the UK, Red Wedge, the Wake used the artwork for their twelve-inch single Something Outside in 1983. USC article The design appropriations of punk and the new wave
26.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
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Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian Soviet poet, playwright, artist, and actor. Mayakovsky often found engaged in confrontation with the increasing involvement of the Soviet State in cultural censorship. Even after death his relationship with the Soviet state remained unsteady, Vladimir Vladimirovichs mother Alexandra Alexeyevna, was a housewife, looking after the children, a son and two daughters, Olga and Lyudmila. The family was of Russian and Zaporozhian Cossack descent on their fathers side, at home the family spoke Russian. With his friends and at school Mayakovky used Georgian, I was born in the Caucasus, my father is a Cossack, my mother is Ukrainian. Thus three cultures are united in me, he told the Prague newspaper Prager Presse in a 1927 interview, Georgia for Mayakovsky remained the eternal symbol of beauty. I know, its nonsense, Eden and Paradise, but since people sang about them // It must have been Georgia, the joyful land, in 1902 Mayakovsky joined the Kutais gymnasium where, as a 14-year-old he took part in socialist demonstrations at the town of Kutaisi. His mother, aware of his activities, apparently didnt mind, people around warned us we were giving a young boy too much freedom. But I saw him developing according to the new trends, sympathized with him and pandered to his aspirations, she later remembered. After the sudden and premature death of his father in 1906 the family — Mayakovsky, his mother, in July 1906 Mayakovsky joined the 4th form of the Moscows 5th Classic gymnasium and soon developed a passion for Marxist literature. For me it was philosophy, Hegel, natural sciences, but first and foremost, thered be no higher art for me than The Foreword by Marx, he recalled in the 1920s in his autobiography I, Myself. In 1908, the boy was dismissed from the gymnasium because his mother was no able to afford the tuition fees. For two years he studied at the Stroganov School of Industrial Arts, where his sister Lyudmila had started her studies a few years earlier. As a young Bolshevik activist, Mayakovsky distributed propaganda leaflets, possessed a pistol without a license and this resulted in a series of arrests and finally an 11-month imprisonment. It was in a confinement of the Moscow Butyrka prison that Mayakovsky started writing verses for the first time. Revolution and poetry got entangled in my head and became one, he wrote in I, as an underage person, Mayakovsky avoided a serious prison sentence and in January 1910 was released. A warden confiscated the young mans notebook, and years later Mayakovsky conceded that was all for the better, upon his release from prison, Mayakovsky remained an ardent Socialist, but realized his own inadequacy as a serious revolutionary. Having left the Party, he concentrated on education, sat down and started to learn… Now my intention was to make the Socialist art, he later remembered
27.
Communist International
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The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern and also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization that advocated world communism. The Comintern had seven World Congresses between 1919 and 1935 and it also had thirteen Enlarged Plenums of its governing Executive Committee, which had much the same function as the somewhat larger and more grandiose Congresses. The Comintern was officially dissolved by Joseph Stalin in 1943, while the differences had been evident for decades, World War I proved the issue that finally divided the revolutionary and reformist wings of the workers movement. The socialist movement had been historically antimilitarist and internationalist, and therefore opposed workers serving as fodder for the bourgeois governments at war. This especially since the Triple Alliance comprised two empires, while the Triple Entente gathered France and Britain into an alliance with Russia, karl Marxs The Communist Manifesto had stated that the working class has no country and exclaimed Proletarians of all countries, unite. Massive majorities voted in favor of resolutions for the Second International to call upon the working class to resist war if it were declared. Nevertheless, within hours of the declarations of war, almost all the socialist parties of the combatant states announced their support for the war, the only exceptions were the socialist parties of the Balkans. To Lenins surprise, even the Social Democratic Party of Germany voted in favor of war credits, Socialist parties in neutral countries mostly supported neutrality rather than total opposition to the war. The International divided into a left and a reformist right. Lenin condemned much of the center as social-pacifists for several reasons, Lenins term social-pacifist aimed in particular at Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the Independent Labour Party in Britain, who opposed the war on grounds of pacifism, but did not actively resist it. Discredited by its passivity towards world events, the Second International dissolved in the middle of the war in 1916, the victory of the Russian Communist Party in the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 was felt throughout the world. An alternative path to power to parliamentary politics was demonstrated, with much of Europe on the verge of economic and political collapse in the aftermath of the carnage of the Great War, revolutionary sentiments were widespread. The Bolsheviks believed that required a new international to ferment revolution in Europe. The Comintern was founded at a Congress held in Moscow March 2–6,1919, there were 52 delegates present from 34 parties. They decided to form an Executive Committee with representatives of the most important sections, the Congress decided that the Executive Committee would elect a five-member bureau to run the daily affairs of the International. However, such a bureau was not formed and Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev was assisted by Angelica Balabanoff, acting as the secretary of the International, Victor L. Kibaltchitch and Vladmir Ossipovich Mazin. Lenin, Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontai presented material, the main topic of discussion was the difference between bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The central policy of the Comintern under Lenins leadership was that Communist parties should be established across the world to aid the international proletarian revolution, in this period, the Comintern was promoted as the General Staff of the World Revolution
28.
Proletkult
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Proletkult, a portmanteau of the Russian words proletarskaya kultura, was an experimental Soviet artistic institution which arose in conjunction with the Russian Revolution of 1917. This organization, a federation of local societies and avant-garde artists, was most prominent in the visual, literary. Some top party leaders, such as V. I, Lenin, sought to concentrate state funding on the basic education of the working class rather than on whimsical artistic endeavors. He and others also saw in Proletkult a hotbed of bourgeois intellectuals, the earliest roots of the Proletarian Culture movement, better known as Proletkult, are found in the aftermath of the failed 1905-1907 Revolution against Nicholas II of Russia. In the aftermath of the Tsars reassertion of authority a political tendency known as the Left Bolsheviks emerged. Among the Left Bolsheviks, Anatoly Lunacharsky in particular had been intrigued with the possibility of making use of art as a means to inspire revolutionary political action. Bogdanov believed that the socialist society of the future would require forging a new perspective of the role of science, ethics, and art with respect to the individual. Together all these ideas of Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Gorky, and these ideas did not exist in a vacuum, there was a political component as well. During the period between the failure of the 1905 revolution and the outbreak of World War I, Alexander Bogdanov stood as the rival to Lenin for leadership of the Bolshevik party. To the intellectually rigid Lenin, Bogdanov was not only a political rival, Lenin ultimately emerged triumphant in the struggle for hegemony of the Bolshevik faction. Relations between them in Western European exile remained tense, the second of these, a book called Engineer Menni, was pronounced by Lenin to be so vague that neither a worker nor a stupid editor at Pravda could understand it. In 1913 Bogdanov, a student of the Taylor system of factory work-flow rationalization, published a work on the topic, General Organizational Science. The pair went their ways, with Bogdanov dropping out of radical politics at the end of 1913. The February Revolution of 1917 which overthrew the Tsarist regime came comparatively easily, so, too, did the October Revolution which followed, events which overthrew the Russian Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky and brought Lenin and the Bolsheviks to the seat of power. The Russian Civil War was another matter altogether — a long, the radical intelligentsia of Russia was mobilized by these events. Following the October Revolution, Lunacharsky was appointed Commissar of Education of the new regime, Lunacharskys factional ally, Alexander Bogdanov, remained sharply critical of Lenin and his political tactics and never rejoined the Communist Party, however. Instead he served at the front as a doctor during World War I, returning home to Moscow in 1917 and becoming involved there as a founder of the Proletarian Culture organization, a first conference of these groups was held in Petrograd from October 16 to 19,1917. Also playing a key role was Pavel Lebedev-Polianskii, another member of Bodganov
29.
Viktor Shklovsky
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Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky was a Russian and Soviet literary theorist, critic, writer, and pamphleteer. Shklovsky was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and his father was Jewish and his mother was of German/Russian origin. During the First World War, he volunteered for the Russian Army, there, in 1916, he founded OPOYAZ, one of the two groups that developed the critical theories and techniques of Russian Formalism. Shklovsky participated in the February Revolution of 1917, subsequently the Russian Provisional Government sent him as an assistant Commissar to the Southwestern Front where he was wounded and got an award for bravery. After that he was an assistant Commissar of the Russian Expeditionary Corps in Persia, Shklovsky returned to St. Petersburg in early 1918, after the October Revolution. He opposed bolshevism and took part in a plot organised by members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. His two brothers were executed by the Soviet regime and his sister died from hunger in St. Petersburg in 1919, Shklovsky integrated into Soviet society and even took part in the Russian Civil War, serving in the Red Army. However, in 1922, he had to go into hiding again, as he was threatened with arrest and possible execution for his former political activities. The Yugoslav scholar Mihajlo Mihajlov visited Shklovsky in 1963 and wrote, I was much impressed by Shklovskys liveliness of spirit, his varied interests and his enormous culture. When we said goodbye to Viktor Borisovich and started for Moscow, I felt that I had met one of the most cultured, most intelligent and he died in Moscow in 1984. Shklovsky is perhaps best known for developing the concept of ostranenie or defamiliarization in literature and he explained the concept in the important essay Art as Technique which comprised the first chapter of his seminal Theory of Prose, first published in 1925. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object, Shklovsky was one of the very early serious writers on film. A collection of his essays and articles on film was published in 1923 and he was a close friend of director Sergei Eisenstein and published an extensive critical assessment of his life and works. Beginning in the 1920s and well into the 1970s Shklovsky worked as a screenwriter on numerous Soviet films, in his book Third Factory Shklovsky reflects on his work in film, writing, First of all, I have a job at the third factory of Goskino. Second of all, the name isnt hard to explain, the first factory was my family and school. And the third – is processing me at this very moment, ISBN1405106964 Shklovsky, Viktor, A Reader
30.
Vsevolod Meyerhold
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Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold was a Russian and Soviet theatre director, actor and theatrical producer. His provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbolism in a theatre setting made him one of the seminal forces in modern international theatre. During the Great Purge, Meyerhold was arrested, tortured and executed in February 1940 and he was the youngest of eight children. After completing school in 1895, Meiergold studied law at Moscow University and he was torn between studying theatre or a career as a violinist. However, he failed his audition to become the second violinist in the University orchestra, on his 21st birthday, he converted from Lutheranism to Orthodox Christianity and accepted Vsevolod as an Orthodox Christian name. Meyerhold began acting in 1896 as a student of the Moscow Philharmonic Dramatic School under the guidance of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre. At the MAT, Meyerhold played 18 roles, such as Vasiliy Shuiskiy in Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich and Ivan the Terrible in The Death of Ivan the Terrible, after leaving the MAT in 1902, Meyerhold participated in a number of theatrical projects, as both a director and actor. Each project was an arena for experiment and creation of new staging methods, Meyerhold was one of the most fervent advocates of Symbolism in theatre, especially when he worked as the chief producer of the Vera Komissarzhevskaya theatre in 1906–1907. He was invited back to the MAT around this time to pursue his experimental ideas, Meyerhold continued theatrical innovation during the decade 1907–1917, while working with the imperial theatres in St. Petersburg. He introduced classical plays in a manner, and staged works of controversial contemporary authors like Fyodor Sologub, Zinaida Gippius. In these plays, Meyerhold tried to return acting to the traditions of Commedia dellarte and his theoretical concepts of the conditional theatre were elaborated in his book On Theatre in 1913. The Russian Revolution of 1917 made Meyerhold one of the most enthusiastic activists of the new Soviet Theatre and he joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918 and became an official of the Theatre Division of the Commissariat of Education and Enlightenment. In 1918–1919, Meyerhold formed an alliance with Olga Kameneva, the head of the Division, together, they tried to radicalize Russian theatres, effectively nationalizing them under Bolshevik control. Meyerhold came down with tuberculosis in May 1919 and had to leave for the south, after returning to Moscow, Meyerhold founded his own theatre in 1920, which was known from 1923 as the Meyerhold Theatre until 1938. Meyerhold confronted the principles of theatrical academism, claiming that they are incapable of finding a common language with the new reality, Meyerhold’s methods of scenic constructivism and circus-style effects were used in his most successful works of the time. Some of these works included Nikolai Erdmans The Mandate, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe, Fernand Crommelyncks Le Cocu magnifique, mayakovsky collaborated with Meyerhold several times, and was said to have written The Bedbug especially for him, Meyerhold continued to stage Mayakovskys productions even after the latters suicide. The actors participating in Meyerhold’s productions acted according to the principle of biomechanics, Meyerhold gave initial boosts to the stage careers of some of the most distinguished comic actors of the USSR, including Sergey Martinson, Igor Ilyinsky and Erast Garin. Energy was replaced by trance, the dynamic with the static, happy jesting humour with bitter, Meyerhold also gave a start to his one time assistant of The Queen of Spades Matvey Dubrovin, who later created his own theater in Leningrad
31.
Frederick Winslow Taylor
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Frederick Winslow Taylor was an American mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. He was one of the first management consultants, Taylor was one of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement and his ideas, broadly conceived, were highly influential in the Progressive Era. Taylor was also an athlete who competed nationally in tennis and golf, Taylor was born in 1856 to a Quaker family in Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Taylors father, Franklin Taylor, a Princeton-educated lawyer, built his wealth on mortgages, Taylors mother, Emily Annette Taylor, was an ardent abolitionist and a coworker with Lucretia Mott. His fathers ancestor, Samuel Taylor, settled in Burlington, New Jersey and his mothers ancestor, Edward Winslow, was one of the fifteen original Mayflower Pilgrims who brought servants or children, and one of eight who had the honorable distinction of Mister. Winslow served for years as the Governor of the Plymouth colony. Educated early by his mother, Taylor studied for two years in France and Germany and traveled Europe for 18 months, in 1872, he entered Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, with the plan of eventually going to Harvard and becoming a lawyer like his father. In 1874, Taylor passed the Harvard entrance examinations with honors, however, due allegedly to rapidly deteriorating eyesight, Taylor chose quite a different path. Instead of attending Harvard University, Taylor became a patternmaker and machinist. He left his apprenticeship for six months and represented a group of New England machine-tool manufacturers at Philadelphias centennial exposition, Taylor finished his four-year apprenticeship and in 1878 became a machine-shop laborer at Midvale Steel Works. At Midvale, he was promoted to time clerk, journeyman machinist, gang boss over the lathe hands, machine shop foreman, research director. Taylors fast promotions reflected both his talent and his familys relationship with Edward Clark, part owner of Midvale Steel, when he became a foreman he expected more output from the workmen. In order to determine how much work should properly be expected, he began to study and his focus on the human component of production Taylor labeled scientific management. While Taylor worked at Midvale, he and Clarence Clark won the first tennis tournament in the 1881 US National Championships. Taylor became a student of Stevens Institute of Technology, studying via correspondence, on May 3,1884, he married Louise M. Spooner of Philadelphia. He spent time as a plant manager in Maine, in 1893, Taylor opened an independent consulting practice in Philadelphia. His business card read Consulting Engineer - Systematizing Shop Management and Manufacturing Costs a Specialty, through these consulting experiences, Taylor perfected his management system. In 1898 he joined Bethlehem Steel in order to solve an expensive machine-shop capacity problem, as a result, he and Maunsel White, with a team of assistants, developed high speed steel, paving the way for greatly increased mass production
32.
Alexander Tairov
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Alexander Yakovlevich Tairov was one of the leading innovators of theatrical art, and one of the most enduring theatre directors in Russia, and through the Soviet era. Aleksandr Tairov was born Aleksandr Yakovlevich Korenblit on July 6,1885, in Romny, Ukraine and his father, Yakov Korenblit, was the headmaster of a primary school in Berdichev. At the age of 10, young Tairov moved to Kiev and settled with his aunt and he took part in amateur performances and assumed the name Tairov as a pseudonym. In 1904 he enrolled in the Law School at Kiev University and that same year Tairov married his cousin, Olga. In 1905 Tairov opposed the pogroms of Jews in Kiev and he was arrested by the Tsars police and imprisoned. His second arrest led him to a decision to move from Kiev to St. Petersburg, in 1906 Tairov was invited by the famous Russian actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya and joined her theatre as an actor under directorship of Vsevolod Meyerhold. At the same time Tairov also continued his studies at the Law school of St. Petersburg University, there he started his lifelong friendship with Anatoli Lunacharsky. He collaborated with Vsevolod Meyerhold on a joint production of a play by Paul Claudel, both directors were creating new experimental models for theatre in Russia. Tairov felt that the work of Meyerholds actors was dictated by the production concept, soon Tairov left to join Pavel Gaideburovs company where he was asked to direct. Tairov created a prototype of his Chamber Theatre as synthetic theatre with high goals in mind and he established ideal discipline at his chamber theatre. Tairovs experimental approach spread to all phases of creating a show including even the rehearsals. He used the music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Frédéric Chopin as a way of helping his actors achieve a state of mind. In 1912 Tairov was invited to direct a play in collaboration with the Russian Drama Theatre in Riga, there he was once again attacked by the local anti-Semites and was banned by the local authorities from staying and working in the city of Riga. The conflict took two weeks to resolve, Tairov prevailed, he stayed and completed his work for the Russian Drama Theatre in Riga. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Tairov converted to Evangelical Lutheranism, in 1913 Tairov moved to Moscow. There he joined a corporation of attorneys at law and could continue a comfortable career, instead Tairov established himself as important anti-realist director. With his wife, the actress Alisa Koonen, he founded the Kamerny Theatre in 1914, it became the center of creativity for many Russian actors, artists, writers. Tairov was the first director in Russia to stage The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and he staged classical play of Kalidasa - Sakuntala, plays of Valery Bryusov, Eugene ONeill, J. B. Priestley, Oscar Wilde, and other contemporary writers
33.
Aleksandra Ekster
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She was born Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Grigorovich in Białystok, in the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire to a wealthy Belarusian family. Her father, Aleksandr Grigorovich, was a wealthy Belarusian businessman, young Aleksandra received an excellent private education, studying languages, music, art, and taking private drawing lessons. Soon her parents moved to Kyiv, and Asya, as called by her friends, attended Kiev gymnasium St. Olga and Kiev Art School, Aleksandra graduated in painting from Kiev Art School in 1906. In 1908, Aleksandra Grigorovich married a successful Kiev lawyer, Nikolai Evgenyevich Ekster, the Eksters belonged to cultural and intellectual elite of Kiev. She spent several months with her husband in Paris, and there she attended Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse, from 1908 to 1924 she intermittently lived in Kiev, St. Petersburg, Odessa, Paris, Rome and Moscow. In 1908 she participated in an exhibition together with members of the group Zveno organized by David Burliuk, Wladimir Burliuk, in Paris, Aleksandra Ekster was a personal friend of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who introduced her to Gertrude Stein. She exhibited six works at the Salon de la Section dOr, Galerie La Boétie, Paris, October 1912, with Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and others. In that same year she participated with the “Russians” Archipenko, Koulbine, in 1915 she joined the group of avant-garde artists Supremus. Her friend introduced her to the poet Apollinaire, who took her to Picassos workshop, according to Moscow Chamber Theatre actress Alice Coonen, In Parisian household there was a conspicuous peculiar combination of European culture with Ukrainian life. On the walls between Picasso and Braque paintings there was Ukrainian embroidery, on the floor was a Ukrainian carpet, at the table they served clay pots, colorful majolica plates of dumplings. Under the avant-guard umbrella, Ekster has been noted to be a suprematist and constructivist painter as well as an influencer of the Art Deco movement. While not confined within a movement, Exter was one of the most experimental women of the avant-garde. Ekster absorbed from many sources and cultures in order to develop her own original style, Ekster later founded a teaching and production workshop in Kiev. Vadym Meller, Anatol Petrytsky, Kliment Redko, Tchelitchew, Shifrin, Nikritin worked there, also during this period she was one of the leading stage designers of Alexander Tairovs Chamber Theatre. In 1919 together with other avant-garde artists Kliment Redko and Nina Genke-Meller she decorated the streets and squares of Kiev and she worked with Vadym Meller as a costume designer in a ballet studio of the dancer Bronislava Nijinska. In 1921 she became a director of the elementary course Color at the Higher Artistic-Technical Workshop in Moscow and her work was displayed alongside that of other Constructivist artists at the 5x5=25 exhibition held in Moscow in 1921. In line with her eclectic avant-guard-like style, Ekster’s early paintings strongly influenced her design as well as her book illustrations. All of Ekster’s works, no matter the medium, stick to her distinct style and her works are vibrant, playful, dramatic, and theatrical in composition, subject matter, and color
34.
Bertolt Brecht
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Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director of the 20th century. Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was born in February 1898 in Augsburg, Bavaria, Brechts mother was a devout Protestant and his father a Catholic. The modest house where he was born is preserved as a Brecht Museum. His father worked for a mill, becoming its managing director in 1914. Thanks to his mothers influence, Brecht knew the Bible, a familiarity that would have an effect on his writing. From her, too, came the image of the self-denying woman that recurs in his drama. Brechts home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied, at school in Augsburg he met Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a lifelong creative partnership. Neher designed many of the sets for Brechts dramas and helped to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their epic theatre, when Brecht was 16, the First World War broke out. Initially enthusiastic, Brecht soon changed his mind on seeing his classmates swallowed by the army and his expulsion was only prevented through the intervention of his religion teacher. On his fathers recommendation, Brecht sought a loophole by registering for a course at Munich University. There he studied drama with Arthur Kutscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist, from July 1916, Brechts newspaper articles began appearing under the new name Bert Brecht. Brecht was drafted into service in the autumn of 1918, only to be posted back to Augsburg as a medical orderly in a military VD clinic. In July 1919, Brecht and Paula Banholzer had a son, some time in either 1920 or 1921, Brecht took a small part in the political cabaret of the Munich comedian Karl Valentin. Brechts diaries for the few years record numerous visits to see Valentin perform. Brecht compared Valentin to Charlie Chaplin, for his virtually complete rejection of mimicry and he did short sketches in which he played refractory employees, orchestral musicians or photographers, who hated their employers and made them look ridiculous. The employer was played by his partner, Liesl Karlstadt, a popular woman comedian who used to pad herself out, anyone can be creative, he quipped, its rewriting other people thats a challenge. Brecht completed his second play, Drums in the Night. Between November 1921 and April 1922 Brecht made acquaintance with many people in the Berlin cultural scene
35.
Erwin Piscator
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Erwin Friedrich Max Piscator was born on 17 December 1893 in the small Prussian village of Greifenstein-Ulm, son of Carl Piscator, a merchant, and his wife Antonia Laparose. His family was descended from Johannes Piscator, a Protestant theologian who produced an important translation of the Bible in 1600, the family moved to the university town Marburg in 1899 where Piscator attended the Gymnasium Philippinum. In the autumn of 1913, he attended a private Munich drama school and enrolled at University of Munich to study German, philosophy, Piscator also took Arthur Kutschers famous seminar in theatre history which Bertolt Brecht was also later to attend. He began his career in the autumn of 1914, in small unpaid roles at the Munich Court Theatre. In 1896, Karl Lautenschläger had installed one of the worlds first revolving stages at that theatre, during the First World War Piscator was drafted into the German army, serving in a front-line infantry unit as a Landsturm soldier from the spring of 1915. In summer 1917, having participated in the battles at Ypres Salient and been in hospital once, in November 1918, when the armistice was declared, Piscator gave a speech in Hasselt at the first meeting of a revolutionary Soldiers Council. As stage director at the Volksbühne, and later as managing director at his own theatre and his dramatic aims were utilitarian — to influence voters or clarify left-wing policies. He used mechanized sets, lectures, movies, and mechanical devices that appealed to his audiences, in 1926, his updated production of Friedrich Schillers The Robbers at the distinguished Preußisches Staatstheater in Berlin provoked widespread controversy. Piscator cut the text heavily and reinterpreted it as a vehicle for his political beliefs and he presented the protagonist Karl Moor as a substantially self-absorbed insurgent. As Karls foil, Piscator made the character of Spiegelberg, often presented as a sinister figure, Spiegelberg appeared as a Trotskyist intellectual, slightly reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin with his cane and bowler hat. As he died, the audience heard The Internationale sung, Piscator founded the influential Piscator-Bühne in Berlin in 1927. In 1928 he produced an adaptation of the unfinished episodic comic Czech novel The Good Soldier Schweik. The dramaturgical collective that produced this adaptation included Bertolt Brecht, Brecht later described it as a montage from the novel. In 1929 Piscator published his own work on the theory of theatre, as John Willett put it, throughout the pre-Hitler years Piscators commitment to the Russian Revolution was a decisive factor in all his work. With Hitlers rise to power in 1933, Piscators stay in the Soviet Union became exile, in July 1936, Piscator left the Soviet Union for France. In 1937, he married dancer Maria Ley in Paris, Bertolt Brecht was one of the groomsmen. When Piscator and Ley subsequently migrated to the United States in 1939, Piscator was invited by Alvin Johnson, Piscator returned to West Germany in 1951 due to McCarthy era political pressure. He was appointed manager and director of the Freie Volksbühne in West Berlin in 1962, until his death in 1966, Piscator was a major exponent of contemporary and documentary theatre
36.
Tatlin's Tower
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Tatlin’s Tower, or the project for the Monument to the Third International, was a design for a grand monumental building by the Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin, that was never built. It was planned to be erected in Petrograd after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as the headquarters, Tatlins Constructivist tower was to be built from industrial materials, iron, glass and steel. In materials, shape and function, it was envisaged as a symbol of modernity. It would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the towers main form was a twin helix which spiraled up to 400 m in height, around which visitors would be transported with the aid of various mechanical devices. The main framework would contain four large suspended geometric structures and these structures would rotate at different rates. At the base of the structure was a cube which was designed as a venue for lectures, conferences and legislative meetings, above the cube would be a smaller pyramid housing executive activities and completing a rotation once a month. Further up would be a cylinder, which was to house a centre, issuing news bulletins and manifestos via telegraph, radio and loudspeaker. At the top, there would be a hemisphere for radio equipment, there were also plans to install a gigantic open-air screen on the cylinder, and a further projector which would be able to cast messages across the clouds on any overcast day. Symbolically, the tower was said to represent the aspirations of its originating country, soviet critic Viktor Shklovsky is said to have called it a monument made of steel, glass and revolution. There are models of Tatlin’s Tower at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, at Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, a 1,42 model was built at The Royal Academy of Arts, London in November 2011. In 1989 the firm Edra produced a sofa named Tatlin inspired to the tower, architect, Vladimir Tatlin Team Creative Collective, Iosif A. Meerzon, Pavel Vinogradov, Tevel Markovich Shapiro Its tilt is the same as Earth,23.5 degrees. The cube was designed to host the congresses of the Third International, the pyramid would make a spin in 30 days and would be the place for the bureaucracy. The thin cylinder was to revolve in a day and host a newspaper, a radio station was to be placed in the little dome at the top. Structure style, constructivism Shukhov Tower Tower Bawher, a short film inspired by Tatlins Tower. A. The Monument to the Third International,1920  Tatlins Tower, Tatlins Tower Short Film on YouTube – silent movie, by Lutz Becker,3,40. Tatlin Tower Hometree in Parliament Square – 3D video animation of a possible Tatlins Tower construction in London, UK, on International Workers Day, Sat 1 May 2010, by Tim Dalinian Jones,1,20
37.
George Grosz
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George Grosz was a German artist known especially for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group during the Weimar Republic and he emigrated to the United States in 1933, and became a naturalized citizen in 1938. Abandoning the style and subject matter of his work, he exhibited regularly. In 1956 he returned to Berlin where he died, George Grosz was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß in Berlin, Germany, the son of a pub owner. Grosz grew up in the Pomeranian town of Stolp, where his mother became the keeper of the local Hussars Officers mess after his father died in 1901. At the urging of his cousin, the young Grosz began attending a weekly drawing class taught by a painter named Grot. Grosz developed his skills further by drawing meticulous copies of the scenes of Eduard von Grützner. From 1909 to 1911, he studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where his teachers were Richard Müller, Robert Sterl, Raphael Wehle and he subsequently studied at the Berlin College of Arts and Crafts under Emil Orlik. In November 1914 Grosz volunteered for service, in the hope that by thus preempting conscription he would avoid being sent to the front. He was given a discharge after hospitalization for sinusitis in 1915, in January 1917 he was drafted for service, but in May he was discharged as permanently unfit. In the last months of 1918, Grosz joined the Spartacist League and he was arrested during the Spartakus uprising in January 1919, but escaped using fake identification documents. In 1921 Grosz was accused of insulting the army, which resulted in a 300 German Mark fine and the destruction of the collection Gott mit uns, by contrast, in 1942 Time magazine identified Grosz as a pacifist. In 1922 Grosz traveled to Russia with the writer Martin Andersen Nexø, upon their arrival in Murmansk they were briefly arrested as spies, after their credentials were approved they were allowed to meet with Grigory Zinoviev, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and Vladimir Lenin. Groszs six-month stay in the Soviet Union left him unimpressed by what he had seen and he ended his membership in the KPD in 1923, although his political positions were little changed. Bitterly anti-Nazi, Grosz left Germany shortly before Hitler came to power, in June 1932, he accepted an invitation to teach the summer semester at the Art Students League of New York. In October 1932, Grosz returned to Germany, but on January 12,1933 he, Grosz became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1938, and made his home in Bayside, New York. In the 1930s he taught at the Art Students League, where one of his students was Romare Bearden and he taught at the Art Students League intermittently until 1955. In America, Grosz determined to make a break with his past
38.
John Heartfield
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John Heartfield was an artist and a pioneer in the use of art as a political weapon. Some of his photomontages were anti-Nazi and anti-fascist statements, Heartfield also created book jackets for authors such as Upton Sinclair, as well as stage sets for such noted playwrights as Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator. John Heartfield was born on 19 June 1891 in Berlin-Schmargendorf and his father was Franz Herzfeld, a socialist writer, and his mother was Alice, a textile worker and political activist. In 1899, Helmut, his brother Wieland Herzfelde, and his sisters Lotte, for a while, the four children resided with an uncle in the small town of Aigens. Heartfield, his brother and George Grosz launched the publishing house Malik-Verlag in 1917, in 1908, Heartfield studied art in Munich at the Royal Bavarian Arts and Crafts School. Two commercial designers, Albert Weisgerber and Ludwig Hohlwein, were early influences, on the back of a photograph which was taken in 1912, his name is written as Helmut. While living in Berlin, in 1917, he anglicised his name from Helmut Herzfeld to John Heartfield, in 1916, crowds in the street were shouting, Gott strafe England. In 1916, John Heartfield and George Grosz experimented with pasting pictures together, in January,1918, Heartfield joined the newly founded German Communist Party. In 1917, Heartfield became a member of Berlin Club Dada, Heartfield later became active in the Dada movement, helping to organise the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe in Berlin in 1920. Dadaists were the lions of the German art scene, provocateurs who disrupted public art gatherings. They labeled traditional art trivial and bourgeois, Heartfield was a member of a circle of German titans that included Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Höch, and a host of others. Heartfield built theatre sets for Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, using Heartfields minimal props and stark stages, Brecht interrupted his plays at key junctures to have the audience to be part of the action and not to lose themselves in it. In 1919, Heartfield was dismissed from the Reichswehr film service because of his support for the strike that followed the assassination of Karl Liebknecht, with George Grosz, he founded Die Pleite, a satirical magazine. Heartfield met Bertolt Brecht in 1924, though he was a prolific producer of stage sets and book jackets, Heartfields main form of expression was photomontage. Heartfield produced the first political photomontages and he mainly worked for two publications, the daily Die Rote Fahne and the weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, the latter of which published the works for which Heartfield is best remembered. In the Museum of Modern Art in New York hangs a George Grosz Montage entitled, during the 1920s, Heartfield produced a great number of photomontages, many of which were reproduced as dust jackets for books such as his montage for Upton Sinclairs The Millennium. Heartfield lived in Berlin until April 1933, when the National Socialists took power, on Good Friday, the SS broke into his apartment, and the 52 Heartfield escaped by jumping from his balcony and hiding in a trash bin. He left Germany by walking over the Sudeten Mountains to Czechoslovakia, in Czechoslovakia, John Heartfield rose to number-five on the Gestapos most-wanted list
39.
Bruno Taut
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Bruno Julius Florian Taut was a prolific German architect, urban planner and author active during the Weimar period. He is known for his works as well as his designs. Taut was born in Königsberg in 1880, after secondary school, he studied at the Baugewerkschule. In the following years, Taut worked in the offices of architects in Hamburg. In 1903 he was employed by Bruno Möhring in Berlin, where he acquainted himself with Jugendstil, from 1904 to 1908, Taut worked in Stuttgart for Theodor Fischer and studied urban planning. He received his first commission through Fischer in 1906, which involved renovation of the church in Unterriexingen. In 1908, he returned to Berlin to study art history and construction at the Royal Technical Higher School of Charlottenburg, a year later, he established the architecture firm Taut & Hoffmann with Franz Hoffmann. Tauts first large projects came in 1913 and he became a committed follower of the Garden City movement, evidenced by his design for the Falkenberg Estate. His aim was to make a whole building out of glass instead of using glass as a surface or decorative material. He created glass-treaded metal staircases, a waterfall with underlighting, and his sketches for the publication Alpine Architecture are the work of an unabashed utopian visionary, and he is classified as a Modernist and, in particular, as an Expressionist. Much of Tauts literary work in German remains untranslated into English, muthesius also introduced him to some of the Deutscher Werkbund group of architects, including Walter Gropius. Taut had socialist sympathies, and before World War I this hindered his advancement, Tauts practical activity ended with the World War I. He became a pacifist and so avoided military service and he began to write and sketch, less to escape from the brutalities of war than to present a positive utopia in opposition to this reality. Taut designed a circular garden city with a radius of about 7 km for three million inhabitants. The City Crown was to be in the very center, mighty and inaccessible, it would have been the culmination of a community and cultural center, a skyscraper-like, purpose-free crystal building. The building contains nothing but one room which can be reached by either of two staircases to the right and to the left of the theatre and the little community center. How can I even begin to describe what it is possible to construct. Said Taut of the City Crown, Taut completed two housing projects in Magdeburg from 1912 through 1915, which were influenced directly by the humane functionalism and urban design solutions of the garden city philosophy
40.
Ilya Ehrenburg
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Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure. Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union and he became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist – in particular, as a reporter in three wars. His articles on the Second World War have provoked intense controversies in West Germany, the novel The Thaw gave its name to an entire era of Soviet politics, namely, the liberalization after the death of Joseph Stalin. Ehrenburgs travel writing also had great resonance, as did to a greater extent his memoir People, Years, Life. In addition, Ehrenburg wrote a succession of works of poetry, ilya Ehrenburg was born in Kiev, Russian Empire to a Lithuanian Jewish family, his father was an engineer. Ehrenburgs family was not religiously affiliated, he came into contact with the practices of Judaism only through his maternal grandfather. Ehrenburg never joined any religious denomination and he learned no Yiddish, although he edited the Black Book, which was written in Yiddish. He considered himself Russian and, later, a Soviet citizen and he took strong public positions against antisemitism. He wrote in Russian even during his years abroad. When Ehrenburg was four years old, the moved to Moscow. At school, he met Nikolai Bukharin, who was two grades above him, the two remained friends until Bukharins death in 1938 during the Great Purge. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1905, both Ehrenburg and Bukharin got involved in activities of the Bolshevik organisation. In 1908, when Ehrenburg was seventeen years old, the tsarist secret police arrested him for five months and he was beaten up and lost some teeth. Finally he was allowed to go abroad and chose Paris for his exile, in Paris, he started to work in the Bolshevik organisation, meeting Vladimir Lenin and other prominent exiles. But soon he left these circles and the Communist Party, Ehrenburg became attached to the bohemian life in the Paris quarter of Montparnasse. He began to write poems, regularly visited the cafés of Montparnasse and got acquainted with a lot of artists, especially Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Jules Pascin, Foreign writers whose works Ehrenburg translated included those of Francis Jammes. During World War I, Ehrenburg became a war correspondent for a St. Petersburg newspaper and he wrote a series of articles about the mechanized war that later on were also published as a book. His poetry now also concentrated on subjects of war and destruction, as in On the Eve, Nikolai Gumilev, a famous symbolistic poet, wrote favourably about Ehrenburgs progress in poetry
41.
New Economic Policy
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The New Economic Policy was an economic policy of Soviet Russia proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who described it as a progression towards state capitalism within the workers state of the USSR. ”The NEP represented a more capitalism-oriented economic policy, deemed necessary after the Russian Civil War of 1917 to 1922, to foster the economy of the country, which was almost ruined. In addition, the NEP abolished prodrazvyorstka and introduced prodnalog, a tax on farmers, other policies included the monetary reform and the attraction of foreign capital. The NEP policy created a new category of people called NEPmen, Joseph Stalin abolished the New Economic Policy in 1928. In November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized control of most of Russia and this led to the Russian Civil War, pitting the Bolsheviks against the Whites and other counter-revolutionary forces. During this period, the Bolsheviks attempted to administer Russias economy purely by decree, farmers and factory workers were ordered to produce, and food and goods were seized and issued by decree. While this policy enabled the Bolshevik regime to overcome some difficulties, it soon caused disruptions. Producers who were not directly compensated for their labor often stopped working, leading to widespread shortages, combined with the devastation of the war, these were major hardships for the Russian people and diminished popular support for the Bolsheviks. At the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks controlled cities, although the fighting was nearly all outside urban areas, urban populations decreased substantially. The war disrupted transportation, and basic public services, shipments of food and fuel by railroad and water dramatically decreased. City residents first experienced a shortage of heating oil, then coal, populations in northern towns declined an average of 24%. Northern towns were more deprived of food than towns in the agricultural south, petrograd alone lost 850,000 people, half of the urban population decline during the Civil War. Hunger and poor conditions drove residents out of cities, workers migrated south to get peasants surpluses. Recent migrants to cities left because they still had ties to villages, urban workers formed the Bolshevik base of support, so the exodus posed a serious problem. Factory production severely slowed or halted, factories lacked 30,000 workers in 1919. To survive, city dwellers sold personal valuables, made artisan craft goods for sale or barter, the acute need for food drove them to obtain 50%–60% of food through illegal trading. The shortage of cash caused the market to use a barter system. Drought and frost led to the Russian famine of 1921, in which millions starved to death, especially in the Volga region, when no bread arrived in Moscow in 1921, workers became hungry and disillusioned. They organised demonstrations against the Partys policy of privileged rations, in which the Red Army, Party members, the Kronstadt rebellion of soldiers and sailors broke out in March 1921, fueled by anarchism and populism
42.
Flapper
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Flappers were a generation of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior. Flappers were seen as brash for wearing makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual manner, smoking, driving automobiles. The slang word flapper, describing a woman, is sometimes supposed to refer to a young bird flapping its wings while learning to fly. The slang word flap was used for a prostitute as early as 1631. By the 1890s, the flapper was emerging in England as popular slang both for a very young prostitute, and in a more general – and less derogatory sense – of any lively mid-teenage girl. In 1907 English actor George Graves explained it to Americans as theatrical slang for young female stage performers. The flapper was also known as a dancer, who danced liked a bird-flapping her arms while doing the Charleston dance move and this move became quite a competitive dance during this era. Call the subject of these lines the flapper, the appropriateness of this term does not move me to such whole-hearted admiration of the amazing powers of enriching our language which the Americans modestly acknowledge they possess. The sketch is of a girl in a frock with a long skirt, quite untrimmed, its plainness being relieved by a sash knotted carelessly around the skirt. By 1911, a newspaper review indicates the mischievous and flirtatious flapper was an established stage-type, tillers use of the phrase come out means to make a formal entry into society on reaching womanhood. In polite society at the time, a girl who had not come out would still be classed as a child. She would be expected to keep a low profile on social occasions, although the word was still largely understood as referring to high-spirited teenagers gradually in Britain it was being extended to describe any impetuous immature woman. By late 1914, the British magazine Vanity Fair was reporting that the Flapper was beginning to disappear in England, under this influence, the meaning of the term changed somewhat, to apply to independent, pleasure-seeking, khaki-crazy young women. By 1920, the term had taken on the meaning of the flapper generation style. In his lecture that year on Britains surplus of women caused by the loss of young men in war. The frivolous, scantily-clad, jazzing flapper, irresponsible and undisciplined, to whom a dance, by the mid-1930s in Britain, although still occasionally used, the word flapper had become associated with the past. In 1936 a Times journalist grouped it with such as blotto as out-dated slang, evokes a distant echo of glad rags. It recalls a past which is not yet period, one cause of the change in young womens behavior was World War I which ended in November 1918
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