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.
Sculpture
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Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. It is one of the plastic arts, a wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling, or molded, or cast. However, most ancient sculpture was painted, and this has been lost. Those cultures whose sculptures have survived in quantities include the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, India and China, the Western tradition of sculpture began in ancient Greece, and Greece is widely seen as producing great masterpieces in the classical period. During the Middle Ages, Gothic sculpture represented the agonies and passions of the Christian faith, the revival of classical models in the Renaissance produced famous sculptures such as Michelangelos David. Relief is often classified by the degree of projection from the wall into low or bas-relief, high relief, sunk-relief is a technique restricted to ancient Egypt. Relief sculpture may also decorate steles, upright slabs, usually of stone, techniques such as casting, stamping and moulding use an intermediate matrix containing the design to produce the work, many of these allow the production of several copies. The term sculpture is used mainly to describe large works. The very large or colossal statue has had an enduring appeal since antiquity, another grand form of portrait sculpture is the equestrian statue of a rider on horse, which has become rare in recent decades. The smallest forms of life-size portrait sculpture are the head, showing just that, or the bust, small forms of sculpture include the figurine, normally a statue that is no more than 18 inches tall, and for reliefs the plaquette, medal or coin. Sculpture is an important form of public art, a collection of sculpture in a garden setting can be called a sculpture garden. One of the most common purposes of sculpture is in form of association with religion. Cult images are common in cultures, though they are often not the colossal statues of deities which characterized ancient Greek art. The actual cult images in the innermost sanctuaries of Egyptian temples, of which none have survived, were rather small. The same is true in Hinduism, where the very simple. Some undoubtedly advanced cultures, such as the Indus Valley civilization, appear to have had no monumental sculpture at all, though producing very sophisticated figurines, the Mississippian culture seems to have been progressing towards its use, with small stone figures, when it collapsed. Other cultures, such as ancient Egypt and the Easter Island culture, from the 20th century the relatively restricted range of subjects found in large sculpture expanded greatly, with abstract subjects and the use or representation of any type of subject now common. Today much sculpture is made for intermittent display in galleries and museums, small sculpted fittings for furniture and other objects go well back into antiquity, as in the Nimrud ivories, Begram ivories and finds from the tomb of Tutankhamun
9.
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
10.
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
11.
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
12.
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
13.
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
14.
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
15.
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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