Constructivism

Constructivism. A movement or ideology in abstract art that originated in Russia in about 1914, became dominant there for a few years after the 1917 Revolution, and in the 1920s spread to the West, where it has subsequently been influential on a wide spectrum of artists. Constructivism is typically characterized by the use of industrial materials—such as glass, plastic, and standardized metal parts—arranged in clear formal relationships, but the meaning to be attached to the word varies according to context, and some writers prefer to use the terms ‘Soviet Constructivism’ (or ‘Russian Constructivism’) and ‘European Constructivism’ (or ‘International Constructivism’) to make a distinction between the original movement and its much more diffuse aftermath. Even in the context of revolutionary Russia, however, the meaning of the word is far from clear-cut.

The father of Constructivism was Vladimir Tatlin, who visited Paris in 1914 and on his return to Russia began making abstract Relief Constructions using materials such as sheet metal, wood, and wire. He was influenced by the sculptural experiments of Picasso, who had used a variety of ingeniously assembled odds and ends, and perhaps also by the Futurist sculptural manifesto (1913), in which Boccioni similarly advocated a move away from the traditional techniques of modelling and carving in favour of sculpture that was constructed from various new materials—this was the essential idea behind Constructivism. From his reliefs Tatlin went on to develop small openwork structures (sometimes hanging), and several other artists, including Alexander Rodchenko, created similar works in the years immediately after the 1917 Revolution. The Revolution created a ferment of enthusiasm in Russia for the building of a better society, with machinery seen as a liberating force, and in this climate Tatlin's idea of investigating and exploiting industrial materials came into its own. Initially Soviet Constructivism was inseparable from politics, and the revolutionary zeal for socially useful art led many Soviet artists to conclude that traditional ‘fine art’ was dead. In this way, a term that had originated in Tatlin's modest reliefs expanded to embrace the whole of applied art, and ‘by 1925 Constructivism had become a blanket term for any angular designs applied to furniture, fabrics, porcelain or theatre sets’ ( Robert Auty and Dimitry Obolensky (eds.), An Introduction to Russian Art and Architecture, 1980).

Many artists who were not prepared to abandon traditional art for industrial design left Russia at this time. Among them were the brothers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, who left in 1922 and 1923 respectively. Although they wanted to reflect modern technology in their work, they rejected the idea that art must serve an obvious social purpose; they thought that ‘fine art’ could make an important contribution to society by being spiritually uplifting and they conceived a purely abstract type of sculpture that used industrial materials such as plastic and glass. It is from their work that European or International Constructivism derives and each of them played an important part in spreading their ideals. In England Gabo was co-editor of Circle (1937), in which he published his essay ‘The Constructive Idea’. The subtitle of Circle is International Survey of Constructive Art, an indication of the ‘international constructive tendency’ that was recognized at this time. Among the other contributors to the volume, Moholy-Nagy was particularly influential in the spread of Constructivism through his teaching at the Bauhaus and elsewhere. (Meanwhile, Constructivism in the Soviet Union was dead by this time, killed—like all other modern forms of expression—by Socialist Realism.)

Gabo's concept of Constructivism, as expressed in his essay in Circle, was vague, being equated with ‘creative human genius’ in art, science, or any other sphere, and since the Second World War the term has been applied to a very broad range of work. Sometimes it is used as a rough equivalent of ‘geometrical abstraction’. In Britain, however, the word is often used to refer specifically to a type of work—reliefs and free-standing constructs in metal or perspex—that became popular with a group of abstract artists in the 1950s and 1960s, including Kenneth and Mary Martin, and Victor Pasmore.