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, indeed, Soviet Constructivism was inseparable from politics, and was meant to be neither ‘an abstract style in art nor even an art, per se. At its core, it was first and foremost the expression of a deeply motivated conviction that the artist could contribute to enhance the physical and intellectual needs of the whole of society by entering directly into a rapport with machine production, with architectural engineering and with the graphic and photographic means of communication. To meet the material needs, to express the aspirations, to organize and systematize the feelings of the revolutionary proletariat—that was their aim: not political art, but the socialization of art’ ( Aaron Scharf, ‘Constructivism', in Nikos Stangos, ed., Concepts of Modern Art, 1974).

The most heroic celebration of this faith in a Communist society was intended to be Tatlin's gigantic Monument to the Third International; it never progressed beyond a wooden model, exhibited in 1920, but it has become the great symbol of Soviet Constructivist ideals. Several other major projects remained unrealized because of lack of funds and materials, but the new spirit was fervently expressed in a whole range of objects and activities, including the decoration of propaganda boats and trains (see AGITPROP ART). This revolutionary zeal for socially useful art led many Soviet artists to conclude that traditional ‘fine art’ was dead. In 1921, for example, Rodchenko and several associates signed a joint declaration in which they acknowledged ‘self-sufficient easel painting as extinct and our activities as mere painters useless', and the following year Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova published the ‘Programme of the First Working Group of Constructivists', in which they declared ‘uncompromising war on art'. 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. Their ideas were expressed in the Realistic Manifesto, which they published in Moscow in 1920; in this they appealed for ‘the construction of the new Great Style’ and wrote that ‘Space and time are the only forms on which life is built and hence art must be constructed.’ It is from their work that European or International Constructivism derives, and each of them played an important part in spreading their ideals. Pevsner spent the rest of his life in Paris, which was the main centre of abstract art in the interwar years (see ABSTRACTION-CRÉATION), and Gabo lived successively in Germany, France, England, and the USA. In England he 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 one of the outstanding representatives of this tendency, and 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. In the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1949–60, the article ‘Konstruktivizm’ begins: ‘A formalistic tendency in bourgeois art, which developed after the First World War, 1914–18. Anti-humanistic by nature, hostile to realism, Constructivism appeared as the expression of the deepest decline of bourgeois culture in the period of the general crisis of capitalism.’ )

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; in 1974 a critic remarked that ‘Constructivism must be just about the most abused term in current art usage’ (Ronald Hunt, ‘Constructivism Mistaken', Studio International, Nov. 1974). Sometimes it is used as a rough equivalent of ‘geometrical abstraction'— George Rickey's book Constructivism: Origins and Evolution (1968), for example, encompasses Hard-Edge Painting, Minimal art, and much else besides. 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. These artists were influenced by Charles Biedermann's book Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge (1948), and one of them— Anthony Hill—wrote that Biedermann had helped them to ‘accept the construction as the successor to the old domain of painting and sculpture'. Apart from Hill, the other British Constructivists of this time included Robert Adams, Adrian Heath, Kenneth and Mary Martin, and Victor Pasmore, who showed their work as a group at the ‘British Abstract Art’ exhibition at the AIA Gallery, London, in 1951. Three years later John Ernest (1922–94) and Stephen Gilbert (1910– ) joined the group, which maintained its identity until about 1960. In addition to making their characteristic small constructions, these artists sometimes had the opportunity to put their ideas into practice on an architectural scale—for example Mary Martin at Musgrave Park Hospital, Belfast, and Pasmore at Peterlee New Town. Their work and teaching influenced many artists of the next generation, including Peter Lowe (1938– ) and Gillian Wis e-Ciobotaru (1936– ), who were among the members of a Constructivist association called Systems Group, founded in 1969.