Inkhuk

Inkhuk (abbreviation for Institut Khudozhestvennoi Kulturi: ‘Institute of Artistic Culture'). An organization set up in Moscow in May 1920 for the purpose of working out and implementing a programme of artistic experiment for post-Revolutionary Russia. It was a section of the Department of Fine Arts, which had been formed in 1918 under the Commissariat for People's Enlightenment (IZO Narkompros). Kandinsky was Inkhuk's first chief. At the end of 1921 sections were formed in Petrograd under Tatlin and in Vitebsk under Malevich. Many of the leading Russian artists of the day were involved in one way or another.

Originally Inkhuk was going to be run according to a programme devised by Kandinsky, but his rarefied ideas were uncongenial to most of the members, who desired an art that would contribute directly to the creation of a Communist utopia. When his programme was voted out, Kandinsky left Inkhuk, and the organization divided into two schools of thought about the form that the new art should take, named ‘laboratory art’ and ‘production art’ respectively. The pronouncements of neither side were particularly clear. Laboratory art involved a rationalizing, analytical approach to artistic creation, with a social end in view, but not necessarily the abandoning of traditional materials (such as paint and canvas). In production art the distinction between artist and engineer was to be eliminated and the artist was to become a designer or craftsman for machine production. The production group was the more influential and contributed to the rise of Constructivism. In the late 1920s Inkhuk also supported Socialist Realism.