Vkhutemas

Vkhutemas (Vysshie Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskiye Masterskiye: Higher Technical-Artistic Studios). An art school in Moscow set up after the Revolution by combining the former School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture with the Stroganov Art School; when it was founded in 1918 it was called Svomas, but it was renamed Vkhutemas in 1920. Gabo describes the workings of the school as follows (quoted by Camilla Gray in The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922, 1962): ‘it was both a school and a free academy where not only the current teaching of special professions was carried out (there were seven departments: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Ceramics, Metalwork and Woodwork, Textiles, and Typography) but general discussions were held and seminars conducted among the students on diverse problems where the public could participate, and artists not officially on the faculty could speak and give lessons. It had an audience of several thousand students, although a shifting one … There was a free exhange between workshops and also the private studios such as mine … During these seminars, as well as during the general meetings, many ideological questions between opposing artists in our abstract group were thrashed out. These gatherings had a much greater influence on the later development of constructive art than all the teaching.’ Among the artists who had studios and taught in the Vkhutemas were Kandinsky, Malevich, Pevsner, and Tatlin. Gabo was not officially on the staff, but he taught sculpture there. The programme of the Vkhutemas was controlled by the Institute of Artistic Culture (Inkhuk). In 1925 the name was changed from Vkhutemas to Vkhutein (Higher Technical Institute) and in 1930 the school was reorganized under central Communist Party control.

George Heard Hamilton writes of Vkhutemas: ‘The combination in one institution of theory and practice in both fine arts and the crafts … was symptomatic of the Soviets' desire to eliminate class distinctions between artist and artisan, as well as to emphasize the structural, materialistic basis of all artistic production. It may also account for the fact that Constructivist design had a more lasting effect in the crafts, especially in typography, than in the major arts after further “leftist” experimentation was prohibited.’