CONSTRUCTIVISM.

Constructivism was an avant-garde movement in twentieth-century art that embraced the fine arts from painting to architecture, with parallel movements in literature, theater, and film. The term was first coined in 1921 by artists in Russia, where it was closely associated with the utopian idealism generated by the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and the civil war (1918–1920). The term was used to describe an entirely new kind of creative activity in which artistic skills were harnessed not to create works of art but to design practical objects of everyday use and total environments for the new society. This movement is identified as Russian or Soviet constructivism. The term constructivism was subsequently used in Europe during the 1920s and later to describe a geometric abstract art in which the precision of the forms and their mathematical qualities evoke associations with science, engineering, and technology and with progressive social and scientific values. This broader movement is called international constructivism.

Soviet constructivism originated with the Working Group of Constructivists (Rabochaya gruppa konstruktivistov) set up in Moscow in March 1921, consisting of the critic Alexei Gan (1895–1940) and the artists Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958), Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956), Karl Ioganson [Karlis Johansons] (1890–1926), Konstantin Medunetsky (1900–1934), and the brothers Vladimir (1899–1982) and Georgy Stenberg (1900–1933). Proclaiming a new synthesis of art, industry, and politics, the group relegated their purely artistic explorations to the role of "laboratory work," aspiring to extend their creative experiments with abstract forms into the real environment by participating in the industrial manufacture of useful objects. They organized their work according to three principles: tektonika ("tectonics," or the functionally, socially, and politically appropriate use of industrial material within communist society), construction (the organization of this material for a given purpose), and faktura (the conscious handling and manipulation of material).

The concept of construction derives from the technique of building up a sculpture from distinct material elements, instead of modeling or carving the form. Invented by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), it was developed further in Russia by Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) in his Counter Reliefs of 1914 and then in his revolutionary Model for a Monument to the Third International (1920), intended to be the functioning headquarters for the organization dedicated to fomenting world revolution. The exhibition of the Model in Moscow in December 1920 inspired the formation of the constructivist group.

The constructivists developed and promoted their ideas within the Moscow Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops (VKhUTEMAS—Vysshie [gosudarstvennye] khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie), which were set up in 1920 to train artists for industry. Many figures, like Lyubov Popova (1889–1924) and Gustav Klucis (1895–1944), became associated with constructivism, while Moisei Ginzburg (1892–1946) and Alexander Vesnin (1883–1959) extended its principles into architecture. The practical results of the constructivists' aspirations can be seen in designs for workers' clothing, furniture, textiles, posters, and graphics as well as in stage productions. Notable examples are Popova's set design for Fernand Crommelynck's (1886–1970) farce The Magnanimous Cuckold of 1922 (in which a machine replaced the traditional set, and theatrical costumes were replaced by so-called production clothing or prozodezhda), Rodchenko's Workers' Club of 1925, and the Vesnin brothers' design for the Leningrad Pravda building (1924). By the late 1920s the lack of official and market support led to a general decline of constructivism, despite a late flowering of photography and photomontage, used for communist propaganda.

International constructivism as a self-conscious movement was initiated at Düsseldorf in May 1922 when the International Faction of Constructivists was organized by Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) representing Dutch De Stijl, Hans Richter (1888–1976), and El Lissitzky (1890–1941). The faction's declaration emphasized their rejection of subjectivity and individualism in favor of a more scientific and objective approach, which involved "the systematization of the means of expression" and "art as a method of organization that applies to the whole of life." Whereas the Moscow constructivists rejected art, the international constructivists saw art as an activity that embraced the making of works of art as well as the design of useful objects. Whereas the Russian constructivists were committed to communism, the international constructivists adopted a non-aligned political radicalism. The movement gained ground in Germany during the 1920s, where it was stimulated by the Erste russische Kunstausstellung of October 1922; the presence of Russian émigrés such as Lissitzky and Naum Gabo (1890–1977); and the activity of Hungarian artists such as László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), who had been inspired by the Moscow constructivists and the communist ideals of the short-lived Hungarian Revolution of 1919. Constructivist movements of various complexions were also active in Poland and Czechoslovakia. After the 1920s it becomes more difficult to disentangle constructivism from the broader history of non-objective art. In the early 1930s, as the repressive regimes of Germany and the Soviet Union effectively destroyed modernism, Paris became a haven for abstract painters and sculptors. By the end of the decade, the center of constructivism had shifted to Britain. After World War II a new generation of artists in America and Western Europe explored the aesthetic possibilities of constructivism's visual language and its scientific and mathematical resonances.

See alsoArchitecture; De Stijl; Lissitzky, El; Modernism; Moholy-Nagy, László; Painting, Avant-Garde; Theater.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bann, Stephen, ed. The Tradition of Constructivism. London, 1974.

Gough, Maria. The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution. Berkeley, Calif., 2005.

Kiaer, Christina. Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2005.

Lodder, Christina. Russian Constructivism. New Haven, Conn., and London, 1983.

Christina Lodder