CategoriesStyles and Movements
Constructivism
Russian avant-garde movement of the late 1910s and 1920s that turned abstract art towards engineering, design and building a new society.
26 works · 10 related artists
About
At the 5x5=25 exhibition in Moscow in 1921, Alexander Rodchenko showed three canvases each painted a single flat red, yellow or blue, and declared that painting had reached its end. Artists around him, including Varvara Stepanova and Lyubov Popova, wanted to leave the easel for the factory, treating art as the organisation of real materials for useful ends.
The groundwork came from Vladimir Tatlin, whose reliefs of wood, metal and glass from 1914 and model for the Monument to the Third International (1919–20) treated materials as structure. In practice Constructivism produced textiles, workers' clothing, stage sets, typography and propaganda posters. Popova and Stepanova designed printed fabrics; Rodchenko photographed buildings from dizzying angles; Gustav Klutsis and El Lissitzky assembled photomontages. Lissitzky and Naum Gabo helped carry these ideas to Western Europe, where they fed the Bauhaus and later geometric abstraction. Look for diagonals, primary colours and industrial materials.
