In the late teens and early twenties, Soviet artists and designers
attempted to put their talents to use for the new communist
state. Most abandoned easel painting, even in its most radical forms,
as overly bourgeois, and turned instead to design. The
general slogan of these "constructivists" was "Art into Life" and their
goal was, as Tatlin put it, "to unite purely artistic forms with
utilitarian intentions." In their most extreme formulations, the constructivists
announced "Art is finished! It has no place in the
human labor apparatus. Labor, technology, organization...that is the
ideology of our time." (For full texts of constructivist
manifestoes, see Bowlt, pp. 205-261) Despite the ostensibly utilitarian
nature of the Constructivists' concerns, the vast majority
of their projects were utopian in nature and never reached a mass audience.
Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956)
was a student of both Malevich and Tatlin in the period just before the
Revolution. This "Collage" of
1919 combines the dynamic vertiginous axis and strict geometrical shapes
typical of Malevich's later suprematist works with the use of different
materials pioneered in Russia by Tatlin. During
the 1920s, Rodchenko became one of the leading constructivists, and
turned away from painting to photography,
furniture and poster design. In 1929, he designed costumes and sets
for Meyerhold's production of the second half of
Mayakovsky's play "The Bedbug".
Another major artist influenced heavily by Malevich and, to a lesser
extent, Tatlin was El Lissitsky
(1890-1941). Lissitsky was originally trained as an engineer and architect.
His series of "prouns" (this one is
labeled #30), experiment with Malevich-like forms which are drawn with
all the precision an architect could muster.
They hold a delicate and tense balance between seeming suspended in
mid-air and about to collapse.
Like many other artists who supported
the Bolshevik coup of October 1917, Lissitsky actively attempted to
advance the ideas of the state
by bringing his art to the masses. This propaganda, or agitational (agit-prop)
panel was photographed on a street in Vitebsk in 1920. The inscription
on the panel reads "The Machine tool depots
of the factories and plants await you. Let's get industry moving."
In 1919 and 1920, Vladimir Tatlin produced sketches and a model for
what was projected to be a Monument to the
Third International. This utopian design, so typical for the frenzied
mood of Russians in the years immediately
following the Bolshevik revolution was, in theory, to have been taller
than that great symbol of modernity, the Eiffel
Tower. Its spiraling structure, however, was to lend the Monument a
structural dynamism lacking in Eiffel's more
symmetrical (and more stable) design. In theory, the Monument was to
house a telegraph office, and other office
space, but Tatlin, who was no architect, did not even attempt to work
out the engineering problems that would have
had to be overcome. Instead, like so many other early Soviet projects
of utopian intent, Tatlin's tower (as it came to
be called) never went past the planning stages. The model was exhibited--and
photographed--in Petrograd in
November 1920, at the same time as the mass theatrical action, "The
Staging of the Winter Palace", was performed.