CONSTRUCTIVISM

Constructivism in Russia developed during WW1 and continued until its suppression by Stalin at the end of the 1920s. Its roots were in the Russian Cubo-Futurist movement, but it also owes much to the absract work of Malevich and the relief forms of of Dada. Painters like Tatin and Rodchenko started to create non-objective paintings and developed those ideas into reliefs and constructions in which they explored the material properties of the objects and the objects spatial presence, this then developed an industrial art and design style.

Constructivist eventually reached the point were traditional painting no longer held any relevance to the artistic process. The period of the Constuctivist style goes hand in hand with the period of revolution and civil war in Russia, these elements embraced each other, they both held the principle of out with the old and in with the new. The St Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts was dibanded in 1918 and replaced by the Commissariat of Enlightenment, many of the Constructivist artists produced work to promote the new revolutionary ideals in many different fields of the cultural landscape, we see new and exciting art and design ideas in, graphics, book design, posters, film and theatre. Lenins New Economic Policy of 1921 created new opportunities for artists to extend their commercial work alongside individual co-operatives and state run retailing.

By the end of the 1920s Stalin had become supreme leader of what was now known as the Soviet Union, he implemented a reversal of the N.E.P and began to supress modern artistic ideas, which were replaced by a tightly, state, controlled Socialist Realism. How ever the ideas of the Constuctivists had a huge impact on the modern world of the 20th century, Constructivism can be seen as the original template for modern design and has a relationship to the every day life of us all.