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Ch. 35.6 -- The Utopian Styles • Suprematism began in Russia in 1913 with the help of artist Kasimir Malevich. He introduced it to the public in 1915 with his manifesto and exhibition titled "0.10 The Last Futurist Exhibition" held in Petrograd. The Suprematist style aimed to eliminate all natural forms and favored flat geometric patterns that represented emotions rather than objects and supported pure aesthetic creativity. Malevich’s art was produced with pure geometric shapes positioned to only initiate aesthetic feeling and held no allusions to anything social, political, or otherwise. It gave way by 1918 to Constructivism. • Founded in 1913 by Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian Constructivist movement developed from Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Suprematism in Russia, Neo Plasticism in Holland, and the Bauhaus School in Germany. The term Constructivism is used to define non-representational relief construction, sculpture, kinetics, and painting. As a response to changes in technology and contemporary life, it advocated a change in the art scene, aiming to create a new order in art and architecture that referenced social and economic problems. Constructivism was one the first movements to adopt a strictly non-objective subject matter. The movement’s work was mainly geometric and precisely composed, sometimes through mathematics and measuring tools. They favored the basic shapes of squares, rectangles, circles and triangles. Constructivists used an array of materials including wood, celluloid, nylon.
plexiglass, tin, cardboard, and wire welded or glued together. Later in the development, Constructivists incorporated aluminum, electronics, and chrome. In using these forms and materials, their aim was to depict the dominance of the machine in the modern world and its triumph over nature. • The De Stijl (literally, "the style") art movement was founded in 1917. It encompassed a new type of style in modern art and architecture. This movement used the artistic talent of the artists by designing homes, buildings, and furniture. They were eager to develop a new aesthetic consciousness and an objective art based on clear principles. Their work and research extended to the fine arts, city and town planning, the applied arts and philosophy.Art was seen as a collective approach, with a language that went beyond cultural, geographical and political divisions. The depersonalization of the artwork was carried through into the execution which was anonymous and impersonal. The artist's personality took a back seat to a conscious and calculated working process. The key ideas underpinning the movement could not be separated from Piet Mondrian's aesthetic theory of Neo-Plasticism. This theory was aimed at scaling down the formal components of art - only primary colors and straight lines. The principles of De Stijl art and design exerted tremendous influence on the Bauhaus Style in Germany in the 1920s, and after Mondrian's immigration to New York in 1940, the U.S.A.
KAZIMIR MALEVICH, Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, 1915 (dated 1914). Oil on canvas, 1’ 10 7/8” x 1’ 7”. Museum of Modern Art, New York (purchase).
NAUM GABO, Column, ca. 1923 (reconstructed 1937). Perspex, wood, metal, glass, 3’ 5” x 2’ 5” x 2’ 5”. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Photograph of Vladimir Tatlin with Monument to the Third International, 1919–1920. Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
PIET MONDRIANComposition in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930. Oil on canvas,
LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY, From the Radio Tower Berlin, 1928. Gelatin silver print. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
Bauhaus Bauhaus ("House of Building" or "Building School") was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during the first years of its existence. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and design. The school existed in three German cities until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933. One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and technology. The machine was considered a positive element, and therefore industrial and product design were important components. Vorkurs ("initial" or "preliminary course") was taught; this is the modern day "Basic Design" course that has become one of the key foundational courses offered in architectural and design schools across the globe. There was no teaching of history in the school because everything was supposed to be designed and created according to first principles rather than by following precedent.
WALTER GROPIUS, Shop Block, the Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany, 1925–1926.
GUNTA STÖLZL, Gobelin tapestry, 1926–1927. Linen and cotton.
LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE, model for a glass skyscraper, Berlin, Germany, 1922 (no longer extant).
LE CORBUSIER, perspective drawing for Domino House project, Marseilles, France, 1914.
