Word: constructivist
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Around 1920 the quest for an ultimate style that would correspond to social revolution and human self-improvement was one of the great issues of avant-garde art, the hope of the constructivist Internationale. And it became so for two main reasons: the growth of Utopian collectivist thought (mainly, but not only, Marxist) and the recoil from the horrors of World War I. "The period of destruction is totally finished," announced a De Stijl maniesto in 1923. "A new period begins: that of construction." It is a younger version of he sentiment hauntingly expressed in Dryden's Secular Masque...
DIED. Ben Nicholson, 87, British painter whose abstracted images of still lifes and landscapes formed the main link between English art and the continental cubist-constructivist tradition; in London. Born into an artistic and moneyed family, he began as a realistic painter before developing an abstract geometric style...
...house-high steel helmet and a number of handsomely styled columns, pylons, tablets and structures that belong at a world's fair or amusement park. Oth er designs accommodate the thousands of names on various layouts of slabs, blocks and other geometric stones and look depressingly like constructivist graveyards...
...another world, was one of the favorite devices of surrealism, used incessantly from Max Ernst in the '20s to Joseph Cornell in the '40s. Nevelson gave it a unique density and gravity. She took the box's power as theater and subjected it to a constructivist rigor of formal layout. The past life of the wood pieces was still apparent: the nicks and flaws, the signs of use and disuse, all preserved and yet held at an emotional distance by the pall of black. But her instinct for placement, for what shapes to repeat and where...
...edge by Cornell's rigor as a formal artist. The essence of the box is to contain, and within a rectangular grid, at that. Cornell enhanced this with a spare, strict sense of proportion in his divisions and compartments; not without reason did he call himself a "constructivist." What one sees in the boxes is not just memory, but the exact disposition of memory, an entrancingly just division of one's gaze between thought and material...