Word: constructivist
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...Constructivists embraced industry as a means to construction, as the Futurists had embraced the present by expression of energy, of motion and of the modern technology. The 1917 Revolution had signaled the end of the old order; the Constructivists embraced the new society based on industrialization. The Constructivist sense of space had broken with the old order or mass, and this Soviet "avant-garde" directed their efforts away from the pedestal arts to the reorganization of the artistic life through a promotion of the new politics and economics: "The streets shall be our brushes the squares our palettes. . . . " (Vladimir Mayakovsky...
Thus moving from the canvas to billboards, the Constructivists designed posters propagandizing the Bolshevik movement: "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge" or "Man in the service of technology." Architectural construction, of workers' clubs or radio stations rang with the Constructivist cry, "Art into life!" (Vladimir Tatlin) an antecedent to the Bauhaus declaration, "That design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of life" (Walter Gropius). And growing from these ideas of incorporation of art in life, came "an architecture whose function is clearly recognizable in the relation of its form" (Gropius). Constructivist experiments...
Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy, the carriers of the Constructivist obsession with space, were the major proponents of Soviet ideas in the Bauhaus. From Russian stage design followed the Bauhausler Oskar Schlemmer, and from Tatlin's chess table and Rodchenko's functional chairs came Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair and Breuer's armchairs. Of course many of these developments ran parallel, and which derived from which is more a question of interaction than origination, such as Mies van der Rohe's model for a Monument to the Third International...
Today, light is used by artists to make positive space out of void as the Constructivists used descriptive space, a making of positive from a previous void. In much of the optical and kinetic movements, one sees the Constructivist concern for space rather than for mass reiterated, especially in the French group, La Groupe de la Recherche Visuele, that includes such pioneers as La Parc and Agam. From Gabo and Pevsner's use of spatial structure comes spatial drawing as manifested in Alexander Calder's mobiles and stabiles, Anthony Caro's I Beams or even Picasso's wire sculptures...
...This Constructivist landmark, in art and architectural development, is well exemplified in a show entitled "Search for Total Construction (U. S. S. R. 1917-1932)," on exhibit until February 14 at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. A rather flat show, consisting mostly of photographic and pictorial representations of architectural structures (which is unfortunate since this group has had such an influence in spatial concepts), but an important record in visual historical thought. Some of the best examples have come out of Harvard's own museums: the basements of the Busch-Reisinger, the Fogg, Carpenter Center, etc. (e.g., Malevitch...