Constructivism

Yakov Georgievich Chernikhov was a Soviet architect and graphic artist, author of scientific works on the theory of architecture and a talented teacher. His name is not well known in Ukraine, although he was born in the current Dnepropetrovsk region and lived in Odesa for about ten years, studied at the Higher Art School. Possessing powerful spatial thinking and imagination, Chernikhov devoted his life to creating bold architectural projects in the spirit of Constructivism and became the spokesman for the ideas of the avant-garde of the early 20th century, which influenced many modern architects.

An outstanding Uruguayan artist, sculptor, art theorist and writer Joaquin Torres Garcia lived and worked in Europe for a long time (Spain, France, Italy), for some time in the United States of America. In Barcelona, the artist worked with A. Gaudi; while living in Paris, he collaborated with representatives of Neoplasticism (Piet Mondrian and others), founding the creative group “Circle and Square” with the support of Michel Seophor. Such a wide experience allowed him, returning to his homeland, to become a conductor and propagandist of new art in Uruguay - modernist art movements in general, Cubism and Abstract art in particular.

A Hungarian artist and graphic illustrator, sculptor and master of art photography, film theorist and journalist. Born Laszlo Weisz. He was one of the largest figures of the world avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century, as well as the most important representative of the New Vision photo.

Gustavs Klucis was a painter, graphic artist, illustrator and photographer. He entered the history of art as a pioneer of photomontage. In the world of art, he is considered one of the four artists who invented the subgenre of political photomontage in 1918. Three other names are known more widely - German Dadaists Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann, Russian avant-garde artist El Lissitzky.

The full name the author gave this work is “Architectural fiction-illusion. The revealed aspiration, demonstration of the grandeur of the mass and the transfer of grandeur through circular, curvilinear and rectilinear combinations with their rich colours”.

Many of Yakov Chernikhov's projects are not a separate building but a whole complex of buildings designed for a specific purpose. During his career, the artist created and implemented several such complexes that have a wide variety of purposes.

This work is included in the collection "Architectural fantasies. 101 composition”, which is one of the most famous creations of Jacob Chernikhov. An unpleasant story is associated with this composition, as it was among 29 works of this cycle that were stolen from the central archive and replaced with fakes.

The figure demonstrates the main features of the architectural compositions of Yakov Chernikhov: asymmetry, dynamism and careful study of every detail. Many drawings of the architect served as illustrations for his theoretical works and were not intended to be embodied in real conditions.

The original architectural style of Yakov Chernikhov was based on his fundamental knowledge of ornament and rhythm. In his cycle with the unusual name “Aristography” he experimented a lot with form and space, rotating graphic elements of constructions in different directions and creating bizarre but impeccably accurate ornaments characterized by attractive rhythmic pulsation.

The work of the late period created using colour schemes according to the canons of Neoplasticism (red, yellow, white, black) is also a tribute to Cubist principles. Geometrically presented figures of people are inscribed in a space also consisting of rectangles, squares, rhombuses and triangles.

From the 1930s, the paintings by the artist reflected a special orthogonal (direct, one-vector) structure into which the author inserted objects. In this work, these are different-sized ships, houses, a number of recognizable pictographic images (the sun, the moon and fish).

Returning to Montevideo (Uruguay), Torres Garcia founded the Southern School, in which he continued to put his creative concept into practice. He revised contemporary art theories and incorporated primitivism into the core of the new art program.

Some critics call a series of portraits by Torres, created in the late thirties and the early forties, strange. These works violated and ignored the dogmas developed by the artist.

One of the symbolic works of the great aesthetic project of Torres has a manifest value. The monumental work three meters high and 5.6 meters long reproduces rows of engraved pictographic drawings.

The composition is organized in accordance with the basics of Neoplasticism - the entire pictorial surface is structured by an orthogonal grid. Unlike works of Piet Mondrian, this drawing of Torres demonstrates the imperfection of hand-drawn lines, and the size of individual squares is dictated by the scale of the inscribed signs and inscriptions.

While living in Paris, Torres Garcia met with Neoplasticist artists (Piet Mondrian and others) who were proponents of geometric abstraction as opposed to contemporary Surrealism. In accordance with this artistic trend, Torres Garcia began to use a strict geometric grid in his compositions as a means of preserving the two-dimensionality of the picture.

In the mid-1920s, returning from America to Europe, Torres worked in different genres based on the principles of Cubism and partly Expressionism. A few still lifes are likely to be philosophical.

The work relates to the period of the artist’s short stay in America, where he arranged the release of the author's wooden toys. By that time, Torres Garcia already had experience working with avant-garde artist R. Barradas and futurist writer Joan Salvat-Papasseit.

The reflective and transparent qualities of plexiglass served the artist’s desire to modulate and activate light - his favorite medium. He strove to create the impression of movement often in unexpected ways and achieved unusual effects in this, using sheets with defects, as in this work.

Moholy-Nagy made a series of photographs of the Berlin Radio Tower built in 1926. This famous photograph was taken from a “deliberately disorienting point of view”, which makes it look more like a complex interaction of abstract geometric shapes than a city scene.

While the first abstract paintings by Moholy-Nagy had opaque geometric shapes and resembled works of El Lissitzky, this one shows that the author developed a unique idiom.

Moholy-Nagy took this photograph while traveling with O. Schlemmer, an artist and his Bauhaus colleague, to Swiss Ascona. This gloomy (which is not typical for the author) image shows two baby dolls lying on a white napkin in a cage on a concrete floor.

This is a work from the series "Photograms", which the author created by placing objects on photosensitive paper. The object of the image — in this case, the artist’s hand — was placed above the “canvas” to leave white figures. This is essentially a photograph without using a camera.

In this collage work, the car rushes along a winding road built from the word “Pneumatik”, referring to a new type of tire. The author considered the work as a key example of the genre, which expresses the "new pace of visual culture".

The author identified this work with Сonstructivism, which appeared in Russia in the 1910s and in the 1920s swept the west, partly due to the activities of the Bauhaus, which is considered the most significant outpost of Сonstructivism in Europe.

Abstract geometric composition conveys a sense of minimalism of architectural order. The background is divided by a black vertical stripe intersected by a small yellow horizontal rectangle at the bottom.

Gustavs Klucis considered the features of photographic technology as a foundation that allows showing aspects of physical reality that eluded the eye of an artisan painter or a graphic artist.

The album of memoirs “In Memory of the Fallen Leaders” was edited by prominent publicist Felix Cohn. On 88 pages of the publication issued to the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution by the Young Worker Publishing House, there are epitaph essays about 23 active participants in the revolution of 1917.

This fantasy work could be attributed to both Constructivism and Suprematism if it were not for a technique unexpected for these styles - the image of several figures of people.

The painting represents the beginning of the experimental period in the career of Gustavs Klucis, because until 1918 he painted, as a student of Purvitis and Korovin, impressionist landscapes and sketches.