THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
The Russian Revolution is the collective term for a series of revolutions in Russia in
1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and
led to the creation of the Soviet Union. The Tsar was deposed and replaced by a provisional government in the first revolution of February 1917 (March in the Gregorian calendar; the older Julian calendar was in use in Russia at the time). In the second revolution, during
October, the Provisional Government was
removed and replaced with a Bolshevik (Communist) government.
A period of dual power ensued, during which the Provisional Government held state power while the national network of Soviets, led by socialists, had the allegiance of the lower-class citizens and the political left. During this chaotic period there were frequent mutinies and many strikes.
When the Provisional Government chose to continue fighting the war with Germany, the Bolsheviks and other socialist factions campaigned for the abandonment of the war effort.
The Bolsheviks formed workers militias under their control into the Red Guards (
later the Red Army) over which they exerted substantial control.
In the
October Revolution (November in the Gregorian calendar), the Bolshevik party,
led by Vladimir Lenin, and the workers' Soviets, overthrew the Provisional Government in St Petersburg. The Bolsheviks appointed themselves as leaders of various government ministries and seized control of the countryside, establishing the Cheka to quash dissent. To end the war, the Bolshevik leadership signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in March 1918.
Civil war erupted between the
"Red" (Bolshevik), and "White" (anti-Bolshevik) factions, which was to continue for several years, with the
Bolsheviks ultimately victorious. In this way the Revolution paved the way for the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). While many notable historical events occurred in Moscow and St Petersburg, there was also a broad-based movement in cities throughout the state, among national minorities throughout the empire, and in the rural areas, where peasants took over and redistributed land.
(www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution_(1917))
THE WINTER PALACE
The Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia, was, from 1732 to 1917, the official residence of the Russian Tsars. The present and fourth Winter Palace was built and altered almost continuously between the late 1730s and 1837, when it was severely damaged by fire and immediately rebuilt. The storming of the palace in 1917 became an iconic symbol of the Russian Revolution.
(www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_palace)
CONSTRUCTIVISM
Constructivism was an
artistic and architectural movement that originated in Russia from 1919 onward which
rejected the idea of "art for art's sake" in favour of
art as a practice directed towards social purposes. Constructivism as an active force
lasted until around 1934, having a great deal of effect on developments in the art of the Weimar Republic and elsewhere, before being
replaced by Socialist Realism. Its motifs have sporadically recurred in other art movements since. (Franz Ferdinand?)
The technique of constructing sculpture from separate elements, as opposed to modelling or carving, was developed by Pablo Picasso in 1912, extending the
planar language of Cubism into three dimensions. This method was elaborated in Russia, initially by
Vladimir Tatlin from 1914 onwards and then by his many followers, who, like him, made
abstract sculptures that explored the textural and spatial qualities of combinations of contemporary materials such as metal, glass, wood and cardboard.
Russian artists did not begin to call their work ‘constructions’ and themselves ‘constructivists’ until after the Revolution of 1917.
Coining the latter term, the First Working Group of Constructivists, also known as the Working Group of Constructivists, was set up in
March 1921 within Inkhuk (Institute of Artistic Culture) in Moscow. The group comprised
Aleksey Gan (1893–1942),
Aleksandr Rodchenko,
Varvara Stepanova,
Konstantin Medunetsky,
Karl Ioganson (1890–1929) and the brothers
Georgy Stenberg and Vladimir Stenberg.
‘Construction’ was seen to have connotations of technology and engineering and therefore to be characterized by economy of materials, precision, clarity of organization and the absence of decorative or superfluous elements.
In order to give their work the quality of ‘construction’, the artists increasingly renounced abstract painting in favour of working with
industrial materials in space. Sculptures they showed displayed a strong
commitment to the materials and forms of
contemporary technology. The Stenbergs, for instance, created skeletal forms from materials such as glass, metal and wood, evoking engineering structures such as bridges and cranes. Rodchenko showed a
series of hanging constructions based on mathematical forms; they consisted of concentric
shapes cut from a single plane of plywood, rotated to create a three-dimensional geometric form that is completely permeated by space.
As much as involving itself in designs for industry, the Constructivists worked on public festivals and street designs for the post-October revolution Bolshevik government. Perhaps the most famous of these was in Vitebsk, where Malevich's UNOVIS Group painted propaganda plaques and buildings, the best known being El Lissitzky's poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919). Inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky's declaration 'the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes', artists and designers participated in public life throughout the Civil War. A striking instance was the proposed festival for the Comintern congress in 1921 by Alexander Vesnin and Liubov Popova, which resembled the constructions of the OBMOKhU exhibition as well as their work for the theatre. There was a great deal of overlap in this period between Constructivism and Proletkult, the ideas of which concerning the need to create an entirely new culture struck a chord with the Constructivists. In addition some Constructivists were heavily involved in the 'ROSTA Windows', a Bolshevik public information campaign of around 1920. Some of the most famous of these were by the poet-painter Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vladimir Lebedev.
As a part of the early Soviet youth movement, the constructivists took an artistic outlook aimed to encompass cognitive, material activity, and the whole of spirituality of mankind. The artists tried to create works that would take the viewer out of the traditional setting and make them an active viewer of the artwork. In this it had similarities with the Russian Formalists' theory of 'making strange', and accordingly their leading theorist Viktor Shklovsky worked closely with the Constructivists, as did other formalists like Osip Brik. These theories were tested in the theatre, particularly in the work of Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had set up what he called 'October in the theatre'. Meyerhold developed a 'biomechanical' acting style, which was influenced both by the circus and by the 'scientific management' theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Meanwhile the stage sets by the likes of Vesnin, Popova and Stepanova tested out Constructivist spatial ideas in a public form. A more populist version of this was developed by Alexander Tairov, with stage sets by Aleksandra Ekster and the Stenberg Brothers. These ideas would go on to influence German directors like Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, as well as the early Soviet cinema.
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_%28art%29)
Vladimir Tatlin
Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin (December 28 [O.S. December 16] 1885 – May 31, 1953) was a Russian and Soviet painter and architect. With Kazimir Malevich he was one of the two most important figures in the Russian avant-garde art movement of the 1920s, and he later became the most important artist in the Constructivist movement. He is most famous for his attempts to create the giant tower, The Monument to the Third International.
The Monument is generally considered to be the defining expression of architectural constructivism, rather than a buildable project. Even if the gigantic amount of required steel had been available in revolutionary Russia, in the context of housing shortages and political turmoil, there are serious doubts about its structural practicality.
The Constructivists' main political patron early on was Leon Trotsky, and it began to be regarded with suspicion after the expulsion of Trotsky and the Left Opposition in 1927-8. The Communist Party would gradually come to favour realist art over the course of the 1920s (as early as 1918 Pravda had complained that government funds were being used to buy works by untried artists). However it wasn't until around 1934 that the counter-doctrine of Socialist Realism was instituted in Constructivism's place. Many Constructivists continued to produce avantgarde work in the service of the state, such as in Lissitzky, Rodchenko and Stepanova's designs for the magazine USSR In Construction
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Tatlin)
RODCHENKO & POPOVA
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/rodchenkopopova/
The Bolshevik Revolution aimed to
transform an entire civilisation, and artists were among the first to show their support. There was already a distinct strain of utopianism in the Russian avant-garde – a determination to reinvent art, as if from zero. Kasimir Malevich's abstract paintings freed art from what he called 'the dead weight of the real world'. Equally radical were Vladimir Tatlin's Counter-Reliefs, made by
assembling real materials, such as wood, glass and metal into three-dimensional constructions.
Following these examples, the
Constructivists rejected all ideas of illusory representation. Rodchenko focused on faktura, the
physical qualities of the painting: the
use of different paints and
different textures, and how these related to other elements such as the
painting surface, or the choice of
colour. His experiments led to the 'Black on Black' series, in which the
elimination of colour focused attention on the texture of the painting's surface, and its interaction with light. In these works, Stepanova wrote, 'nothing but painting exists'.
Popova's Painterly Architectonics respond to some of Malevich's ideas, but push them further.
Geometric shapes jostle together, overlapping,intersecting, their edges pressing beyond the frame. A dynamic sense of instability and movement is matched by her use of strong colour. As the title suggests, Popova was already looking beyond painting, into
architecture and three-dimensional structures, yet cramming that expansive energy onto the flat surface of a painting.
Rodchenko made his first
freestanding abstract sculptures in 1918, and later suggested that these
geometric constructions, made using everyday materials,
'signified the abandonment of painting for the move toward real space'. While Tatlin’s Counter-Reliefs were mounted on the wall, he noted, his own Spatial Constructions could be looked at from all sides. Their extravagant configuration of geometric forms in space would be echoed in his architectural designs.
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