To the Tate Modern, across the Millennium Bridge on a bright and windy Saturday. This time, we went to see the current Russian Constructivist exhibition on Alexandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova.
Not really my area of expertise, but according to good ole Wikipedia, constructivism is "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." Love you, Wikipedia...
The show neatly illustrated Rodchenko and Popova's growth in maturity and development of their theory by charting the move from the figurative to the abstract as the clash of the opposing ideas of "Composition" and "Construction".
Composition is:
- Personal taste
- Subjective
- Art made by hand
- Figurative
- Symbolic
Construction is:
- Collective
- Non-unique
- Mechanised
- Non-decorative and non-representational
- Abstract
Constructivist art does away with subtleties of the brush, the unnecessary and the personal, in favour of bold graphics and geometric shapes created with ruler, compass, collage.
Most fascinating were the post-New Economic Policy graphic designs, a strange combination of consumer ads for state-produced goods and slogan propaganda aimed at the illiterate.
Also, Popova's fabrics, designed for mass-production and for the workers, were very beautiful: she said of them, "no single artistic success gave me such profound satisfaction as the sight of a peasant woman buying a piece of my fabric for a dress".
Quite something!
