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Andrea Fineman

Prof Grigor

FA 193

9 December 2009

The art of the Russian avant-garde, though much discussed, is often also much confused. There are, of

course, many important political, social, and historical issues surrounding the 1917 revolution—as Russia opens

up to the west, the varied art movements to come out of the World War I era in Western Europe begin to mingle

with native Russian ideologies, all at the same time that the country is undergoing a major revolution. A lot of

ideas are at play, and the scholarship surrounding the Russian avant-garde art movement reflects this. Over the

past one hundred years, scholarship has classified various artists from the Russian avant-garde under differing and

sometimes seemingly opposed labels, but there’s a general sense that the Russian avant-garde had two major

ideological groups: the Suprematists, led by Konstantin Malevich, and the Constructivists, usually symbolized by

Vladimir Tatlin.

The two groups perhaps have more in common than not; both sought to create a new reality under the

new revolutionary paradigm. Both used abstract forms that echoed and contributed to the avant-garde movements

in other countries at the same time. The Suprematists sought to create an international aesthetic language that they

could use to help create a utopian revolutionary future; their philosophy believed in the power of art for art’s sake,

and placed a premium on the expression of spiritual and emotional messages in their work. The Constructivists,

though not purely utilitarian, drew their forms from the visual look of machinery and factory life, and denied the

idea of art for art’s sake. They felt that the expression of personal emotions through art was a bourgeois practice,

and that true revolutionaries should use their art to help further the goals of the revolution in a more concrete way

—a belief system that led many Constructivist artists to abandon pure painting and sculpture in favor of

photography, advertising and poster design, and architecture. By the 1920s, the Constructivists had grown

contemptuous of the Suprematists’ spiritual, somewhat mystical content, the Suprematists felt that the

Constructivists’ functional emphasis was stifling to creativity,1 and a schism between the two groups grew.

Regardless of their differences, the members of both groups (and the artists who don’t really fall squarely

in either camp) must have felt that their work could effect change. The fact that these revolutionary artists with a

goal in common couldn’t agree on an international language points to the absurdity of the situation. How did they

think the forms they depicted would accomplish this in a concrete way? Some of the Constructivists’ formal

choices are easy to understand—for example, the raw symbolism of Tatlin’s famed tower being painted red, the

color of the revolution. However, the meaning communicated by form as the Russian avant-gardists see it is

something much deeper than such obvious symbolism. A few of the artists of the avant-garde wrote extensively

though vaguely about their choices, showing that the range of choices and ideas was broader than simply a system

1 Jonathan M. Woodham, “Design and Modernism,” in Twentieth Century Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 38.

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of alliances with one of two opposed movements that sought to accomplish the same goals via differing means.

By examining their texts, I hope to answer this question, in the meantime proving that the two groups are less

well-defined than many later texts claim.

The cultural climate, both within Russia and in Europe at large, leading up to the flourishing of the avant-

garde in the late 1910s and early 1920s, has a lot to do with the nature of the movement. Russia in the late 19 th

century was undergoing many ideological battles regarding the question of westernization; societies all over

Europe were undergoing political and social turmoil due to the new pressures created by industrialization. Russia

itself was in a unique position; its culture did not undergo the same trajectory of development as the other western

nations that it influenced and was influenced by. Unlike the nations of Western Europe, Russian culture was little

affected by the Enlightenment. Similarly, the development of Russian society was rather different from Western

European nations. The societal system of serfdom, which essentially enslaved the lower classes to local

landowners, existed in Russia for centuries until the mid to late 19th century, in contrast to much of Western

Europe, which had a markedly different societal structure, at least by the time of the Renaissance. This societal

structure was of course one of the main problems cited by the revolutionaries of 1905 and 1917 and was heavily

addressed in the reform movements of the revolutionary government of the 1917 revolution.

Art in the late 19th century was reeling from the invention of photography and its impact on the

development of styles in painting. At the end of the 19th century, Symbolism and Expressionism were the reigning

styles in painting in Western Europe, along with art nouveau. Symbolism especially took hold in Russia; it is

believed that the surreal and spiritual aspects of the style appealed to Russian intellectuals in the wake of the 1905

revolution and the Russo-Japanese war.2 The mystical, spiritual aspects of Symbolism and Expressionism,

reacting in part to the relatively more analytical focus of the Impressionists and Neoclassical painters of the

generation before, are preserved in the work of Wassily Kandinsky, an abstract artist who led the Russian art

scene until Malevich and Tatlin and their followers began to push Russian art in a direction that required it to

have primarily revolutionary content.

This fervent desire to imbue art with a purpose more utilitarian and, from these artists’ perspective, more

noble than simple “personal expression,” was common not only to Russia at this time. During the 1910s, major

artistic movements in Western Europe such as De Stijl and the Bauhaus school developed, focusing on ideas of

utopia, universality, social harmony and order, and eschewing the irregular or the picturesque, which had been a

source of personal expression and emotional content in the 19th century. The Russian avant-garde fed off of and

contributed back to these movements in Western Europe not only ideologically, but also formally. The angular,

geometric work of artists like Lissitzky and Malevich echoes the forms created by the German and Dutch

Bauhaus and De Stijl artists—colleagues with whom the Russian artists collaborated and communicated

frequently.

2 John E. Bowlt, ed. and trans., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934 (New York: The Viking Press, 1976), 6.

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It’s important to remember that at the turn of the 20th century, the Russian peasantry for whom the

revolutionary artists and writers were attempting to create a new reality were indeed inhabiting a completely

different reality than the artists and writers were at the time. The urban intellectual artists, educated in western

culture and ideology, were poorly equipped to deal with the realities of peasant life, and their efforts to transform

the peasant from an illiterate serf into a productive, efficient communist worker who sought to contribute to the

greater good of the vast nation of the USSR were, in hindsight, somewhat absurd. The uneducated masses of

Russia were accustomed to understanding visual communications (such as art) by interpreting iconography and

symbolism stemming from their society’s tradition—in the case of Russia, commonly-understood iconography

came from the art of the Orthodox church as well as from native Russian cultural touchstones. The artists of the

Russian avant-garde largely refused to communicate on these “old-fashioned” terms, however, although there are

a few aspects of their work that recall popular art of earlier generations in Russia.3 The revolutionary message

communicated by, for instance, Malevich’s Black Square, might be obscure to a 21st century viewer, not to

mention an uneducated Russian serf of 1915.

Before undertaking an investigation of the means by which Russian avant-garde artists attempted to

convey revolutionary content to their fellow countrymen and to foreigners via abstract form, it’s important to

understand the concept of Russian Messianism. The idea that Russia’s suffering throughout the centuries can

somehow atone for the sins of humanity and bring a utopian future closer to hand has a long history in Russian

thought. The heavy influence of Orthodox Christianity in Russia spurred many who rejected western influence

throughout the centuries to advocate a return to “pre-western” Russian society—that is, a Russia-centric way of

life, guided by Russian Orthodoxy, that denies imported western practices. The idea is somewhat similar to

utopian efforts in the west in the 19th century by the likes of John Ruskin and other medievalists who sought to

“return” to a “pre-modern,” highly Christian way of life by rejecting the social and ideological innovations

brought on by industrialization. The advent of the revolution in the name of Marxism contributed to the allure of

the Messianism concept. By conducting the first Marxist revolution and creating a “workers’ state,”4 the concept

of Russian Messianism became a distinctly revolutionary idea. It is indeed reflected in the official texts of

Constructivism. Said Alexei Vaslievich Filippov, a little-known writer whose essay “Production Art”

(Constructivism often being referred to by the term “Production” or “Productivist”) was in a small collection

called Art in Production, released in 1921 by the Art-Productional Council of the Visual Arts Department of

Narkompros5, “The aspirations of the new productional art be formulated by applying to artists K. Marx’s idea

about scientists: artists in varying ways have merely depicted the world but their task is to change it.”6 The

Messianistic attitude that artists could even bring about utopia in the first place, compounded by the belief that it

is their duty to do so, is something of a contrast to the rhetoric of the Bauhaus, De Stijl, or Ruskinian movements,

for example, which were much less focused on the fact of their respective societies having suffered nobly in 3 For example, Russian icon painters used red a lot, which was to become the color adopted by the revolutionaries. Stephen White, The Bolshevik Poster (New Haven: The Yale University Press, 1988), 5.4 Peter J. S. Duncan, Russian Messianism: Third Rome, holy revolution, communism and after (London: Routledge, 2000), 2.5 An agency in the revolutionary government that handled public education and other matters of culture.6 Quoted in Stephen Bann, ed., The Tradition of Constructivism (New York: The Viking Press, 1974), 23.

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previous eras, and which didn’t quite charge their artists with

the responsibility of saving the world through utopia.

Along with these historical and contemporary

influences on the development of the avant-garde ideology, it’s

important to remember that practice of classifying avant-garde

artists and their philosophies has led to confusion and

contradiction not only in scholarship done decades after the

revolution, but even among the artists themselves7.

Additionally, artists who fall outside of one of the two main

camps, such as El Lissitzky, cannot be simply classified in a

discussion of the similarities and differences between the two

nebulous groups. Nonetheless, a discussion of the avant-

garde’s attempts at making meaning via abstract form can be

conducted by examining the texts of the artists along the lines

of the two somewhat opposing systems of thought of

Suprematism and Constructivism.

The spiritual, metaphysical nature of Malevich’s

Suprematism owes much to his fellow avant-garde artist (and something of a forefather) Wassily Kandinsky,

whose On the Spiritual in Art was published in 1911. Kandinsky is hardly a Suprematist; the geometric nature of

works like Malevich’s Black Square, Blue Triangle (1915) [Figure 1] share little in common formally with works

like Kandinsky’s Composition VII (1913) [Figure 2]. However, Kandinsky’s ideology, focusing on the power of

form and color to touch the spirit of the

onlooker, and the responsibility of the

artist to use his skill in order to bring

humanity forward in the progression of

human achievement, is not far from

Malevich’s ideology of Suprematism. The

sheer fact of Kandinsky’s immense

popularity and influence during the 1910s

is cause for study in an examination of the

forms of the Russian avant-garde.

Kandinsky’s writing focused greatly on

the impact of the visual experience on the

soul—something that the younger artists,

7 Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 1 and 39.

Figure 1. Kasimir Malevich, Black Square, Blue Triangle (1915). Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Figure 2. Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII (1913). Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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whether Suprematist or Constructivist, tended to avoid discussing. For example, in “Content and Form,”

Kandinsky states that

A work of art consists of two elements,

the inner and

the outer.

The inner element, taken separately, is the emotion of the artist’s soul, which (like the material musical

tone of one instrument that compels the corresponding tone of another to covibrate) evokes a

corresponding emotional vibration in the other person, the preceptor.

While the soul is bound to the body, it can perceive a vibration usually only by means of feeling—which

acts as a bridge from the nonmaterial to the material (the artist) and from the material to the nonmaterial

(the spectator).8 [sic]

(In this definition of art, the “outer element” is the “material form capable of being perceived” which represents

“the artist’s emotional vibration.”9) This solemn tribute to the importance of the artist’s personal spiritual contents

and their expression on canvas is coupled with this instruction on creating a form to represent spiritual content:

A work of art is, of necessity, an indissolubly and inevitably cohesive combination of inner and outer

elements, i.e., content and form… In art, form is invariably determined by content. And only that form is

the right one which serves as the corresponding expression and materialization of its content. Any

accessory considerations, among them the primary one—namely, the correspondence of form to so-called

nature, i.e., outer nature—are insubstantial and pernicious, because they distract attention from the single

task of art: the embodiment of its content. Form is the material expression of abstract content.10

Thus, abstract form echoes best abstract content—here, the contents of the artist’s soul. Kandinsky declines to tell

the reader why the expression of an artist’s inner soul is art’s noblest aim. It seems rather that to Kandinsky, it

isn’t so much that expression of deep emotions is the best use of art, but rather that expressing emotion is the

purpose of art by its very definition (at least in the way Kandinsky chooses to define it).

Malevich, on the other hand, takes this type of extreme faith in the necessity of spiritual content in art and

injects a considerable amount of concern for the political treatment of his fellow man, and ends up with a much

sparer, more geometric system of forms. Though he began creating works he called Suprematist as early as 1915,

he didn’t begin writing extensively on Suprematism for a few years11—his The Non-Objective World, a book on

the philosophy of Suprematism that was published by the Bauhaus, wasn’t released until 1927. That book

describes the goals of Suprematism in statements like “Perhaps in the future the truth of non-objective art will

unmask current ‘reality’ as an illusion, will show that it is nothing more than a façade, a fiction”12 and “[a new

8 Wassily Kandinsky, “Content and Form, 1910,” in Bowlt, 19.9 Ibid.10 Ibid., 19-20.11 Troels Andersen, preface to K. S. Malevich: Essays on art, 1915-1928, vol. 1, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowack-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgens Forlag a-s, 1968), 15.12 Quoted in Sybille Fuchs, “Exhibition in Bielefield, Germany—Kazimir Malevich: The Later Work: New insights into the work of Russian avant-garde artist,” International Committee of the Fourth International, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/male-m11.shtml.

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society] is only achieved when objective reality is transformed into the complete elimination of all inequalities

and differences in the liberated nothingness of a completely non-objective world.”13

Malevich’s faith in the ability of art to radically shape society via the expression of individual creative

feeling wasn’t unique among his colleagues. The Association of New Architects (ASNOVA), founded by Nikolai

Ladovsky, a teacher at Vkhutemas14, and which was affiliated with architect Konstantin Melnikov and with

Lissitzky, tended toward the idea that a “language of forms” could be used to communicate specific sentiments

onto the viewer15. Ladovsky, for example, described “architectural rationalism” as “the economy of psychic

energy in the perception of spatial and functional aspects of a building.”16 Here, “the true form arises from the

combination of feeling and science.”17 Those in the Suprematist camp employ the language of science and other

“rational” disciplines to promote the expression of creativity and feeling in art.

Often, Malevich’s descriptions

of why and how Suprematism should be

followed and can be effective are

vague. Speaking in opposition to the

more utilitarian Constructivist modes of

art, Malevich said in 1929,

An attempt was made to throw

aside the new type of “pure

art,” but it was a spectacular

failure, and once again “pure

art” occupies its own place and

applied art—its own…

We would make a great

mistake if we were to throw

aside new art; we would be left

only with the forms of

utilitarian functionalism, or the art of the engineer, arising not from aesthetic but from purely utilitarian

aims. But this is not all: new experimental art, as a result of this, gives new forms which renew our

perception.18

13 Ibid.14 An art school founded in the wake of the revolution where many of the avant-garde artists attended or taught. Many see Vkhutemas as an important influence on the teaching methods of the Bauhaus.15 William J. R. Curtis, “Architecture and Revolution in Russia,” in Modern Architecture Since 1900 (New York: Phaidon Press, 1996), 208.16 Quoted in Catherine Cooke, Russian avant-garde: theories of art, architecture and the city (London: Academy Editions, 1995), 30.17 Wassily Kandinsky, “On the Problem of Form,” originally from Wassily Kandinsky, “Uber die Formfrage,” Der Blaue Reiter, tr. Kenneth Lindsay (Munich: R. Piper, 1912). Quoted in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 162.

Figure 3. Suprematist exhibition in 1915, featuring Malevich’s Black Square in the corner, at an angle. This is the position in a room where, in a traditional Russian home, the icon would be hung.

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Yes, but how? There seems to be a lot that Malevich and his colleagues expect their readers (and, presumably,

their viewers) to take on faith. Combine Malevich’s vague urgings for his reader to accept Suprematism with

statements such as “A work of the highest art is written in the absence of reason”19 and an explanation of the

mechanics of Suprematism’s forms and their ability to signify is hard to find, or at least, hard to make sense of in

the realm of a more “objective”20 reality. However, some meaning can be drawn from Malevich’s texts. It’s clear

that he sought to keep emotion and creativity at the forefront of artistic production, just like Kandinsky, but to

reconcile such a desire with the harsh realities of revolutionary life, rather than arrive at utilitarianism as the only

responsible reaction to the terrible inequalities affecting the Russian people. We will see from examining

additional texts by the artist that Malevich felt that abstract forms created in a state of emotional and creative

sincerity could reach the viewer on the same level at which the artist created them; like Kandinsky, he likened

artistic form and feature to music.

Malevich admitted that many didn’t understand his art or his goals. In “Introduction to the Theory of the

Additional Element in Painting,” he writes that provincial, pictorial art should be “surmounted,” and says that

“The adherents of the pictorial culture of the provinces reproach the artists of the city on the score that their art is

incomprehensible to the masses (the general public),” going on to say that the initiated will understand soon

enough that modern forms are a positive advancement, just as

The workman who constructs a modern motorized plow is quite correct in maintaining that this new

plow, once its mechanism has been understood, is just as easy to operate as an outmoded, primitive plow;

one has only to recognize that it is an improvement over the old plow to realize that it represents a

valuable new advance.21

A passage in another chapter from the same work from which the above quotation is drawn better explains just

how the new aesthetic system is “better.” Speaking of the Black Square (1913) [Figure 3] in 1927’s The Non-

Objective World, Malevich writes,

The critics and, along with them, the public sighed, “Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a

desert… Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!

…Even I was gripped by a kind of timidity bordering on fear when it came to leaving “the world of will

and idea,” in which I had lived and worked and in the reality of which I had believed.

But a blissful sense of liberating nonobjectivity drew me forth into the “desert,” where nothing is real

except feeling… and so feeling became the substance of my life.22

18 Kasimir Malevich, “The Constructive Painting of Russian Artists and Constructivism,” in New Art, in K. S. Malevich: Essays on Art, 1928-1933, vol. II, ed. Troels Anderson, tr. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgens Forlag a-s, 1968), 80.19 Kasimir Malevich, “Secret Vices of the Academicians,” quoted in K. S. Malevich: Essays on Art, 1915-1928, 17.20 Especially since Malevich sought to create a “non-objective” reality—one could argue that his texts cannot be read from a mainstream point of view.21 Kasimir Malevich “Introduction to the Theory of the Additional Element in Painting,” in The Non-Objective World, quoted in Chipp, 340-341.22 Kasimir Malevich, “Suprematism,” from Ibid., 342.

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From this passage it’s clear that Malevich is attempting, through his discussion of the “international language of

forms” which he is developing with Suprematism, to legitimize a desire for the sublime, individualistic experience

that the Constructivists considered so bourgeois and irresponsible to the causes of the revolution. Perhaps because

of this consciousness of the revolution as a primary goal and occupation for all Russian intellectuals at the time,

Malevich is careful not to describe his mission in the clearly personal terms that Kandinsky does. Malevich, while

often using strong, dramatic, intense language, doesn’t often appeal to the sublime when addressing the reader.

Here, however, he tells the reader of his own sublime experience, perhaps to give himself as an example, since, as

he stated before, the masses need to learn the value of the technologically advanced before they can understand its

superiority.

In this vein, says Malevich, “Colour and texture in painting are ends in themselves. They are the essence

of painting, but this essence has always been destroyed by the subject.”23 That is, narrative content is to be

destroyed, in favor of a form and color that can produce a purer, more universal feeling and effect. He continues

on to say that by using color in a non-traditional way, the power of the narrative subject of the painting is broken

down, until “here I have arrived at pure colour forms. And Suprematism is the pure art of painting, whose

independence cannot be reduced to a single colour.”24 And then, “I transformed myself in the zero of form and

emerged from nothing to creation, that is to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting—to non-objective

creation.”25 Note the almost biblical tenor of Malevich’s prose, yet the absence of a direct appeal to the sublime.

El Lissitzky clarifies the Suprematist mission in 1920’s “Suprematism in World Reconstruction,” quoted

below. Lissitzky, who met Malevich in 1919 at the Vitebsk Practical Art School where both artists taught, took to

Suprematism soon after learning of Malevich’s theories.26 He would go on to create something of a new genre or

medium of art with the Proun [Figure 4], a series of artworks that blended architecture, painting, drawing, and

sculpture, and resulted in the creation of forms that were intended to be extrapolated to all practices of art, from

typography to architecture to painting and textile design. Curiously (in that he uses the past tense when describing

an art movement he only joined but a year before), Lissitzky describes Suprematism thusly:

for us SUPREMATISM did not signify the recognition of an absolute form which was part of an already-

completed universal system. on the contrary here stood revealed for the first time in all its purity the clear

sign and plan for a definite new world never before experienced—a world which issues forth from our

inner being and which is only now in the first stages of its formation. for this reason the square of

suprematism became a beacon.27 [sic]

In Lissitzky’s view, it’s not only the fact of Suprematist painting’s ability to, supposedly, touch the viewer’s soul

in the sublime way that Malevich himself experienced in developing such forms that is so important, it is also the

creation of a new world, outside the reality currently experienced by the Russian citizen.

23 Kasimir Malevich, “Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting,” quoted in in K. S. Malevich: Essays on Art, 1915-1928, 25.24 Ibid., 34.25 Ibid., 37.26 Eva Forgacs, “Malevich, Lissitzky, and the Culture of the Future,” The Structurist 39/40 (1999): 50.27 El Lissitzky, “Suprematism in World Reconstruction,” quoted in Bowlt, 151.

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Lissitzky is often considered a more pragmatic artist than Malevich, one who can bridge the ideological

gap between Suprematism and the more utilitarian artists like Tatlin and Rodchenko.28 For instance, he disagreed

with Malevich on the role the artist should play in the ideal society. “The idea that art is religion and the artist the

priest of this religion we rejected forthwith,” he said in 1922.29 His interest in creating the Proun, something that

can be used in the applied arts as well as in a fine arts setting, reflects his more pragmatic attitude.

Tatlin and his fellow Constructivists rejected not only the idea that art should have a kind of religious

importance in society—they called for an end to art as such, believing that created objects ought to be utilitarian

and serve a useful purpose for the proletariat and for the causes of the revolution. They took a scientific attitude

towards their creative efforts: the “art” they produced that didn’t serve an expressly utilitarian purpose they

considered “laboratory work” or experimentation that would

lead to utilitarian breakthroughs in the future.30 Their texts

are certainly filled with statements against the emotional,

metaphysical ideology of the Suprematists, but on occasion,

the Constructivist artists and writers say things that belie

their scientific, utilitarian point of view. They maintained in

common with the Suprematists a belief in a somewhat

supernatural power of art to create a new, revolutionary

reality, and, despite making statements to the contrary, the

Constructivists’ belief that the artist has the power to create

a new reality indicates that those artists felt that the artist

can have an almost religious significance in society.

The texts of the Constructivists nearly all contain some

kind of dramatic “down with art” statement. Tatlin, along

with some fellow artists, stated in 1920’s “The Work Ahead

of Us,” “We declare our distrust of the eye, and place our

sensual impressions under control.”31 More radically,

Rodchenko and Stepanova wrote, in 1920’s “Program of the Productivist Group,” “the group stands for ruthless

war against art in general.”32 The writers rarely take the time to define “art” and “other items created by artists,” in

order to reassure the reader that they aren’t declaring war on their own Constructions. Their mentality that

considers “art” something separate from the utilitarian work they do seems somewhat at odds when one considers

the fact that the Constructivists don’t vehemently admonish their reader to abandon the term “artist.” Of course, a

manifesto requires radical language; however, in these writings, it’s interesting that while denying the legitimacy

of art, the artists maintain the power of the artist to create a new society through his production. There’s also no 28 Bann, 53-54.29 Quoted in Forgacs, 56.30 Lodder, 7.31 Tatlin, T. Shapiro, I. Meyerzon, and Pavel Vingradov, “The Work Ahead of Us,” quoted in Bann, 12.32 A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova, “Program of the Productivist Group,” quoted in Bann, 19-20.

Figure 4. El Lissitzky, Proun G7 (1923). Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf

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shortage of direct criticism of the Suprematists and their colleagues in the writings of the Constructivists. Fedor

Yalovkin, of OSA (the Union of Contemporary Architects), criticized his fellow architects of the ASNOVA group

saying, “Their pathetic ejaculations about art are reminiscent of antediluvian searchings for a god; for we believe

that what is needed is not the invention of an art… but work on the organization of architecture, proceeding from

the data of economics, science, and technology.”33 Any group of artists who have charged themselves with an

ambitions common goal will have some amount of infighting, but the specificity and at the same time vagueness

of their language (“not the invention of an art… but work on the organization of architecture”) points to the

absurdity of the whole endeavor.

Though at times the language of the Constructivists points to what appears to be a deep ideological divide

between themselves and the artists like Malevich who believed in the power and responsibility of art to express a

deep emotional feeling, there is more ideology among the Constructivists, at least as far as their texts go, in

common with the Suprematists than not. Though Constructivists like Alexei Gan wrote such invectives as

“Painting cannot compete with photography,”34 expressing not only a turn away from painting’s excesses and

bourgeois representations of emotion but also a belief that painting’s emotional content had been rendered

obsolete by technology, the Constructivists wrote statements that seem almost in line with the ideology of the

Suprematists. Alexei Gan, in the same essay in which he stated that painting cannot compete with photography,

wrote, “Art is indissolubly linked: with theology, metaphysics, and mysticism.”35 Whether Gan saw this fact of

art’s entanglement with mysticism as problematic or not, the fact that he believed this seems to be in contradiction

to the statement wherein he blithely casts aside painting and sculpture as casualties to industry. Nikolai Punin

wrote, of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International [Figure 5], “the spiral is a line of liberation for humanity:

with one extremity resting on the ground, it flees the earth with the other; and thereby becomes a symbol of

disinterestedness, and of the converse of earthly pettiness.”36 This kind of language wouldn’t be out of place in the

writings of Kandinsky, that most emotional of Russian avant-gardists. While Tatlin’s tower may use the materials

and (perhaps) the forms of “industrial life,” the symbolism interpreted by Punin doesn’t echo the iconography of

factory life—it’s hard to believe that the spiral as a “symbol of disinterestedness” was a symbol for conveying

utilitarian, industrial meaning in the language of factory life in 1910s Russia. What’s more, it seems that the

Constructivists still maintained a faith in the artist’s original, creative act. In Filippov’s “Production Art,” cited

above, the author states,

Productional art is understood, grounded, and introduced into life (1) as a higher aspect of the artist’s

creative effort to organize in new forms the outer appearance of life and the complex of objects

surrounding us, (2) as something created by the essential, vital demands of life and by the constructive

imagination of the artist-creator, and (3) as the comprehension, mastery, and transformation of material.37

33 Curtis, 208.34 From 1922’s Constructivism, quoted in Bann, 37-38.35 Ibid., 35.36 Curtis, 205.37 Quoted in Bann, 25.

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While Filippov’s definition of Productional art follows the

“scientific” viewpoint expressed in other texts by

maintaining that the artist is to organize new forms drawn

from the environment surrounding the modern man

(instead of, presumably, originating new and mystical

forms like Kandinsky did), he still includes the “higher

aspect of the artist’s creative effort” and language about

the “essential, vital demands of life” and the “imagination

of the artist-creator” in his definition of a style of

“production” that is supposed to be replacing art as it is

defined by Malevich and Kandinsky. Again, the “essential”

and the “higher aspect” aren’t elements of the physical

world around the Russian worker, repurposed to take on

revolutionary meaning. They’re more akin to the ideas of

Malevich and Kandinsky than they are to mass-produced,

mechanical imagery of industry.

Finally, it’s important to note that while one can

compare the ideologies of the two opposing groups and

identify ways in which the groups are actually more similar

than they let on, there are also artists long considered part of either camp who have mixed pedigrees and who

have themselves spoken against their fellow artists labeling them as such. Lissitzky, as stated above, didn’t always

agree with the ideology of his friend and mentor, Malevich. Naum Gabo, often listed as a Constructivist in

textbooks and scholarly texts, felt that the term “Constructivist” applied to a style of art far more utilitarian than

his own, and thus didn’t apply to him at all, stating in 1948, “my art is commonly known as the art of

Constructivism. Actually the word Constructivism is a misnomer. The word Constructivism has been appropriated

by one group of constructivist artists in the 1920s who demanded that art should liquidate itself.”38 In fact, Gabo

and his brother Antoine Pevsner had written about the spiritual side of art without prejudice as early as 1920, in

their “Realistic Manifesto,” saying, “we proclaim today to you artists, painters, sculptors, musicians, actors,

poets… to you people to whom Art is no mere ground for conversation but the source of real exaltation, our word

and deed,”39 and later in that same essay, “We know that everything has its own essential image; chair, table,

lamp, telephone, book, house, man… they are all entire worlds with their own rhythms, their own orbits.”40 This

respect for the metaphysical in art and environment (and not a purely physical, objective, industrial point of view

as the purer Constructivists espouse (“painting cannot compete with photography”) clearly sets these two artists

apart.

38 Lodder, 39.39 Bann, 5.40 Ibid., 9.

Figure 5. Photograph of Tatlin’s model of his Monument to the Third International (1917).

Fineman 12

In the end, after taking a survey of the avant-gardists’ texts, a lot of questions remain about the mechanics

of significance that the artists presumably saw working behind the abstract forms of their art. What’s more, this

difficult and confusing period in the history of art, made only more obscure by the artists’ own paradoxical

writings, has been further obfuscated by later scholarship which placed artists like, for instance, Gabo, in

categories the artists did not agree with. The avant-gardists’ writings were vague and dogmatic, and almost

always fall back on emotion as fuel for the art’s significance—something that makes sense in the writings of

Kandinsky and Malevich, but which is highly contradictory in the writings of the hard-line Constructivists. If the

artists are to be taken on their word, then the two opposing ideologies are, at their core, very similar.

Fineman 13

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