REVOLUTIONARY DESIGN IN RUSSIA

Some notes taken down from Richard Mile's lecture and seminar about Russian Revolutionary and Constructivist design.

• Russian revolution led by Lenin in 1917
• 1917-1921 Russian civil war: Reds v Whites = Revolutionary Bolsheviks vs Anti-revolutionary Imperialists
• "Peace, Bread and Land"
• Battleship 'aurora' (dawn)

Communism = everything owned by everyone, Money got shared. Equality. This is what the russian revolutionists, Bolsheviks and Lenin wanted. Didn't actually turn out this rosy though after the war.

Capitalism = Everyone to themselves, your money is yours. Ends up with people being either really rich, or really poor.

Propaganda

• 1917 - mid 1920s: intense artistic experimentation
• 80 percent illiteracy
• The Russian Constructivists - leading Avant Garde Artistic Group

Marxism

Photomontage

1. Superimposition e.g. Rodchenko portrait, Klutsis 'Electrification' & with text Rodchenko's portrait of Osip Brik
2. Cropping eg. Rodchenko's cover for 'Mess Mend'
3. Juxtaposition eg. Rodchenko's cover for 'Novy L.E.F.'

The aim of the Constructivists was of 'achieving the communistic expression of material structures'. ('The programme of the first working group of Constructivists' 1921 quoted in Lodder (1983) Russian Constructivism, London & Yale, p.94)

red and black.white becomes sybol of bolshevism/communism

• 1921 Lenin's New Economic Policy = consumer goods needed
• Stepanova and Popova - First State Textile Factory, Moscow
• 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs

'For many artists on the left in the 1920s, including Moholy-Nagy, the single most significant reference point was no longer the Parisian avant-garde but the revolutionary connotations of construction, with revolutionary Eussia as the new symbol of advanced culture.' Fer, B (1993) Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism, Yale, p.88

VKhUTEMAS (Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops)

'voile and prints have not just become artistically acceptable, they have reached the level of real art, and have brought the rich colours and intense ornamentation of contemporary art to the cities of our immense Republic' D. Aranovich 1929 (quoted in: Lavantiev, A (1988) Stepanova, London P.83)