CONSTRUCTIVISM AS AN ART MOVEMENT

One of the 20th century’s most influential movements amounted to nothing less than an attack on
art. In 1922, a Russian artist named Aleksei Gan penned a manifesto that began with words in
glaring uppercase: “WE DECLARE UNCOMPROMISING WAR ON ART!” The Russian
Revolution had taken place five years earlier, in 1917. The country was in the process of freeing
itself from the grips of a powerful ruling elite; now it would revolutionize Russia’s cultural life,
too, and put art to work in service of a new, Communist society.

Constructivism began with Vladimir Tatlin, a Russian artist who was profoundly impacted by a
visit to Picasso’s studio in 1913. There, he saw the artist’s experimentations with collaged objects.
In 1915, Tatlin demonstrated the influence of the Spanish artist in his own abstract, three-
dimensional collages made of metal and wood, which he showed alongside Malevich’s
Suprematist paintings at what was called the “Last Futurist Exhibition” of that year.

The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great
effect on modern art movements of the 20th century, influencing major trends such as the Bauhaus
and De Stijl movements. Its influence was widespread, with major effects upon architecture,
sculpture, graphic design, industrial design, theatre, film, dance, fashion and, to some extent,
music.

DE STIJL ART MOVEMENT

De Stijl, (Dutch: “The Style”) group of Dutch artists in Amsterdam in 1917, including the painters
Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and Vilmos Hher early associates of De Stijl were Bart van
der Leck, Georges Vantongerloo, Jan Wils, and Robert van’t Hoff. Its members, working in an
abstract style, were seeking laws of equilibrium and harmony applicable both to art and to life.

De Stijl’s most outstanding painter was Mondrian, whose art was rooted in the mystical ideas of
Theosophy. Although influenced by his contact with Analytical Cubism in Paris before 1914,
Mondrian thought that it had fallen short of its goal by not having developed toward pure
abstraction, or, as he put it, “the expression of pure plastics” (which he later called Neoplasticism).
In his search for an art of clarity and order that would also express his religious and philosophical
beliefs, Mondrian eliminated all representational components, reducing painting to its elements:
straight lines, plane surfaces, rectangles, and the primary colours (red, yellow, and blue) combined
with neutrals (black, gray, and white). Van Doesburg, who shared Mondrian’s austere principles,
launched the group’s periodical, De Stijl (1917–32), which set forth the theories of its members.

As a movement, De Stijl influenced painting, decorative arts (including furniture design),

typography, and architecture, but it was principally architecture that realized both De Stijl’s
stylistic aims and its goal of close collaboration among the arts. The Worker’s Housing Estate in
Hoek van Holland (1924–27), designed by Oud, expresses the same clarity, austerity, and order
found in a Mondrian painting. Gerrit Rietveld, another architect associated with De Stijl, also
applied its stylistic principles in his work; the Schröder House in Utrecht (1924), for example,
resembles a Mondrian painting in the severe purity of its facade and in its interior plan. Beyond
the Netherlands, the De Stijl aesthetic found expression at the Bauhaus in Germany during the
1920s and in the International Style.