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Russian Avant Garde Art - General Information




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	History of the Avant-Garde Art


Before investigating Constructivism and other post revolutionary Soviet works of art and design a summary of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde’s history must be reviewed. The progressive art movement emerged in 1907 with

the Neo-Primitivist movement. Although these artists were influenced by the examples set by Gauguin, Matisse, and Rousseau, there was also an idigenous group who based their work on peasant art and themes of soldiers, peasants and everyday life. Along with using folk art as a thematic source, they used the formal aspects of peasant art and Icon painting in their art. Significantly, the use of folk art was to be of important propagandist value in revolutionary times. Its use was an attempt to communicate to the “lowest common denominator” the illiterate Russian Peasant via forms that were familiar.


			Civil War


	In 1917, the Czar was overthrown. After the coming and going of democratic Kerensky provisional government, the communists gained the upper hand. Not surprisingly, the democratic forces known as

“whites” did not give up. Also outside iterventionists from the European Allies and America attacked the new Soviet State. This led to a Civil War period known as War Communism. War Communism lasted from 1918-1920. It was a period during which a certain fanaticism impregnated the general utopian hope fro socialism with a dictatorial attitude towards everything that threatens its realization.


			A new form of art - Constructivism


		Contrary to all the gloom, the art avant- garde gained quite a bit of power and influence during this time. Because of the revolutionary nature of their art, the avant-garde was now accepted as the

herald of the revolution. Another reason for their power was that they had nothing to lose and merely filled the void left by the flight of accepted artists. To build bridges between artists, the public, and government, artist trade unions were established in 1917. In the political realm, Shterenburg and Tatlin became the heads of the Visual Arts Section of the government in Moscow and Petrograd. At the same time, Cubo-Futurism was being pushed as the state art form. A. Lanarsky, head of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment, countered that no single group could be the only “spokesman of the proletariat”. The rejection of the past by Lanarsky helped the couse of the newer forms of art, namely, “Constructivism”.

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