Week 7- The Language of Form- Part 1

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism, 1915

(image is not the exact poster but is similar for context.) Abstract shapes that lay vertical, diagonal, and horixontal on a white background with black background plane square shapes and primary color rectangle and swuare shapes. Mainly obtained in top left corner and bottom right corner.

El Lissitzky, exhibition poster, 1929

15-23. El Lissitzky, exhibition poster, 1929. In this stark, powerful image, the youth of a collective society are cloned into an anonymous double portrait above the exhibition structure designed by Lissitzky. 126.4 x 90.5 cm. Lissitzky utilized photomontage for complex communica- tions messages (Figs. 15-21 and 15-22). On a poster for a Russian exhibition in Switzerland, the image (Fig. 15-23) gives equal position to the female and the male, a significant symbolic communication in a traditionally male-dominated society.

The Style of Constructivism

Constructivism: • Heavily influenced by Suprematism • Social and political concerns • Russian Revolution/Communism • How does the artist fit into the new society? • Artists see themselves as constructors, essentially designers for thenew utopian society • Machine-like, geometric forms • Akin the the Bauhaus • Utopian • Artist as worker • Importance of construction/building • Get rid of unnecessary decoration (form follows function) • Synthesis of art and industry • Use of photomontage • Use of the grid • Influence of Cubism and Futurism evident in typography • 1932- Stalin makes Soviet Realism the law of the land, shuts down modern art.

Kasimir Malevich, Composition with the Mona Lisa, 1914

Cubism. Malevich created this piece at a time when he was moving away from objective art and embracing his newly invented Suprematism painting style. At the time, he condemned representational art citing it was theft from nature. Kazimir said artists needed to construct on the basis of speed, weight and direction of movement, not objectivity. He managed to convey his beliefs by placing shapes against a plain background to eliminate spatial interpretations and infer relationships from the overlapping figures. In this composition, Malevich does not abandon representation entirely. He uses abstraction to dissect the picture plane and figure into different interlocking geometric shapes. Mona Lisa's silhouette is still identifiable to illustrate Malevich had not abandoned representation completely. He includes a general palette of cool colours dominated by blues, greys, pink, white and black colours that add a visual dynamic to the composition. It shows Malevich's intention to communicate. Malevich created this piece at a time he had rejected reason. He wanted to be free from objective representations, which were primary to creating most paintings then. Kazimir adopted a fragmented style he called Alogical Federalism, which was best exhibited in this composition. This form of art was based on the Utopian ideals that were politically and artistically revolutionary. The piece also exhibits abstraction style through the use of a host of triangles, rectangles and vibrant colours.

El Lissitzky, PROUN 23, no. 6, 1919

In 1919 Marc Chagall, principal of the revolutionary art school in Vitebsk, located about 400 kilometers east of Mos- cow, asked Lissitzky to join the faculty. Malevich was teaching there and became a major influence on Lissitzky, who devel- oped a painting style that he called PROUNS (an acronym for "projects for the establishment [affirmation] of a new art"). In contrast to the absolute flatness of Malevich's picture plane, PROUNS (Fig. 15-8) introduced three-dimensional illusions that both receded (negative depth) behind the picture plane (naught depth) and projected forward (positive depth) from the picture plane. Lissitzky called PROUNS "an interchange station between painting and architecture." This indicates his synthesis of architectural concepts with painting; it also describes how PROUNS pointed the way to the application of modern painting concepts of form and space to applied design.

part 3

In 1925 he predicted that Gutenberg's system of printing would become a thing of the past and that photomechanical processes would replace metal type and open new horizons for design as surely as radio had replaced the telegraph. As a designer, Lissitzky did not decorate the book—he constructed it by visually programming the total object. In For the Voice, also translated as For Reading Out Loud, a 1923 book of thirteen poems by Vladimir Mayakovski, Lissitzky signed exclusively with elements from the metal type case set by a German compositor who knew no Russian (Figs. 15-14 through 15-16). He said his intent was to interpret the poems as "a violin accompanies a piano." A die-cut tab index along the right margin helped the reader find a poem. Each poem's title spread is illustrated with abstract elements signifying its content. Spatial composition, contrast between elements, the relationship of forms to the negative space of the page, and an understanding of such printing possibilities as overlapping color were important in this work.

Kasimir Malevich

Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) founded a painting style of basic forms and pure color that he called suprematism. After working in the manner of futurism and cubism, Malevich created an elemental geometric abstraction that was new and totally nonobjective. He rejected both utilitarian function and pictorial representation, instead seeking the supreme "expression of feeling, seeking no practical values, no ideas, no promised land." Malevich believed the essence of the art experience was the perceptual effect of color and form. To demonstrate this, perhaps as early as 1913 he made a composition with a black square on a white background (Fig. 15-5), asserting that the feeling this contrast evoked was the essence of art. In works such as the 1915 Suprematist Com- position (Fig. 15-6), and the cover of Pervyi tsikl lektsii (First Circle of Lectures) (Fig. 15-7), Malevich created a construction of concrete elements of color and shape. The visual form became the content, and expressive qualities developed from the intuitive organization of the forms and colors.

El Lissitzky (we will be focusing a lot of him; know the specific qualities of his style—both his PROUNs and his graphic design)

Lissitzky saw the October 1917 Russian Revolution as a new beginning for mankind. Communism and social engineering would create a new order, technology would provide for society's needs, and the artist/designer (he called himself a "constructor") would forge a unity between art and technology by construct- ing a new world of objects to provide mankind with a richer society and environment. This idealism led him to put increasing emphasis on graphic design, as he moved from private aesthetic experience into the mainstream of communal life. In 1921 Lissitzky was appointed head of the architectural faculty at the new VKhUTEMAS art school in Moscow. That same year he traveled to Berlin and the Netherlands, where he made contact with De Stijl, the Bauhaus, Dadaists, and other constructivists. In addition, he met the Dutch architect Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld (1885-1987) and in 1922 designed a cover for the magazine Wendingen (see Fig. 15-58). Postwar Germany had become a meeting ground for eastern and western ideas advanced in the early 1920s. Access to excellent German print- ing facilities enabled Lissitzky's typographic ideas to develop rapidly. His tremendous energy and range of experimentation with photomontage, printmaking, graphic design, and paint- ing enabled him to become the main conduit through which suprematist and constructivist ideas flowed into western Europe. Editorial and design assignments for several publications were important vehicles by which his ideas influenced a wider audience.

part 2

Lissitzky's Berlin period enabled him to spread the con- structivist message through frequent Bauhaus visits, important articles, and lectures. Major collaborations included the joint design and editing of a special double issue of Merz with Kurt Schwitters in 1924. The editors of Broom, a radical American magazine covering advanced literature and art, commissioned title pages and other graphics from Lissitzky. A Broom cover layout (Fig. 15-12) shows Lissitzky's practice of making layouts on graph paper, which imposed the modular structure and mathematical order of a grid upon his designs. Advertise- ments and displays were commissioned by the Pelikan Ink Company (Fig. 15-13). Rebelling against the constraints of metal typesetting, Lissitzky often used drafting-instrument construction and paste-up to achieve his designs.

How Constructivism relates to the Russian Revolution (aka the Bolshevik Revolution)

Russia was torn by the turbulence of World War I and then the Russian Revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century. Czar Nicholas II (1868-1918) was overthrown and executed along with his family. Russia was ravaged by civil war, and the Red Army of the Bolsheviks emerged victorious by 1920. During this period of political trauma, a brief flower- ing of creative art in Russia had an international influence on twentieth-century graphic design. Beginning with Marinetti's Russian lectures, the decade saw Russian artists absorb cubism and futurism with amazing speed and then move on to new innovations. The Russian avant-garde saw common traits in cubism and futurism and coined the term cubo-futurism. Experimentation in typography and design characterized their futurist publications, which presented work by the visual and literary art communities. Symbolically, the Russian futurist books were a reaction against the values of czarist Russia. The use of coarse paper, handicraft production methods, and handmade additions expressed the poverty of peasant society as well as the meager resources of artists and writers. The poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovski's autobiographical play was printed in a dissonant futurist style designed by David and Vladimir Burliuk (Fig. 15-1), becoming a model for works by others, including Ilja Zdanevich (Figs. 15-2 and 15-3).

The style of Suprematism

Suprematism: • Name suggests that this art is superior to the art of thepast • Kasimir Malevich • Reaches pure abstraction after learning the lessonsof previous modern art movements • Wants to "free art from the burden of the object" • Black Square• Pure abstraction • When you look at a painting, you are looking atformal elements (like contrast), not reality • The essence of art is formal elements • Wanted to create something new, not copy nature • Also has a relationship to Russian icons

part 2-

The Bolsheviks began a news agency, the Russian Tele- graph Agency (ROSTA) in 1917, immediately following the Russian Revolution. Two years later ROSTA posters began to be produced to support the Red Army in the civil war. Using straightforward pictorial designs, their goal was to portray the Bolshevik version of the new politics through the use of images. Crudely stenciled illustrations presented exaggerated historical and social events to appeal to a largely illiterate or semiliterate audience. Typical images included fancily dressed uncouth capitalists receiving punishment for what the Bolshe- viks considered their evil ways. Issued on separate sheets in a comic book form, they were commonly called ROSTA Win- dows. Appearing between the fall of 1919 and January 1922, they were hung in shop windows and other places where they would be easily seen. At first they were hand-copied individual designs, but in the spring of 1920 they began to be produced using stencils, and one hundred copies could be produced in a single day.

El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919

This is seen in his 1919 poster "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge" (Fig. 15-9). The space is dynamically divided into white and black areas. Suprematist design elements are transformed into political symbolism that even a semiliterate peasant can supposedly understand: Support for the "red" Bolshevik against the "white" forces of Aleksandr Kerensky is symbolized by a red wedge slashing into a white circle.

Kasimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913

This piece epitomised the theoretical principles of Suprematism. Though Kazimir had been influenced by the Cubism style, he believed this technique did not showcase the abstraction well enough. The 1915 Black Square painting displays this style perfectly in a single pictorial element. When creating this piece, Malevich believed that such forms should be free of reason and logic for the intended purpose to be fulfilled through feeling. The square symbolised feelings while the dark colour portrayed nothingness. The Black Square became the epitome of non-representational art. It explains why it was hung where other Orthodox paintings would traditionally be placed in the Russian exhibition.

Aleksandr Rodchenko, Books!, c. 1920

This political shift was accompanied by dramatic changes in Russian art production. The kind of individual expression associated with fine arts came to seem bourgeois and incompatible with the lifestyle and values advocated by Communism. In response, a group of artists known as Constructivists set out to reconceive the role of art in society; they demystified it by establishing rigorous guidelines, renounced traditional media, and emphasized the notion of art in service of the proletariat. Aleksandr Rodchenko was one of the leading artists in the post-revolutionary era. Although formally trained in painting and sculpture, he devoted himself to photography and graphic design. In this 1924 poster, Rodchenko combines the two media in an image that is mechanical and linear. The text, in big block letters, is clear and legible; no flourish of the artist's hand is evident. The photograph of a woman who appears to be calling out the Russian word for "books" is Lilya Brik, a fellow member of the Constructivist circle. Her image has been manipulated and integrated into the bold design. The aesthetic of immediate communication exemplified by Rodchenko's poster was characteristic of official Soviet art of the period and was in use not only for posters, but also for political journals, book covers, and other kinds of propaganda. Through images that were visually arresting and easily accessible, Rodchenko and his colleagues believed that they could best convey the messages of the Communist state to the masses.

The meaning behind Black Square

• Black Square• Pure abstraction • When you look at a painting, you are looking atformal elements (like contrast), not reality • The essence of art is formal elements • Wanted to create something new, not copy nature • Also has a relationship to Russian icons

How did Malevich come up with Suprematism?

• Reaches pure abstraction after learning the lessonsof previous modern art movements • Wants to "free art from the burden of the object" • Black Square• Pure abstraction • When you look at a painting, you are looking atformal elements (like contrast), not reality • The essence of art is formal elements • Wanted to create something new, not copy nature • Also has a relationship to Russian icons