Art in Revolution 3 - newleafdesign.me.uk

3 A design for a better world?157

days to November 7th/8th) and the relocation of the capital and governmentfrom Petrograd to Moscow, for strategic as well as emotional reasons .Where did all this leave the artists? They needed to find an integral role forthemselves in this new context of social cooperation – to find a way ofhelping the revolution to build a Socialist state. Although Lenin had littlesympathy with avant-garde art, he recognised the usefulness of propaganda inthe media and consequently needed to exploit painting, sculpture,architecture, literature, theatre, music and film to realise his aims.Shortly after the revolution a number of People’s Commissariats wereestablished to help support a new political, economic, social and culturalstructure to the country. The People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment’otherwise known as Narkompros was established for education, culture andthe arts. The artists were fortunate in the choice of the liberal-minded AnatolyLunacharsky as Commissar of Education to lead this drive as he had studiedart in Paris and firmly believed in the central role that art could play in shapingthe new society. ‘To link art with life – this is the task of the New Art’ hedeclared.Although isolated from the rest of Europe, an indigenous form of avantgardeart was emerging Russia. Many of these artists had been abroad beforethe war. Chagall, El Lissitzky, Popova, Udaltsova, Naum Gabo and his brotherAnton Pevsner had returned home at its outbreak and each made theircontribution. Even the reluctant Kandinsky returned due to his status as anenemy alien by his adopted country German.The seeds of this new style of Russian art had been sown shortly beforethe Bolshevik revolution with ‘0.10. The Last Futurist Painting Exhibition’ in theDobychina Gallery, Petrograd. The two broad strands that would dominateRussian art for more than a decade were first shown here: Vladimir Tatlin’sassemblages would lead to Constructivism and Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematistsystem inspired a vibrant abstract school of artistic activity.When the Commissariat’s Department of the Visual Arts known as IZO wasset up under the Narkompros umbrella it was chaired by Tatlin. Committeemembers included the apolitical Kandinsky who was assured by Tatlin that hewould be allowed to pursue a purely artistic role. Through this institutionartists were granted a fair degree of responsibilty and support to further therevolution. Painter and poet Olga Rozanova was one who strongly believedthat art should be at the service of the proletariat and she tirelessly travelledthe country organising the educational side of the programme, promoting theapplication of art to urban and industrial needs, organising studios andworkshops in remote areas of the country. Tragically she died of dipheria inOctober 1918 before she could see her efforts come to fruition.In 1916 Tatlin had organised another significant exhibition ‘The Store’. Due tohis rivalry with Malevich he had decided to exclude him from exhibiting hisSuprematist works which were still a bone of contention between them.Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956), a young artist who was equally impressedby Malevich and Tatlin’s work first showed his work here and provided a vitallink between the two pre-eminent artists. He was born in St Petersburg wherehis father had been a skilled theatre craftsman and as a young man went tothe art school in Odessa. By 1914 he was making complex abstract pen andink drawings with ruler and compass and five of these works were shown at160 ART IN REVOLUTION

(Below) AlexanderRodchenko’sConstruction onreddish-brown andgreen ground No 94(1919) one of a series ofhis mathematicallybased ‘Lines’ paintings.which showsSuprematism pointingthe way forward toConstructivism.(Below right)Rodchenko with SpatialConstruction no 12.These could bedismantled andreassembled at thepoint of exhibition.the 1916 exhibition. From Malevich he adopted the use of pure geometricforms in two dimensional painting, and from Tatlin he gained an interest inthe exploratory use of various materials in three-dimensional metal and spatialconstructions. He responsed to Malevich’s White on white with theSuprematist inspired Black on Black of 1918; both were shown together atthe Non-objective art and Suprematism exhibition in Moscow in 1919. Hisfuture wife Vavara Stepanova described the ‘facture’ of Black on Black (thediffering textures matt, gloss or whatever used to make selected areas of thework stand out). ‘There is nothing but painting and for this reason the facturegains extraordinarily, it creates the impression that the work was painted withquite different materials. These lustrous, matt, flaky, uneven, and smoothparts of the surface produce an extraordinarily powerful composition ... theyleave no room for colours’.Rodchenko stated that ‘art is a branch of mathematics like any otherscience’ so it was obvious that a majority of his work would have amathematical basis. Lines , for instance, were a series of geometric oilpaintings that were developed from pen drawings made wiith a ruler andcompass. He felt that ‘inventors are artists and the artist is essentially aninventor’ and proved the point by working in an innovative way on a broadrange of activities, including painting, drawing, sculptural constructions,linocuts, collages and later posters, graphics and photography. Suprematismallowed him to show an illusion of the third dimension in his paintings. Theshortened perspectives and planes abutting or intersecting at right angles givean architectural quality to his work. By 1920 his mathematical and geometricpaintings belong to the new creed of Constructivism, a series of threedimensionalstructures including Light reflecting surfaces and On the Principleof Equal Forms. His spatial constructions are forerunners tothe welded metal sculptures of David Smith and AnthonyCaro later in the century; conveniently they were hinged sothat they could fold and be transportable.He also explored the potential of mobile sculpture. Theseincluded a series of five different geometric spatialconstructions, each made of elipses, circles, squares, trianglesand hexagons. Several of these shapes were attached insideeach other by wire and suspended from the ceiling. ToA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 161

enhance these forms it occured to him that he could shine lights on the silvermetallic surfaces to increase the spatial effects as well as giving a sense ofmovement. These were prescient to the Surreal mobile sculptures of AlexanderCalde and could be flat-packed, moved and reassembled elsewhere. .Shortly before the October revolution Tatlin had asked Rodchenko to help himwork on the interior design of the Café Pittoresque in Moscow, andRodchenko came up with lamps and mouldings which were a complexarrangement of spatial planes. The Café Pittoresque was a Russian-Futuristhangout and one of a number of bohemian café theatres which were at thecentre of a wild pre-revolution artistic café culture, contemporaneous and inmany respects similar to the activities of the Dada group in Zurich. Eccentricdress and faces painted with hieroglyphs were de rigeur. Mayakovsky wasoften seen in a bright yellow shirt with a wooden spoon or a radish in hisbutton hole. He would perform exclamatory nonsense poetry from a crowdedstage, hurling rhymed abuse at the audience in his deep and powerful voice.The press reported many ‘scandals’ from these evenings and sometimes fightsbetween the performing artists and the members of the audience would breakout. Police intervention would be a fairly typical end to one of theseentertainments. Not suprisingly Lenin with his experience of Zurich Dada wasvery suspicious of the Russian Futurists and thought their total rejection of thepast was nonsense. It made more sense to him to keep and develop the bestof the existing culture saving the immense trouble of having to invent acompletely new one. After a good deal of soul-searching the frivolity came toan end as Narkompros and IZO had much more serious aims in mind.Malevich and Tatlin, as the two most influential figures of the Russianavant-garde, had the most influence in shaping post revolution art. Malevichtheorised that both Cubism and Futurism had been revolutionary forms of artand as such had foreshadowed the social and political reforms of therevolution. Similarily the commited Tatlin thought that the art of ‘material,volume and construction’ that he had been working on since 1914 was anartistic forerunner to the revolution. ‘To accept or not accept the OctoberRevolution, there was no such question for me as I merged into an activecreative social and pedagogogical life’. So he and Rodchenko, anotherenthusiastic supporter of the revolution, turned their attention to cultivatingan artistic role in this new socialist world. Any thoughts of the ‘Art for art’ssake’ of their predecessors were now dead and buried in the distant past.The roots of a socially based art were already in place. ‘Prolekult’(Proletarian Organisation for Culture and Education) had been founded in1906 and although effective was given a boost by the October revolution. Itsprimary concern to unite art and industry would eventually lead toConstructivism in its broadest sense. One of its leading members, the Futuristwriter Osip Brik, argued that the ideal of art should be based on a socialproduct and that the proletariat should have its own type of art to help in thestruggle for socialism. With this kind of political credibility it was even allowedto retain its pre-revolutionary automony, the only cultural organisation thatwasn't controlled by Lunacharsky. Despite Lenin’s belief that Prolekult shouldcome under the central administration of the Party it remained anindependent branch of culture until 1932 when it was eventually broughtunder state control with the officially sanctioned art of Socialist Realism.162 ART IN REVOLUTION

Following the Bolshevik revolution Russia withdrew from the war andthrough the process of peace negotiations managed to lose twenty-five percentof its European territory to the Germans including the importanteconomic base of the Ukraine. As one of the major wheat growing areas inEurope and its abundant supply of minerals, the loss of the Ukraine wasbound to cause an enormous dent in Russia’s vital resources.In the late summer of 1918, less than a year after the Bolsevik revolution,a bitter and bloody civil war began to rage across the country, a conflict thatwould last for the next three years. Counter-revolutionary resistance to theBolsheviks and the Red Army came after the end of the first world war fromthe White Russians, aided by Britain, France, USA and Japan. The civil war wasat times confusing, many men changing sides at least once. Banners wereseen that proclaimed ‘Long live the Bolsheviks, down with the Communists’so no wonder the workers were confused. The protracted strife wrecked theeconomy and the resulting poverty and famine killed millions.Despite everything there was a surprisingly high level of optimism amongstthe more idealistic artists who still shared a belief that art would changesociety for the better. The Russian Futurists changed their habits and put theirminds to communicating visually and verbally the ideas put forward by theSoviet government to a largely semi-literate population. All through the earlyyears of the revolution organisations were formed and meetings were held inwhich artists took part in a seemingly endless debate about their role in thenew society, and how they could produce necessary objects for everyday life.Between 1918 and 1922, under the auspices of IZO, Kollegia, a MuseumBureau and Purchasing Fund helped to establish thirty-six museums all overthe country. The idea was to educate and familiarise the public with artisticcreativity through exhibitions and the acquisition of contemporary art.Rodchenko served as the head of the bureau between 1919 and 1920 andwas partly responsible for its impressive record before it was closed down in1922. In all nearly 2000 works by over 400 artists were acquired anddistibuted to the various museums. A subsection of IZO commissionedthousands of stencilled posters for the commemoration of the Revolution anda campaign to abolish illiteracy and promote economic reform. During its timetwenty-eight exhibitions were organised, the first of these being ‘The firstexhibition of Petrograd artists of all trends’ held at the Winter Palace in April1919 where 300 or so artists showed nearly 2000 works!A couple of months earlier in January the more radical ‘Tenth StateExhibition’ in Moscow had shown 230 abstract works and tried to bringforward non-objective art as a revolutionary style which could represent thenew image of Russia as the first country to widely promote new forms ofabstract art through official institutions. Stepanova said that ‘Russia hasbecome the home of non-objectivity since Russia has long been a country ofthe spirit’. There were however early signs of discontent that the art of thepast was being dismissed as having no relevance for the present day and thiscriticism would grow ever louder over the next decade.Lunarcharsky wrote that ‘the revolution needed art – as agitation andpropaganda – and art needed the revolution – as a grand social event toprovide it with vast material and so it could formulate a new artistic soul’. Heset up Agitprop (agitation and propaganda) to fill this need and give thepublic positive feelings and ideas towards the revolution, a sugar-coated pillA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 163

A visualisation of thedecorations for the firstanniversary celebrationsof the Octoberrevolution held in thelarge square in front ofthe Winter palace inPetrograd.presented in the form of an attractive range of artworks. These included streetdecorations designed for the First of May and October Revolution celebrations.For the first anniversary of the October Revolution in November 1918 thebuildings around the great square of the old capital of Petrograd were drapedwith canvases adorned with Russian Futurist designs. The centre of attentionhowever were huge abstract sculptures that were constructed to cover thecentral obelisk in front of the Winter Palace.As part of these celebrations, the Russian Futurist poet VladimirMayakovsky wrote and performed a play Mystery Bouffe. The sets weredesigned by Malevich and it was co-produced by a protegé of Stanislavski,Vsevelod Meyerkhold who became the great theatrical producer of therevolutionary years. The play was announced as follows – ‘we poets, artistsand directors celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution with arevolutionary show and we shall perfom “Mystery Bouffe”an heroic epic and a satirical picture of our era’. Futuristinfluences were still much in evidence. One scene was setin Noah’s ark, another set in Hell ‘in which the workerssend Beelzebub himself to the devil’ and yet another inHeaven, ‘an important discussion between a labourer andMethusaleh’. Despite its pre-revolutionary referencesMayakovsky was keen to add his support to the Revolutionshown by his appeals for a positive role for art in thecommunity:It was the Revolution speaking. Look lively, don’t messabout, this is not the time to speak but to act.Crystallise your idea into a sloganMayakovsky had become well-known throughout thecountry and beyond through his public performances ofdeclamatory poetry, and as an actor in films such as ‘Notfor money born’ adapted from a Jack London story andpartly set in the Poet’s Café.Around the time of the revolution he had written thatwe do not need a dead mausoleum of art where deadworks are worshipped, but a living factory of thehuman spirit – art must be spread everywhere – on thestreets, in the trams, factories, workshops and workershomes.In March 1918 he launched an artist’s newspaper‘Isskusstvo Kommuny’ (Art of the Commune) which wasan attempt to redefine the role of Russian Futurism. Thefirst issue included Mayakovsky’s poetic manifesto entitledMarching Order for the Army of the Arts. Artists were toldthat ‘Factories, industrial plants, workshops, are waitingfor [you] to come to them, to give them designs for newand unprecedented objects’. The proper place for artisticactivity was now to be in the workshop, the factory, aswell as in the home and on the street. Art might have asocial conscience but should still be independently minded.164 ART IN REVOLUTION

Vladimir Mayakovskythe former RussianFuturist poet andplaywright and a greatpropagandist for postrevolutionary Russia.Tatlin, Rodchenko, along with Burliuk and Kamensky had the same ideals inmind when they published the Manifesto of the Flying Federation of Futuristsaround the same time. This called for the Art Academy to be abolished and aseparation of all art from the state with artists controlling the institutions. Theformer request was granted when in April 1918 the traditional PetrogradAcademy of Art was closed down and reformed by IZO as Svomas (thePetrograd Free Studios). This was repeated in Moscow (the new capital from1918) when IZO closed down the old Sroganov college of Painting, Sculptureand Architecture replacing it with the Moscow State Free Studios whichallowed for complete artistic freedom. A number of other art colleges wereset up to teach painting and sculpture allowing anyone who wished to havean art education to join at any time of the year. This kind of freedom andidealism wasn’t likely to last and the resulting chaos was replaced in 1921 bya stricter régime under the auspices of the Academy of the Sciences.In the meantime IZO introduced an ambitious and far-sighted plan to turnthe Moscow school into the country’s principle art school, Vkhutemas ’HigherState Technical-Artistic Studios’ a multi-disciplinary college which opened on29 November 1920. It was set up to train artist/technicians to design andproduce material goods to help improve the well-being of the country. Theschool encouraged students to work in a wide range of subjects and one ofits aims was to give an advanced artistic and technical training so thatspecialist artists and craftsmen would be equipped with the necessary skills toimprove the quality of the end-product to suit the needs of industry. Itpioneered in the multi-disciplined art and design courses that appearedaround Europe after the war and for a time was the most advanced of itskind, as it had departments of Architecture, Painting, Sculpture, Ceramics,Textiles and Typography. Vkhutemas became the centre of RussianConstructivism and was an equivalent to the Bauhaus school in Germanywhich had opened a year or so earlier. The Metalwork (Metfak) andWoodwork (Derfak) faculties were to become increasingly important whenthey were combined in one faculty called Dermetfak. Tatlin, Rodchenko andGustav Klutsis were all at some stage involved with this department,important for the production of light fittings, coat hangers, furniture andlarger projects such as railway compartments, rural reading rooms andworker’s clubs.Tatlin ran its influential design course and Popova and Alexsandr Vesninwere appointed to run a course on colour construction. There were also earlyattempts to introduce standardisation as the most economic and convenientbasis behind product design. Other ideas that found favour were space savingdesigns like collapsible beds and folding chairs necessitated by extremehousing shortages that forced whole families to live in one room.Rodchenko made a strong impression on his students when he became ateacher at Vkhutemas in late 1920. One described him as ‘a new special typeof person, a bit like a pilot’. With a shaved head, beige jacket-like uniform,grey-green riding breeches and black lace-up boots you can imagine him asthe perfect role model for the new breed of Constructivist man.Several thousand students took part in the new art school and there wereregular open discussions and seminars held in the school auditorium withmembers of the public and artists from outside the college. One of theteachers, the sculptor Naum Gabo, reckoned that these were more importantA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 165

Rodchenko (left)models the new lookfor Constructivist manin front of some of hisspatial constructions.in the clarification of a wide range of ideas that lead toConstructivist art than all of the teaching. The courses were in aconstant state of flux as a result of these discussions.Kandinsky and Rodchenko amongst others helped to set up‘The Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture’ known as ‘Inkhuk’under the auspices of IZO and Narkrompos. This was intendedas a sort of research centre and think-tank for the discussionand development of new forms of art and would make surethat the courses at Vkhutemas gave the students a suitableartistic education.Four talks by Inkhuk member Boris Kushner were typical ofthe Inkhuk process. These covered a range of topics includingthe nature of the manufactured object, mass production, theroles of the engineer and the artist in production: he saw thelatter‘s usefulness as a planner in the technical office and not agrafter in the craft shop.Initially the institute was to introduce a curriculum devisedby Kandinsky who was by now in his fifties and a good dealolder and more experienced than his colleagues. He prepared avery elaborate questionnaire which posed a myriad of questionsconcerning the participitant’s response to line, form and colourin a variety of configurations and also included a number ofpractical tasks which were to be recorded in an exercise book.By now his ideas and his mystical and intuitive approach to artteaching were becoming increasingly unpopular and out of step with thephilosophy of the younger rationalist artists. A contemporary report states that‘there was found to be a fundamental divergence between Kandinsky andsome of the members of the Institute.’ Ideas he held about the artist havingthe ability to access and communicate a strong spiritual vision in his work wasdeemed elitist and out of step with current needs especially when youconsider that the more idealistic members were beginning to abandontraditional concepts of Fine Art convinced that pure art and easel paintingwere old-fashioned bourgeois activities that no longer had a valid role.Echoing Tatlin’s maxim of ‘real materials in real space’, this is the fulcrumon which, what became known as ‘Production Art’, rests. A greatlydiscouraged Kandinsky resigned towards the end of 1920 to become aprofessor of aesthetics at the University of Moscow. He was soon to leave thecountry for good, firstly moving to Berlin at the end of 1921 and then takinghis ‘controversial’ teaching methods to the more receptive and less politicalenvirons of the Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany.166 ART IN REVOLUTION

3.2 Going Dutch- De StijlVilmos Huszár’s originallogo for De Stijl strictlyconformed to the‘orthogonal’ principlesof horizontal andvertical bars.When the mystic pioneer of geometric abstract art PietMondrian, returned to Holland from Paris in July 1914, to visithis sick father, he was obliged to remain there due to theoutbreak of war a few weeks later. Making the most of a bad situationhe went to live at Laren, home to a large artist’s community. He soonbefriended a neighbour, graphic artist Bart van der Leck, who in turnintroduced him to Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) an intellectual artistand writer eleven years his junior.Early on in their relationship van Doesburg came up with the idea ofpublishing a periodical. This was part of a recent Dutch tradition thatencouraged artists and architects to explain their work and build up theirpublic profiles by writing articles on art in related journals. At first Mondrianwasn’t keen on the idea but it did eventually appear on 16 June 1917 as ‘DeStijl’ (The Style). It soon became a collective project for a small group of likemindedDutch artists and architects which included architect/designers J.J.P.Oud and Gerrit Rietveld and provided an invaluable platform for thedissemination of their ideas. The periodical was commited to the ‘Devaluationof tradition ... the exposure of the whole swindle of lyricism and sentiment’ aswell as ‘abstraction and simplication’ with a basis in mathematics. As areaction to the war, there was a call for ‘clarity, for certainty and for order’.Mondrian made friends with another neighbour, mathematician, mysticphilosopher and fellow Theosophist, Dr M.H.J. Schoenmaekers whose writingsenabled him to rationalize his pictorial method. Theosophy had already taughthim that through art he could reach what he referred to as ‘the spiritualrealm’. Schoenmaekers’ occult writings had included theories about themathematical structure of the universe, and the symbolic nature of lines, thelatter taken in part from Madame Blavatsky’s idea of the horizontal line beingbased on terrestrial matters while correspondingly the vertical line related tocelestial ones. A combination of the two types of line would create what isknown as an orthogonal structure with lines at right angles to each other.Similarly in Schoenmaeker’s The New Image of the World, the earth wascontrolled by horizontal power forces of rotation round the sun and verticalspatial rays emanating from the sun. Schoenmaeker had written that ‘thethree principal colours, yellow, blue and red... are the only colours existing’ asall other colours emanated from them. He attributed to these mysticalqualities which to a modern mind seems close to mumbo jumbo. Neverthelessthis way of thinking helped Mondrian formulate as well as confirm hisapproach to composition, as it was around this time that he finally rejectedany representation of subject matter and any illusionistic depth in his work,deciding to concentrate on pure flat abstraction. It confirmed his idea thatabstract art was more suitable for conveying transcendental matters thanrepresentational art and Schoenmaeker had presented him with aphilosophical justification for his geometric abstract paintings. In his search fora kind of reality beyond the visual ‘motif’ Mondrian thought that art could beas exact as mathematics in understanding the universe and that there was anequivalent in art to the ‘dynamic equilibrium’ found in nature. No doubt thecurrent horrors of war pointed him spiritually towards a belief in a higherrealm that transcended human nature.As a neutral country Holland was culturally and politically isolated duringthe war, so the Russian experiments in abstraction weren’t known there untilA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 167

The style of Bart vander Leck’s paintingDockwork of 1916 istaken from hisadvertising work. Theuse of simplified formsand restricted colourrange was clearly aninspiration to his friendand neighbourMondrian.Vilmos Huszár’s designand woodcut for thecover of the firstedition of the De Stijljournal in 1917.after the war. This helped the avant-garde in both countries to formulate anindigenous form of abstraction suited to their differing circumstances.Mondrian’s neighbour Van der Leck, had been designing and illustratingadvertising posters, such as a shipping poster in 1915 for a Rotterdam toLondon service. Here the subject matter, stylised figures or objects, is reducedto flat shapes of solid colours with black horizontal and vertical lines. Thisgeometric approach to representation ran parallel to Mondrian’s natureabstractions and by 1917 his new purely abstract paintings, which he named‘Nieuwe beelding’ or ‘Neo-Plasticism’, presented flat planes of colour on awhite background. One of the first examples was Composition in colour B.Pink, yellow and blue squares and rectangles are juxtaposed with a number ofshort black bars placed in isolation or overlapping the shapes which makethem appear to float on the white ground. These are reminiscent of Malevich’slater Suprematist work.There was always a logical development in Mondrian’s painting that wasbuilt on strong foundations. While abandoning Cubism’s external referencesfor an alternative or internal reality he still retained a Cubist derived grid orstructural framework. Although Neo-Plasticism grew out of his interest inCubism, towards the end of his life in 1942 he expressed his opinion that‘Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries ... notdeveloping abstraction to its ultimate goal, the expression of pure reality ... Ifelt that this could only be established by “Plasticism”’. Plasticism meant that‘the plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance that is to say tonatural form and colour, illusionistic reality with its romantic and expressiveassociations’. ‘To create pure reality plastically it is necessary to reduce naturalforms to the constant elements of form, and reduce natural colour to primarycolour’. Pure reality was the act of painting itself, the abstract use of form andcolour. When freed from the burden of imitating nature, he could play aroundwith the rhythm of forms and their spatial relationships to each. He was alover of jazz so these can consodered as improvisations in colour and form butwith a difference as everything he did was tirelessly worked out as opposed tojazz’s impression of ease and spontaneity.Van Doesburg, van der Leck and Vilmos Huszár also produced looselyrelated abstract paintings as De Stijl demonstrated a strong collective spirit inits early years. Van Doesburg had been making stained glass windows that by1916 contained the abstract rectangular elements that became integral to theDe Stijl style. This was in line with a strong Dutch tradition for stained glass forsecular and non-secular buildings. Calvinist churches in particular requirednon-representational images as an expression of their puritanical faith.Van Doesburg began to create paintings which would start with a realistic168 ART IN REVOLUTION

Mondrian’s 1917Composition in colourB. Due to the isolationof war this was paintedwithout any knowledgeof Malevich’sSuprematist paintingsbut achieve a similareffect. This is thestarting point for hisspiritual exploration of‘orthogonal’geometricalcompositions painted ina basic range of colourto find a pictorialequivalent for the‘dynamic equilibrium’to be found in nature.sketch – for instance a cow feeding – and would then go through two orthree stages of geometric transformation until the composition becameunrecognisable, similar to the evolution of Mondrian’s pre-war tree paintings.Van der Leck also made ‘abstract’ paintings of isolated floating rectangularforms, sometimes angled, on a white ground. These ‘Compositions’ wereoften ‘decomposed’ from figurative or naturalistic compositions. Huszár whohad been trained in Budapest and Munich had a background in commercialand stained glass design. His abstract paintings played with the illusion ofgeometric shapes emerging from the background to the foreground, whilesimultaneously the foreground shapes retreat to the background, a visual tricklater to be adopted by the Dutch graphic artist Escher and Op Art in thenineteen-sixties.The early years of De Stijl show an exchange of ideas and a close-knitpattern of working similar to ‘Analytic Cubism’. Although each personadopted an individual style, common factors include the use of horizontal andvertical bars, a severely restricted use of coloured rectangles down to shadesof red, yellow and blue, with black, white and grey as ‘structural’ elements ona white background. De Stijl simplified the form of the constituent elementsto a geometrical structure or ‘formal configurations’ which lead to pureabstraction. Clarity and order were pivotal to all those involved. No curvedA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 169

Vilmos Huszár’s Still lifecomposition (hammer andsaw) 1917 (right). Incontrast to Leck Huszárwas keen to makeforeground andbackgroundindistinguishable toachieve perfectly flatcompositions.Van der Leck’sComposition (above)accentuates space andbackground and has aless rigid approach togeometry thanMondrian who adheredsolely to the right angle.Georges VantongerlooConstruction of volumerelations (1919). Hissculptures are ameeting point betweenDe Stijl painting andthe field of architecturewhich was to becomeimportant to themovement.weren’t always strictly adhered to and disagreements about these principleswere to increase over the years. Van Doesburg for instance didn’t like to usegrey which he saw as an impure colour but was happy to use green, violetand orange which were not a normal part of the De Stijl palette.Mondrian was also a notable theorist and had written a treatise on avantgardepainting, entitled Neo-Plasticism in Painting. This was serialised in theDe Stijl journal, and after returning to Paris in 1920 he expanded these articlesinto a book Néo Plasticisme. After its translation into English it became one ofthe most influential books ever written about abstract art. Mondrian’s otherwritings for the journal were often essays about the spiritual world and itsrelationship to the artistic world.Both Mondrian and Van Doesburg had been fascinated by Futurism andVan Doesburg had even learnt Italian so he could read the manifestos in theoriginal language. In 1919 Marinetti gave Van Doesburg some drawings ofAntonio Sant’ Elia’s visionary architectural conceptions which he featured inthe De Stijl issue of August 1919. As his interest in new forms of architectureincreased, Van Doesburg began to talk of factories as ‘cathedrals ofmechanical production’ and made it plain that he had no time for the ‘handcrafted’philosophy of the English Arts and Crafts Movement which was still agreat influence on Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus art school in Weimar,Germany. Mondrian became a friend of Marinetti when he returned to Parisafter the war and wrote a piece for De Stijl on Futurist music.Due to its neutrality during the war, Holland was able to build as normalduring these years. Several architects were associated with the De Stijlmovement, including Gerrit Rietveld, Jan Wils, who built the Olympic Stadiumin Amsterdam in 1928, J.J.P. Oud and Robert Van’t Hoff. Most were followersof the Dutch architect Hendrik Berlage, who had built the Amsterdam StockExchange at the turn of the century. This was a new kind of traditional brickand iron structure completely devoid of decoration whose spare styleanticipated the more notable features of modernist architecture and design.Van’t Hoff had worked in America with Frank Lloyd Wright before the warand in 1919 built the Henny House in Utrecht, a very early modernist house,which had features that came to characterise De Stijl architecture includingflat roofs, horizontal rows of windows, open spaces, asymmetry, white andlight grey colouring.J.J.P. Oud derived his interest in machine aesthetics from a study of FrankLloyd-Wright, who despite developing an organic style of architecture derivedA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 171

Although the architectJ.J.P. Oud had alreadyleft De Stijl when hebuilt the Café de Unie,Rotterdam in 1924 thebuilding is still ahomage to themovement. It wasdestroyed by bombingduring the war but hasbeen reconstructed inrecent years.Gerrit Rietveld’s redand blue chair of 1918was painted in the DeStijl livery to resemble aMondrian painting inthree dimensions.from an Arts and Crafts aesthetic, mainly used machinemadeparts and furniture which he felt had a technicalperfection that was not possible with the hand-madeproduct. Oud was appointed a city architect in Rotterdam in1918 and later made a reputation for high concentrationsocial housing projects which often compromised De Stijlideals through lack of funds. Oud believed in standardization,especially useful for making these municipal housing schemesin the Rotterdam area more economical. These are to be seenin his stylish low-rise two-storey blocks with their roundedends built for the Hook of Holland estate in 1927. In totalcontrast his mid-twenties design for the Café de Unie inRotterdam wittily translates a Mondrian style painting into anarchitectural facade.Another odd example of the ‘Neo-plastic’ principles of aMondrian painting transformed into three dimensions was achair designed by the architect Rietveld independently of themovement in 1918. After joining a year later he wasencouraged to paint it in the de Stijl colours and it becameknown as the ‘Red and blue chair’. This radical but extremelyuncomfortable chair realises in its black frame the bars to be seen in many ofthe de Stijl paintings and the rectangular planes of the chair use the primarycolours of the paintings. Van Doesburg glowingly enthused ‘that chairs, tables,cupboards ... will be the abstract-realistic sculptures in our future interiors’.After moving back to Paris in 1919, Mondrian became less involved withDe Stijl. Barring a few cobwebs, he found his studio exactly as he had left itfive years before. After years of experimentation, he finally arrived at aformula in 1921 which would perfectly realise the ‘abstraction of form andcolour ... in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour’. This is thestyle behind his most celebrated asymmetric works, coloured rectangleslimited to three strong colours, yellow, orange or scarlet-red, and a mid-blueor indigo. These are positioned on a white background and enclosed within agrid of supporting black lines to hold the composition together. Aside fromtheir architectural associations these paintings remind one, as had some of hisearlier Cubist paintings, of stained glass windows.Unlike in Cubist composition the asymmetrically arranged grid of lines andcolours are weighted centrifrugally towards the edges of the canvas setting upthe illusion of an expanding composition reaching beyond the confines of thecanvas. Small or thin rectangular strips placed at the edges were as much of afocal point as any other part of the painting. This visual trick helps to implythat the painting exists beyond its physical confines, i.e. the edge of thecanvas – and imbue the paintings with a suggestion of other-wordly feelings.The spatial relationships in these compositions maximise the concept of whitespace, a white area that appears as a void or ‘negative’ area to offset colourrectangles, dominating in the reds and oranges, subdued in blues and purplesand vibrant in the yellows. ‘White space’ was to become an importantcomponent in assymetric graphic design that had its origins in the nineteentwenties.It also helps to suggest the opening up of structural space in themodernist architecture which was to develop in the nineteen-twenties. Thedynamic placement of all of these elements in relation to each other exerts172 ART IN REVOLUTION

hythm and balance within the confines of the canvas. The painting becomesa metaphor for the ‘dynamic equilibrium’ to be found in nature.The formula allowed for an infinite number of variations all similar and yetall different. These seemingly spontaneous compositions would actually takeweeks to work out, many juxtapositions were made to achieve perfectharmony, black lines, colour rectangles and white space adjusted until thework came to life. Like Malevich before him, Mondrian treated this largegroup of paintings that occupied him for most of the inter-war years, likereligious icons, windows onto an inner spiritual world.Mondrian, who recognised the potential for applying abstract principles tothe fields of architecture and all forms of modern design, transformed hisParis studio into a De Stijl-style interior. This was some consolation for thedisappointment and artistic isolation brought on by many Parisian-basedartists’ return to figurative and representative art; most obviously exemplifiedby Picasso’s return to a more classical representational style. The apparent lackof interest in Mondrian’s abstract paintings meant that he had to resort topainting and selling flower pictures to subsidise his work. His disillusionmentwas compounded by the lack of interest shown in the 1923 Paris De Stijlexhibition.Mondrian’sComposition of red,yellow and blue of(1921) shows theformula that Mondrianarrived at after the warand which he was ableto use in an infinitenumber of variations.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 173

3.3 Purismpaves a way toarchitectureOne man who had been impressed by the Paris De Stijl exhibitionof architecture in 1923 was Charles Edouard Jeanneret (1887-1965) better known as Le Corbusier (the crow). Fifteen or soyears earlier he had studied architecture in Paris and then worked forthe progressive Parisian architect Auguste Perret on the design ofmodern apartment buildings where he learnt about reinforced concrete.After working for the influential architect and designer Peter Behrens inBerlin from 1910-11 he had been trying to establish himself as anarchitect on the strength of the Dom-ino frame system of constructionwhich he had formulated in 1915 and which utilised vertical stanchions(or pilotis) combined with a concrete skeleton allowing for free internalspace. Biding his time for the right moment to launch his invention heworked as a manager of a Paris brick factory during the middle years ofthe first world war. He took up painting and joined forces with the Parisbased painter and writer Amédée Ozenfant.Ozenfant had founded the journal L’Élan in 1915 which provided a culturallink for the soldiers at the front as well as laying down the principles of Purismwhich both men started in 1917 as a reaction to what they considered theuntidiness and decorative nature of the later forms of Cubism. During a visitto Greece and Rome, Le Corbusier had sketched the classical buildings that headmired including the Parthenon. Purist painting was to adopt a cool andimpersonal style based on the geometric principles of classical architectur, thecube, the cylinder and the sphere. Artists of this period looked to classicism intheir longing for an ordered system after the chaotic catastrophe of the recentwar. When Le Corbusier finally made his mark in architecture he, like FrankLloyd Wright before him, based his radically new architecture partially onclassical examples.Charles EdouardJeanneret (alias LeCorbusier’ Still Life(1920) shows anexample of Purism’scleaned up and classicalreaction to Cubism. Hepainted while he bidedhis time waiting for theopportunity to put hismodernist architecturaltheories into practice.174 ART IN REVOLUTION

Fernand Leger’s Still lifewith ball bearing (1926)is an abstact geometriccomposition withmachine andarchitectural elementswhich expresses theessential principlesbehind Purism.Purism was an attempt to portray mathematical beauty with ‘straight-on’compositions in subdued colours drawn precisely with ruler and compass. Thesubject matter, still-lifes, bottles, glasses and guitars was inherited fromCubism but the latter tidied up pre-war disorder in a style that seems topredate Art Deco’s graphic styles. The mechanically gradated tone and colourremind one of the smooth airbrushed surfaces of advertising images from the1930s and in turn the 1970s. Of the Cubists Léger and Gris, both associatedwith the group, were the only ones who suited their ideals.Purism’s major achievements were written down and published as theory.Their manifesto Après le Cubisme was published after the two founders of themovement had exhibited in Paris at the end of the war in November 1918. Itencouraged a relationship between art and science and the need to‘innoculate artists with the spirit of the new age.’ It also emphasised theimportance of precision in art stating that ‘Art must generalise to attainbeauty’. Purism’s aesthetic elevated the machine and mass production, animportant factor in Le Corbusier’s architectural creed.Their new philosophy for art and design was published in a journal ‘L’éspritNouveau’ which ran from October 1920 to January 1925 and publishedarticles on contemporary interests, covering everything; art and music, scienceand technology, politics and economics and even sport. The Paris Olympics of1924 were eagerly anticipated and in keeping with the spirit of classicism andpost-war health issues, sport had become a modernist fixation. Newapartment blocks, if sufficiently large, could now include gymnasiums,exercise areas and swimming pools on their flat roofs. As a reaction to thefashion for Bergsonian intuition of the previous decade they declared that‘Purism dedicates itself to the elevated faculties of the mind as opposed to thearts that are there to please the senses.’The first issue of ‘L’Ésprit Nouveau’proclaimed thatit is in general production that the style of an epoch is found, and not ...in a few products with ornamental aims ... the aeroplane and thelimousine are pure creations that clearly characterise the spirit, the styleof an epoch. The contemporary arts must proceed from itL’Ésprit Nouveau, anew type of magazinefor the new age ofModernism reflectingthe new ideals ofPurism.‘L’Ésprit Nouveau’ also served as a platform to expound new theories aboutarchitectural design. It published an article ‘Ornament and Crime’ by theCzech-born Viennese-based architect Adolf Loos, memorably painted byfellow citizen Oskar Kokoschka as an archetype of Viennese neuroticism.‘Ornament and Crime’ written in 1908, castigated the florid style of theVienna Secession, and was a beacon for Modernist architecture, although forLoos it seemed to be a philosophy of life as he made links between ornament,tattooing, criminality and degeneracy! ‘The evolution of culture issynonomous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects’. Morereasonably he equated ornament with extra work and therefore extraexpense. Loos had previously worked for the pioneering American architectLouis Sullivan who while designing the early skyscrapers had thoughts ofabandoning ornament but didn’t have the courage of his convictions. Loos’’Steiner house’ built in Vienna in 1910 was an early example of the modernistconcept of designing a building from the inside out as it had a plain whiteunadorned exterior which was a logical extension of the planned spaces insidethe house.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 175

Austrian architectAdolph Loos built theSteiner House in Viennain 1910, a very earlyexample of modernistarchitecture, and builtfrom the inside outwith no ornamentation.Although Mondrian was disappointed with the apatheticresponse to the Paris De Stijl exhibition of architecture in1923 it won over one important convert. After his visit LeCorbusier was impressed enough to change stylisticelements of his current project, the Maison LaRoche/Jeanneret. When his book Towards a NewArchitecture appeared in the same year it presented achoice for society of ‘architecture or revolution’ andincluded his well-known maxim that the ideal house was amachine for living in. Another of his ‘bon mots’ was thatfunctionalism equals rationalism, that is necessary to findthe most appropriate and economic uses of materials,structure and space. In accord with De Stijl he advocated the principle of‘Universality’; in which forms, colours and effects could be understood andwould be appropriate anywhere in the world. His architectural creed called forunadorned functional forms found in modern engineering and shipbuildingand to achieve this his chosen materials were ferro-concrete and plate glass.Modern housing should also provide a hygienic environment that could easilybe kept clean and the extensive use of glass would allow for maximumsunshine, perceived as essential for health and happiness.Le Corbusier had for some time been attempting to get his mass-producedprefabricated Dom-ino housing system adopted for social housing. The basicscheme had three rectangular slabs; the top two were supported by concreteposts and the lowest was raised from the ground by resting it on concreteblocks. The immediate gain was to free the interior space which could thenhave flexible panelling placement. As a response to war damage in Flandershe saw that it could be an inexpensive way of rebuilding war damaged towns,but in the early nineteen twenties it was still too radical.Le Corbusier devised hisDom-ino structuralsystem for buildings(above) in 1914 but hadto wait for over adecade before he wasable to implement itinto his architecturalplans. It is best seen inhis Villa Savoye houseat Poissy (above right)outside Paris in 1928.His architectural principles came together most successfully in 1928 withthe Villa Savoye at Poissy north-west of Paris. The upper floors were lifted offthe ground by a row of reinforced concrete columns or ‘pilotis’ allowing spaceinside for the turning circle of a Voisin automobile. Other features includedexterior long horizontal strip windows encased in unsupported white paintedconcrete slabs, flexible interior spaces, vertically and horizontally, a roof gardenand a exterior ramp running from the bottom to the top floor. Another earlysuccess was for the Palace of the League of Nations in the same year.176 ART IN REVOLUTION

THE NEED FOR A NEW ARCHITECTURAL CREEDArchitecture should be a an honest combination of science and art but in the nineteenth century hadlargely failed to make the most of its potential. It needed to cast off romantic associations wherearchitects often did little more than decorate engineered structures with pattern-book styles from thepast such as Classic Greek or Roman, Egyptian or Gothic.London’s Crystal Palace of 1851 was a truly modern building made by Joseph Paxton, a gardenerturned engineer. It showed the potential of mass-production in building as the small iron pieces andglass were delivered to the site where they were assembled. It could then be dismantled andreconstructed several miles to the south. It was too early to use steel which was made possible by 1855with the invention of the Bessemer converter. Cast iron was brittle under pressure but structural steeland reinforced concrete – reinforced with steel rods – came in the 1890s. This exploited the crushingstrength of concrete and the tensile strength of steel that made great spans possible in beams andbridge structures. Steel framed buildings which took the supporting function away from the outsidewalls came in at this time. In a department store this would allow for large windows for the shopdisplays as previouslty window widths had been dictated by the span of an arch or lintel. Thenineteenth century brought about many other possibilities - for instance elevators in 1859 and by 1902neon lights and air conditioning.The early years of the new century saw a new breed of modern architect who would becomeresponsible for both design and construction. Many would also design the furniture and the fixturesand fittings until a proper supply industry grew up. It became possible to use materials supplied byfactories that were machine produced and machine finished. The ready made parts, windows, steelbeams and columns - could be assembled or riveted together on site.The floors and roofs of the building could now be supported by a few columns and it was nowpossible to raise the building so that a street could be built underneath. Lightness and poise replacedthe solidity of brick and stone structures. The spaces inside the building could be larger, infinitelyflexible and not confined to rigidly defined rooms. Partition walls replaced structural walls, roofs couldbe flat, although pitched roofs might still be preferred for storage and drainage. Cantilevered roofsallowed for large external areas of glass as the outside shell of the building had no supporting function,Le Corbusier while assimilating the lessons of Cubist space, emphasised functionalism or fitness forpurpose, the house as a machine for living in, a justification for a new form of architecture but not a‘be all and end all’, as his architecture and those who followed him, could be very imaginative.Le Corbusier could be prone to megalomaniacal mass communal housingschemes as can be seen in his elaborate plans of 1925 for ‘La Ville Radieuse’with huge blocks set in parkland, which would have cleared large swathes ofParis for a huge and soulless housing scheme based on a geometrical grid. Itwas designed to be user-friendly towards the motor car at the expense ofpedestrians but fortunately it never got implemented due to its impracticality.Nothing on this scale was built until the construction of the L’Unitéd’habitatition in Marseilles after the second world war. This had communalfaciliities like shops, a gym, a crèche, a hotel and a restaurant with views overthe Mediterranean. Despite all this by the early nineteen-thirties he was fastbecoming the guru of the Modern Movement.In retrospect it can be seen that Purism was more influential onarchitecture and design than in painting. Although Ozenfant was later todevote himself to mural painting, he is now considered more influential as ateacher and a writer. In 1931 he wrote an influential book Foundations ofModern Art and set up an art school under his name when he emigrated tothe USA in 1938.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 177

3.4 A house forbuilding? –The BauhausWalter Gropius in 1920.The axis for contemporary art and culture after the war graduallyshifted from Paris to Germany and in particular Berlin, where thereflection of a fractured society appeared in the cinema of FritzLang, the theatre of Bertold Brecht and in Expressionist painting. Shortlyafter the end of the war the foundation of the Staatlisches Bauhaus atWeimar in the south-east German province of Thuringia was especiallysignificant for the future of art, architecture and design. The capital ofthe new Weimar republic was a quaint antiquated cobbled-street sort oftown associated with illustrious historical figures such as J S Bach, Liszt,Goethe, Schiller and Nietsche. Almost totally devoid of any industry manyof the forty thousand residents lived in villas surrounded by lime trees.The Bauhaus director, Walter Gropius (1883-1969) came from a family ofarchitects. In 1907 he became assistant to Peter Behrens’, the leading Germanindustrial designer and architect of the day and a pioneering figure in theModern Movement. Behrens had started out as a painter but wanted tointegrate the visual arts into a design discipline which would affect everydaylife. Although he was not a particularly radical designer he brought a newlevel of organisation and vision to the country’s attempts to bring about goodindustial design through, the Deutsche Werkbund which was set-up in 1907as a response to the country’s rapid industrial expansion. Gropius would laterexplain that ‘it was Behrens who first introduced me to logical andsystematical coordination in the handling of architectural problems’.Britain had set the model for German designers by addressing theproblems of bad design in the era of mass-production. Back in 1853, JohnRuskin disgusted with the tastelessly ornate goods on show at the GreatExhibition of 1851 and the dehumanising effects of the industrialisation ofBritain, wrote The Stones of Venice which advocated a return to the individualskills exemplified by the medieval ways of working. An early disciple wassocialist artist and businessman William Morris who was totally dissatisfiedwith the quality of contemporary machine-made products that had discardedany vestige of craftsmanship. From around 1870 his workshops produced allmanner of hand-crafted items for the home. This was the birth of what cameto be known as the ‘Arts and Crafts Movement’ which denounced the socialand aesthetic implications of the machine-made product and endorsed Ruskin’sreturn to the craftsmanship of the ‘middle ages’, a period seen, perhapserroneously, to have had ideal social conditions for the manual labourer.Nevertheless the aesthetic qualities and integrity of the Arts and CraftsMovement continued to have an influence on product design, graphic arts,and on some of the more progressive architects at the turn of the new centuryincluding Frank Lloyd Wright in the USA, and J.J.P. Oud in Holland. Morris’Kelmscott Press was a venture into book production in the early eighteenninetiesthat by its example helped to found the private press movement. Itwas particularly admired in the USA and Germany and helped to improve thelow standards to which book production and type design had fallen.Inevitably the time and care needed for the individually produced articleresulted in an expensive and consequently élitist product which only the welloffcould afford, and so despite the socialist ideals of the movement itremained out of reach of the working classes. This problem could really onlybe solved by a more realistic attempt to embrace the machine age. One of theEnglish Arts and Crafts designers, Charles Ashbee, who specialised in silver178 ART IN REVOLUTION

Art NouveauArt Nouveau was an international design movement which covered acomplete range of applied art, design and architecture. Its origins were inthe early 1890s and it continued to the end of the first decade of the newcentury. It unashamedly used mechanisation with modern manufacturingmethods and modern materials were often used. It usually came with alarge dollop of decoration, a legacy of the highly ornate revivals of gothic,and baroque styles which dominated Victorian architecture and whichwere still demanded by entrepreneurs to be tacked on to the buildings togive ‘grandeur and pretence’. Iron work which had been used functionallyby modern engineers and designers in large public buildings were to beseen in the entrances to Hector Guimard’s Paris metro stations and thebuildings of the Belgian architect Victor Horta where it was twisted intoorganic forms conforming to the sinuous curves of oriental and Japaneseart. Highly decorative organic swirling formswere also a feature of Mucha’s posters whichenjoyed a huge revival through Athena’s posterreproductions in the 1960s and 70s.A more progressive aspect of themovement was the use of asymmetrical designfirst seen in the Japanese prints that werebeing avidly collected by the cognoscenti whohad spotted them when they were used aswrapping paper for tea and porcelain importedfrom the east. The Japanese influence isobvious in the graphic work of AubreyAubrey Beardsleyposter for the OscarWilde verse play ‘Isolde’is another example ofArt Nouveau designwhich shows theinfluence of Japaneseline and assymetry. Theblocked colour predatesabstract painting.Hector Guimard’sornate iron workentrances for Parisianmetro stations were agood example of howArt Nouveau used massproduced forms in avariety of materials.Here iron work is usedin a modern style ratherthan repeating historicstyles that had becomethe norm in theVictorian era.Beardsley who in his pen and ink work of the early eighteen-nineties usesasymmetry, figurative abstractions and simple blocks of colour showingearly traces of twentieth-century geometric abstract art.The future could also be detected in the austere style of Charles RennieMackintosh whose building and furniture were rooted in the Arts andCrafts tradition. In Austria, Josef Hoffmann’s uncluttered style ofarchitecture seem to predate post first world war industrial design.Hoffman had helped to found the Wiener Werkstratte (Vienna Workshops)which evolved out of Viennese Secession – Austrian Art Nouveau – in 1903and became known for using simple geometric shapes in his designs whichfor the best part of thirty years covered a complete range of design andcraft activity, furniture, metal work, textiles, ceramics, books and posterdesign.and metalwork, realised that the only way forward was machine production.‘We do not reject the machine we welcome it, but we wish to see itmastered’.By the turn of the century Germany was one of the leading industrial nationsso although the Prussian government in Northern Germany were keen toadopt British Arts and Crafts principles they also wished to adapt them tomachine production as with Jugendstijl – the German version of Art Nouveau.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 179

Behrens corporateidentity for AEG is avery early example ofthis by now ubiquitousconcept.Louis Sullivan’sWainright building in StLouis, built in 1890, wasthe first skyscraper andwas made possible bysteel frame constructionand new lifttechnology. Thehorizontals howevershow a traditional useof decoration.Hermann Muthesius had been attached to the German embassy in Londonduring the heyday of the Arts and Crafts Movement and took an interest inthe new forms of British architecture in particular respect to housing projects.He was, as Nicholas Pevsner put it, converted to ‘reason and simplicity inbuilding and art’. Once back in Germany he wrote Das Englische Haus andbecame involved in ‘Sachlichkeit’, a new direction in German design roughlytranslated as a combination of objectivity and matter of fact. It was an earlysign of the important role that Germany was to take in the development ofthe Modern Movement. Muthesius had noted the unfussiness and utility inBritish engineering design, evident in their stations, bridges, exhibition hallsand ships. He had these in mind when he encouraged the founding of theDeutsche Werkbund which brought together twelve artists and twelveindustrialists and retailers, including Peter Behrens and the Belgian Henry vande Velde, to further the standards of good industrial design. They made adecision to open craft schools in new and existing colleges that hadworkshops and emply ‘modern artists’ as teachers. Behrens at the DüsseldorfSchool of Applied Arts was one of these as was Van de Velde, Gropius’predecessor at Weimar. The versatile Van de Velde had been an admirer ofWilliam Morris and had followed his example by opening a decorative craftsfirm near Brussels. He began working in an Art Nouveau style seen in hiselaborate designs of 1898 for the food manufacturer Tropon. These includedposters and packaging and are a very early example of corporate identity.Behrens took charge of the design of AEG (German Electrical Company) anddesigned a remarkably forward looking factory building in Berlin with largeareas of glass supplying natural light and no ornamentation which after ahundred or so years is still in use today. In 1906 Behrens began a completecorporate design with trademark to be used on the buildings, electricalproducts, brochures and letterheads. Another offshoot of this designsensibility was the standardisation and interchangability of quality industrialparts which over the years would a universal principle. This practice had beenfirmly advocated by Muthesius although van de Velde thought that it wouldcurb individualism in the design process.Decoration was beginning to be rejected as superfluous in the context ofan affordable but well thought out ‘machine art’. The pioneer Americanarchitect Louis Sullivan had been building skyscrapers with a steel skeletonfrom 1890 when the Wainright building shot up in St Louis, Missouri. Two ofhis maxims seem to be very pertinent to the future of architecture and design,that it is the ‘essence of every problem that it contains suggests the solution’and that ‘form follows function’.Although a forerunner of the Modern Movement his architecture doesn’talways conform to its spirit as his buildings were symmetrical and vestiges ofdecoration clung to the horizontal and vertical structures. His young officedraughtsman, Frank Lloyd Wright, had an interest in Japanese art and rejectedthis symmetry and ‘irrelevant’ decorative detailing, going on to praise thepotential of the machine age in his manifesto of 1901 Art and Craft of theMachine. Wright combined a belief in modern materials and technology as hethought that the only salvation for the craftsman was to learn from themachine. Wright imagined scientists and inventors taking the place ofShakespeare and Dante, as cultural heroes and all types of engines ‘taking theplace that works of art had taken in previous history’. He devised a180 ART IN REVOLUTION

Taylorism and mass productionIn 1905 Frank Lloyd Wright built the Larkin building in Buffalo, a radically new form of office blockdesigned for a mail-order company. It was partly inspired by the principals of Frederick Taylor who hadtaught the science of industrial organisation and efficiency at his School of Scientific Management.‘Taylorism’ or the ‘American system’ as it became to be known, advocated the rationalisation ofworking methods for mass production and prompted time and motion men to use a stop watch tomeasure work rate and to cut out anything that was superfluous to minding the machine. Althoughmass production for cars had first been employed by Ransome E Olds in Detroit in 1901 it was moreeffectively used by Henry Ford for his Model ’T’ Ford, first made in 1908 but by 1914 using assemblylinetechniques. Here each identical component part wasmanufactured separately and each part of the assembly wasdone by a separate individual. At its worst this could becompletely soul destroying causing mental and physicalfatigue and is well satirised in the film ‘Modern Times’ byCharlie Chaplin’s whose little tramp is a worker on theproduction line. Nevertheless modernist designers werefascinated by mass production and Walter Gropius actuallyvisited the Ford factory on a visit to the USA in 1928. The 1908 Model T Fordrevolutionary scheme ‘Organic Architecture’ allowing him to design hisbuildings from the inside to the outside.Like many architects starting out before the outbreak of the first world warGropius had been impressed by Wright’s ‘naked’ architecture after it becamemore widely known in 1911 when a book of his work was published inGermany. His early experience of working for Peter Behrens, designinginteriors had been valuable, something that architects Le Corbusier andLudwig Mies van der Rohe would endorse as they had also worked withBehrens before becoming leading figures of the Modern Movement in theinter-war years. After three years of running his own architectural practicewith Adolf Meyer, Gropius was recommended by the Belgian architect/designer Henri van de Velde in 1914 to be his replacement as the principal ofthe Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. Van de Velde had designed the ArtNouveau styled building in 1904 and run the school from 1907. Gropius’appointment turned out to be premature as the school was closed downduring the war so it could be used as a military hospital. Gropius spent hiswar years serving as a cavalry officer but also found time to marry the famousbeauty Alma Mahler, widow of composer Gustav.The ending of the war on November 3rd 1918 was sparked off by arevolution in Germany. This had been started by a mutiny of the fleet at Kielwhen three thousand sailors and workers raised the red flag, and rebellionsoon spread to the troops and workers. As part of the peace negotiations theAmericans insisted that the Emperor Kaiser William II resigned so he fled toHolland. Prince Max of Baden resigned the Chancellorship and power washanded to the socialist leader Friedrich Ebert. Democratic elections followed inJanuary 1919 and amidst political turmoil the democratic Weimar Republicwas set up to replace the monarchy, with Weimar as capital of the newfederal state.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 181

The Weimar School of Arts and Crafts reopened as an entirely new school,the Staatlisches Bauhaus and by the spring of 1919 Gropius had recruited hisstaff. Continuing the Werkbund tradition the German educational reformerswanted art education in the colleges to be closely allied to a training in thecrafts. Design was considered vitally important to bolster the economy in apost-war country, low in spirit, low in raw materials and very dependent onthe quality of manufactured goods.In accordance with these ideals Staatlisches Bauhaus was meant to be asynthesis of the arts, but over the next few years it would take this a lotfurther, reforming art education with a mix of school, studio, workshop andlaboratory, encouraging a more profound relationship with local industry.In April 1919 Gropius published his manifesto in the German press,Today the fine arts live in isolation from which they can be rescued onlyby the conscious, cooperative efforts of all craftsmen. Architects,sculptors, painters must once again come to know ... the compositecharacter of a building both as an entity and in terms of its variousparts. Then their work will be filled with that true architectonic spiritwhich as ‘salon art’ it has lost.The old art schools were unable to produce this unity ... Schools mustbe absorbed by the workshop again. The world of the pattern-designerand applied artist, consisting only of drawing and painting must at lastbecome a world where things are built.Architects, painters, sculptors, we must all return to the crafts! Art is nota profession. There is no essential difference between artist andcraftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman. Proficiency in his craft isessential to every artist. It is there that the primary source of creativity lies.Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without class distinctions whichraise an arrogant barrier between artist and craftsman ... the newbuilding of the future will embrace architecture, sculpture and painting ina single form and will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of amillion workers like the crystal symbol of a new and coming faith.Like many others, the experience of war had politicised Gropius to leftishviews with a strong commitment to radical social reforms. His idealism andsocialist beliefs shine through in his initial statement. The radical spirit was areflection of what a number of other intellectuals in Germany were thinking atthe time, but implementing these ideas would get him into trouble over thenext few years with the increasingly reactionary elements in Weimar politics.Although Gropius believed in the utilisation of modern constructiontechnique and materials he still held onto the example of the medievalcathedral as the embodiment of a unified approach to architecture anddesign. This tradition involved a team of architects, masons, stone and woodcarvers and other craftsmen all working together towards a corporate vision.Staatlisches Bauhaus literally means the House for Building, a place where allthe craftsmen would be housed during the construction of a medievalcathedral. Appropriately the cover of the Programme of the State Bauhaus inWeimar which accompanied the manifesto in April 1919 was illustrated withan expressionist woodcut of a gothic cathedral by painter and illustrator182 ART IN REVOLUTION

Lyonel Feininger, one of the initial teachers at the school. This imagesymbolised the idea of collective utopianism and the three spires thedisciplines of architecture, painting and sculpture. The Bauhaus engendered astrong community spirit with a mix of architects, craftsmen and painters. Themedieval influence in the Bauhaus went further with masters, journeymenand apprentices replacing the usual teacher/student relationship. From thebeginning the school emphasised the need to centre all the arts aroundarchitecture although curiously the initial promise of an architecturaldepartment failed to materialise in its first few years, probably due to the lackof funds during Germany’s post-war depression.The students were encouraged to get away from the idea of fine art for itsown sake:art itself cannot be taught, but craftsmanship can. Architects, painters,sculptors are all craftsmen in the original sense of the word. It is afundamental requirement of all artistic creativity that all studentsundergo a thorough training in the workshops of all the crafts.Lyonel Feininger’swoodcut illustration forthe cover of WalterGropius’ manifesto forthe StaatlischesBauhaus.Gropius believed that to understand the work of craftsmen all architects,artists and designers should start out as craftsmen, abolishing the socialdistinctions between the two.The coming years will demonstrate that craft will be salvation of all of usartists ... All the great artistic achievements of the past, the Indian, theGothic miracles, arose out of a total mastery of craft.Gropius respected the English ‘Arts and Crafts Movement’ and its belief inmedieval values, but unlike Morris and his cohorts he was not disillusionedand defeated by the products of industry. Alongside like-mindedcontemporaries he was optimistic enough to believe that they could embracepost-war technology.By breaking down the barriers and hierarchy between painting,architecture, craft and design to share common interests in form,composition, colour and aesthetics an equivalent of Gesamtkunstwerke (totalartwork) could be achieved, elevating the applied arts or crafts to what hadpreviously been considered 'Fine Art'. Gropius thought that this could beachieved by a combination of education and practice that would give thestudent an insight into the nature of creativity. Each workshop would have anartist or Master of Form in charge who would stimulate a creative streak,alongside an experienced craftsmen or Workshop Master who would teachthe students manual skills and techniques. For a number of reasons, mostparticularly the ego of the artists, this blend didn’t work out as planned. Someof the painters weren’t interested in visiting the workshops, and the generalegalitarianism including equal pay for all staff didn’t stop some of the paintersbehaving as if they were a class above the rest.The courses were to run for four years, starting with a probationary periodfollowed by a structured course. This now seemingly common place idea wasone that the educational reformers in Germany had recently begun tointroduce into their arts and craft colleges. The Bauhaus preliminary course(Vorkurs) was from the outset more advanced than the other colleges due toits thoroughness in teaching the underlying principles of artistic creativity andvisual experience. Inevitably there was a good deal of trial and error from theA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 183

Johannes Itten showingthe mystic side of hischaracter.outset. Gropius made this clear in a letter to a student. ‘My sole aim is toleave everything in suspension, in flux, in order to avoid our communitysolidifying into a conventional academy’.Two of his early appointments were to give him trouble for very differentreasons. Lyonel Feininger had left America in 1887 at the age of sixteen andestablished himself as a well-known satirical cartoonist for the German papers.In 1907 he began painting architectural and maritime subjects which evolvedinto an Expressionist version of Cubism characterised by overlapping colouredprismatic planes. Success came in 1917 with an exhibition of over a hundredof his expressionist works at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin. Feininger as aGerman/American was considered to have revolutionary and alien ideas whichmade him a controversial appointment as far as the conservative authorities inWeimar were concerned. This was one of many battles Gropius held with theofficials and citizens of Weimar over the next five years.The other man who would eventually cause difficulties for the school wasJohannes Itten a Swiss painter, theorist and mystic. From 1916 he had run anart school in Vienna and was appointed on the recommendation of Gropius’wife Alma, a few months before the couple were divorced.. He seemed to bethe ideal man to run a ‘foundation’ course, a concept that the school wishedto pioneer. He must have seemed a strangely exotic figure with his monkishrobes and shaved head.Another appointment, Georg Muche, was a young Expressionist painterwho became Itten’s assistant on the preliminary course. As a follower ofMazdaznan, he converted Itten to this popular German sect which sprangfrom Zoroastranism. Part of the creed involved vegetarianism and for a periodthey managed to take over the school canteen: yoga, the use of enemas,periodic fasting and sexual abstinence were now on the menu.Itten believed there was a latent creativeness in everybody and from May1919 he ran the six month preliminary course, designed to purge the studentsof any preconceived ideas or accumulated information, allowing them ‘to gainknowledge of the material and form through direct experience’ and also toliberate the creative potential in each student. The tradition of life drawingand an examination of the old masters was upheld but alongside this studentswere encouraged to study natural objects and materials. They wereencouraged to familiarise themselves with the qualities of a variety materialsthat may be needed in future designs by making collages out of them. Theconcept of contrasts was also investigated; rough and smooth, sharp andblunt, round and square, light and dark etc.Itten was an important pioneer in colour theory and his writings related toart and design are still sold in gallery bookshops. He thought that colour andform were inextricably linked, ‘without form there is no colour’ and thatgeometric forms and colours of the spectrum are the simplest and mosteffective forms on which to base a composition, ‘all form lies dormant in thesquare, circle and triangle’. He invented a colour sphere which moved fromblack to white around the ‘poles’, and from red to violet around the‘equators’. Amongst other things this showed the relationships betweenprimary and complementary colours. As a mystic he believed in the emotionaland spiritual states suggested by colour and form which he set out in somedetail. This was similar and was influenced by the ideas that Kandinsky hadlaid out in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art back in 1912.184 ART IN REVOLUTION

Johannes Itten was animportant earlyinfluence on Bauhausteaching as he ran thepreliminary course anddeveloped ideas aboutcolour theory. Thecolour sphere (right)was published in‘Utopia’ in 1921.Despite this diligent grounding the course didn’t work out according toplan as his teaching methods, an intuitive rather than an intellectual approachto design solutions, were at odds to the evolving philosophy of the school.One strange aspect of the course had students taking part in spiritual or semimysticalactivities such as meditating on shapes and colours by singing,dancing or doing breathing exercises. Much of this was similar to RudolphSteiner’s theories of Eurythmics and was closely related to Theosophy.In the grim post-war years this sort of activity was understandably verypopular with the young Germans who had just emerged traumatised from thewar and were desperately looking for the course to give them a purpose intheir lives. Similar circumstances lead to the popularity a few years later of theGerman Youth Movement ‘Wandervogel’ with its healthy outdoor life ofhiking, camping and exercise.Some students disliked the rigours of workshop training and the role ofthe apprentice graduating to journeyman that had been laid out for them.Quite a few were so poor that they couldn’t afford the school fees, althoughallowances were made for this as well as the recruitment of a quota of femalestudents to fall in line with the new Weimar constitution. It was still too earlyfor the liberated woman in Germany as the female students were restricted topottery, weaving or bookbinding. Architecture for women was out of thequestion although this discipline was separated from the college anyway asthe male students had to attend an architectural and engineering collegeoutside the school.Some students were disillusioned by the lack of importance given to fineart in the curriculum. It seems odd that that there was no painting class aseight out of nine of the Masters of Form appointed in the years between1919 and 1924 were painters. Gropius realised the current importance ofA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 185

A poster advertising aperformance of OskarSchlemmer’smechanical ballet.painting and thought that a combination of artist and craftsman would be thebest combination for a well-rounded design education, but still stuck to thelatter as a basic precept. His hunch was right as the diversity of art and craftteaching meant that the better students became extraordinarily versatile.Many were adept at painting, photography, sculpture, pottery, and the designof domestic articles like lamps and furniture. Some like Herbert Bayer andMarcel Breuer also turned their talents to architecture. This range of skills wasuseful as the school was always desperate for funds, and acceptedcommissions to sell student products to help finance the courses. In the earlyyears the pottery department under the sculptor Gerhard Marcks, situated 25kilometres away in Dornburg, managed to sell to the local community but theonly other commercial success at this time was weaving.The first important outside commission, between 1920 and 1922, was theSommerfeld House on the outskirts of Berlin. Gropius and his long-termassistant Adolf Meyer designed this villa for the building contractor AdolfSommerfeld from teak salvalged from a battleship. A number of studentswere involved with the design of the interiors, including Marcel Breuer’s hallseats and Joseph Albers’ stained glass. The differences between Itten andGropius began to emerge at the time of this project. Itten believed that theschool had two clearly defined options; either be involved with personal noncommercialwork or combine with industry but not mix the two. Due to thedire financial position of the college the pragmatic Gropius realised he neededto encourage commissions from trade and industry to raise badly neededfunds as well as gain important practical experience for the students.There were two new appointments at the beginning of 1921, OskarSchlemmer and Paul Klee. After the war Schlemmer became interested in thehuman body as an artistic medium that could be governedby geometry and presented in a semi-abstract manner.Shortly after joining the Bauhaus his Triadisches Ballett(Triadic Ballet) with mechanical and stylised movement waspremiered in Stuttgart with music composed by PaulHindemith. Over the years many other performances wereheld. The number three in the title was a dominant theme:there were three performers, three acts, three scenes ineach act and so on. The marionettes or ‘figurines’ weremade up of geometric shapes and colourful costumes thatalso appeared on the background set.Although he became well known for his paintings andanimations of mechanical human figures which translatedwell into the other disciplines. Schlemmer’s role at theBauhaus was more prosaic as he became in charge of themetalwork class but he also made contributions to painting,sculpture and stage design.Initially Klee’s main field of craft activity wasbookbinding, but he soon became involved in stained glassand weaving. The prolific Klee had recently shown over 300of his works in a 1920 retrospective and had sold much ofthis work. Despite this relative success he was keen toobtain the security of a teaching post. As an imaginativepainter, an accomplished draughtsman, and an articulate186 ART IN REVOLUTION

writer and theoriser he was ideal for a teaching post at the Bauhaus. Hisapproach to teaching was less dogmatic than any of the other Masters andthe students responded favourably to this. Teaching allowed him to considerhis work from an intellectual level for the first time, formulating his ideas forstudents on the principles of art gathered from his wide range of interests. Hemade it clear that all artistic effort has little effect if forced; that the formativecreative process takes place below the level of consciousness and that thelaws of nature that make elemental forms grow should have a parallel in art.One former pupil was to say of him, 'the extraordinary science of form thatPaul Klee’s Onceemerged from the greyof night (1918) showshow he could use manygraphic elements – inthis instance lettering –as a basis for hiscolourful and semiabstract compositions.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 187

Klee had, of plastic means and their possibilities, allowed him to reveal to hisstudents the magical power of the sign (unconscious in children butcompletely under control in Klee himself) which has always been thepreoccupation of artists’. In his books, essays and articles as well as in hislectures he made the most complete record on the principles of art and designby any modern artist.Klee like Apollinaire before him was interested in breaking down thebarriers between literary forms and graphic representation, and like theCubists he was keen to bring linguistic devices into painting. In some of theseworks whole texts would occupy the pictorial space, making the words themain subject of the composition. This is all part of a complex graphiclanguage that he used in many of his paintings where pictograms or amultitude of organic and biomorphic forms would emerge.Gropius was seeking an international character for the Bauhaus and manyof the Masters’ and the second wave of students came from outside Germany.Expressionist painters were favoured as this style still dominated the Germanartworld in the years immediately after the war. The more abstract approachof an artist like Klee was encouraged as it was thought that this wouldprovide the theoretical basis that Gropius had in mind. Although he consultedand listened to his colleagues he always had the final say on appointments.An unusual mixture of opposites was to form the basis of modern design. Agrowing awareness of Russian Constructivism and De Stijl with its emphasis onprimary colours and a rigid asymmetric geometrical grid and structure soonbegan to exert its influence. From the early to middle nineteeen twenties theless fussy and more objective methods of these two movements came to thefore and helped to alter the direction of the courses as they moved away fromthe more subjective and spiritual to a more practical and functional aesthetic.Kandinsky had long been interested in craft and design and after hisunfortunate experiences in Russia joined the Bauhaus in 1922. He hadpreviously read the Bauhaus manifesto and referred to it when preparing theKandinsky’sComposition 8 (1923)shows the influence ofpost-war geometricabstraction which hehad adopted throughhis exposure toSuprematism andConstructivism duringhis years of exile in hisnative Russia. The useof the circle in thiscomposition wouldhave a spiritualsignificance that wouldbecome prevalent in hisfuture compositions.188 ART IN REVOLUTION

Inkhuk programme back in Russia. He subsequently incorporated parts of thisinto the Bauhaus teaching programme including his analytic studies of formand colour.He linked up with his old colleague Klee and together they successfullytempered the influence of Itten. Kandinsky’s paintings had gone through atransformation in the last few years. He no longer wavered between realityand abstraction, moving closer to the pure abstraction of Suprematism andRussian Constructivism while with his aura of mysticism still remainingideologically separated from them. His post-war work shows a hard-edgedabstract style made from a multitude of coloured geometric shapes, often inthe same work, somewhat reminiscent of the diassembled parts of a colourfulSwiss watch. During the Bauhaus period he steadily reduced the number ofthe elements and simplified the compositions. Perfect circles became adominant motif in his work and these are presented in a variety of ways,shaded like a three-dimensional representation of the moon or surrounded bya series of haloe-like forms made from compass-drawn circles.Compared with Klee the students found him dogmatic and slightly aloof.Nevertheless his reputation meant that he was a star appointment althoughlittle could be made of this for fear of upsetting the authorities who would besuspicious of any Russian influence. Ironically he would have agreed with theirattitude as he remained vehemently apolitical feeling that a mix of politics andart ‘was one of the greatest enemies of art’. His assigned craft was the muralworkshop, where he translated his abstract paintings to large-scale murals; hisvisual style would affect the appearance of Bauhaus design for the next fewyears. Independent of the Bauhaus, Kandinsky joined forces with Klee,Feininger and Alexei von Jawlensky to form Blaue Vier (the Blue Four) topromote their work collectively abroad and especially in the US where theyhad their first exhibition in March 1925.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 189

3.4Constructivism –Art as productWhen Kandinsky left Inkhuk for the Bauhaus, Rodchenko, tookover its administration. Over the next few months there weretheoretical discussion programmes, under the snappy title of‘Analysis of the concepts of construction and composition and thefactors differentiating them’. Kandinsky’s subjective and psychologicalapproach was replaced by one that was purely objective. One institutemember El Lissitzky was a fluent German speaker and through hisintellect was able to disseminate the current trends of Russian art to asmall but select international audience.A journal ‘Object’, produced by El Lissitzky and the Russian writer Il’yaErenburg was published in Berlin in 1922. This international arts review hadtrilingual text (including French) with articles by the leading lights of theEuropean avant-garde including van Doesburg and Le Corbusier. Anaccompanying exhibition at the Van Diemen gallery in Berlin and aConstructivist Congress at Düsseldorf in the same year were the first chanceto show the new Russian art abroad and all were vital in spreading itsdoctrine around Europe albeit in a watered down way. ‘Objectism’ was a halfwayhouse to Constructivism, art still made for arts sake, despite many artists’eventual objective to be involved in an industrial-made utilitarian product. Theideological consensus of the Working Group was published in the first issueArt as the creation of new objects...By no means suppose that byobjects we mean objects of everyday use...Naturally in factory-madeutilitarian objects, in the aeroplane or the car, we see genuine art. Butwe do not wish to limit the production of artists to utilitarian objects.Every organised work - a house, a poem or a painting - is an expedientobject, not leading people away from life but helping to organise it.At this stage the rational search for an end-product could include anythingfrom a poem to a chair, even a painting if it could fulfill a useful socialpurpose. This was consistent with the Marxist theory that art should notreflect life but directly help to change life/social conditions, a principle thatBertold Brecht was concurrently applying to German theatre. Rodchenkowrote about this period; ‘our gravitation towards the principle of constructionis a natural manifestation of contemporary consciousness which derives fromindustry’. Due to the different social and political circumstances in Russiawhere the work was created there were inevitably misunderstandings abroadabout its meaning. The constructions and laboratory work for instance weremeant as utilitarian exercises towards a manufactured product but as theywere neither one thing nor the other they were taken to be aesthetic objectsin their own right, which is how they are still regarded to this day.Objectism broke down the art object into three elements; firstly thematerial to be used, be it paint, metal or whatever; secondly the facture or‘faktura’ (the texture or the nature of the colour used), and thirdly thetechnique of working the materials involved. All three were brought togetherby composition and would constitute the artwork (or system). However dueto the lengthy discussions that characterise Russian art at this period therewere always disagreements about any form of definition. One of the moresignificant groups that debated these matters was formed within Inkhuk inMarch 1921 and called itself the ‘The First Working Group of Constructivists’which included Rodchenko, Stepanova, and Alexei Gan.190 ART IN REVOLUTION

Some early ‘constructions’ were shown in Moscow that year but theideology behind ‘Objectism’ was soon seen to be flawed. It was deemed toosimplistic for an industry, which was already prejudiced against artists whohad an insufficient understanding of the way to design for the succession ofdifferent processes involved in mass production.As Constructivism spread around Europe it transmuted into an amorphousanimal encompassing several different philosophies concerning the functionof art. All had things in common; a concern with technology, materials and aform of abstraction; and to eliminate anything superfluous or withoutpurpose from the work – an artwork lacking in ornament or imposed style.Engineers were useful models. The architect and graphic designerAlexander Vesnin put it like this. ‘The contemporary engineer creates objectsof genius: the bridge, the steam engine, the aeroplane, the crane. Thecontemporary artist must create objects equal to these in their potential’.Rodchenko believed that non-objective art could permeate all aspects of thenew socialist society,The art of the future will not be the agreeable decoration offamily apartments. It will be just as indisposable as 48-storeyskyscrapers, mighty bridges, wireless, telegraph, aeronautics andsubmarines which will be transformed into art.The Tatlin tower wascommisioned asmonument for the thirdCommunistInternational and wasto be taller than theEiffel Tower. It was tooambitious and so wasnever built butremained as aninspirational model,showing the unfullfilledpotential of manyConstructivist projects.This sentiment owes a debt to Sant’Elia’s Futurist visionary pre-wararchitectural plans of a Futuristic city; the celebration of new formsof transport and technology and a faith in the machine and thefactory which for the Russian artist would forever remain a dream.In 1920 Tatlin was commissioned to design a Monument to theThird Communist International which was to straddle the RiverNeva in Petrograd. He planned an enormous dynamic structure, aleaning double-helix made of iron and glass inside which youcould be mechanically transported up or down. A motorised andslanting asymmetric spiralling iron structure was to complete asingle revolution every year. Inside three separate revolving glassstructures each housed a different activity. The lower storey was arotating cube which would house rooms for meetings andcongresses and would also rotate once a year. The next storey wasto be a pyramid housing various executive bodies and was torotate once a month. Above these a domed cylinder accomodating aninformation and propaganda centre, with news and telegraph service wouldappropriately ‘spin’ once a day. The whole structure at 400 metres wouldhave been a good deal higher than the Eiffel Tower, housing a radioantennae on top to broadcast news of the revolution to the world. Lenin wasreported to have said that he would have preferred the Eiffel Tower.Mayakovsky applauded it as the first monument without a beard. Ultimatelythe tower was a victim of ambition, and as a symbol and metaphor for theideal socialist state which they hoped to build, it turned out to be similarilyimpractical. It did however manage to establish itself as a symbol of therevolution’s potential and models of it were paraded at festivals for a numberof years. The potential of its dynamic movement and its use of basic materialswere important in the development of Constructivism, not least in themobiles of Rodchenko and Naum Gabo.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 191

Stepanova’s poster forthe ‘5 x 5 = 25’exhibition in 1921which signalled the endof painting for the fiveProductivist artistsinvolved.The Constructivist artist’s wish to aid the revolution and improve the life ofthe working classes was given a boost in 1921. The branch of RussianConstructivism that grew out of Tatlin’s maxim ‘real materials in real space’,became known as Productivism or Production Art. This was a needy responseto the parlous state that the country found itself in after the seriously cripplingeffect of the civil war that had ended early that year. The processes behind thethree-dimensional constructions that Tatlin, Rodchenko and others had beenmaking with real and utilitarian objects in mind, could be used as workingmodels for practical products. They embarked on a programme of ‘laboratoryart’; formal investigations of non-utilitarian objects in two or three dimensionsthat had utilitarian objects in mind. The abstract constructions of metal, woodor other available materials that had earlier been practice pieces, were nowthe means to an industrial product. Rodchenko, Stepanova and Alexsei Ganproduced a manifesto Who are we? which promoted the idea that technologyhad the ability to change man’s potential. Rodchenko wrote that ‘we mustcreate and construct with all the resources of modern science andtechnology’. Art as work and work as art could serve cultural, social andeducational needs, and be considered philosophically sound as well aspolitically correct!Easel painters like Udaltsova – the best of the Suprematists according toMalevich – didn’t share the Productivist’s views and she left Inkhuk at thisstage. She thought that Constructivism was a theoretical and formal dead-endand despite Productivism’s idealism painting was to remain the biggest facultywithin Vkhutemas. Osip Brik thought that those artists who rejected easelpainting should get ‘real practical work in production’ and twenty-five artistswithin Inkhuk responded by expressing a total commitment to working inindustry. These so-called ‘Leftist’ artists broke away from the confines of FineArt, committing themselves to a political and social agenda that might servethe community and the state by producing cheap and well-designed productsand enlightening the population to the benefits of socialism by the means ofpropaganda.Lenin’s political ideals were severely compromised with the introduction ofthe NEP (New Economic Policy), an early form of Perestroika. This wasintended to inject discipline and help quell some of the dissention that had ledto the civil war, allowing for a limited amount of free enterprise to help tomend the shattered economy. Much to the disgust of the ‘leftist’ artists thisresulted in a new breed of art patronage interested in buying work of a prerevolutionarystyle. By 1923 private entrepreneurs were successfully benefitingfrom the New Economic Policy in a wide range of activities.The exhibition ‘5 x 5=25’ held in Moscow in September 1921 wasintended to signal the ‘supposed’ end of making art with brushes and paint.Five of the Production artists in Inkhuk, Rodchenko, Stepanova, Popova, Eksterand Vesnin each showed five works. Stepanova showed five geometricisedpaintings of figures that had their roots in Cubism. In the catalogue she statedthat the sanctity of a single work was now destroyed. Rodchenko signalledthe end of his life as a painter by exhibiting three square monochromecanvases of red, blue and yellow side-by-side, almost as if they were elementsin a ‘construction’, declaring that the time for painting was over as it was nowtime to construct. Popova showed works that were preparatory outlines formaterial constructions. Her statement read:192 ART IN REVOLUTION

We must find the paths and methods that lead away from the deadimpasse of depictive art and advance through the knowledge oftechnological production to a method of creating objects of industrialproduction, products of organised, material designPopova’s Spatial forceconstruction was one ofthe prints that sheshowed at the ‘5 x 5 =25’ exhibition. Thesewere experiments inusing structuralelements in space thatare intended to lead toan industrial productthrough materialdesign.Alexei Gan’s’sConstructivismpublished in was astrikingly baldstatement of theMarxist philosophy. Onepage had a blackborder surrounding theslogan ‘Art is dead’.To some Constructivists the painted picture was now synonomous withpornography as no matter what the subject may be it appealed shamelessly tothe viewer and demanded to be purchased!The future was signposted in another part of the ‘5 x 5=25’ exhibition;working drawings for practical projects which included Rodchenko’s designsfor lampshades and a candelabra. It was deemed important that the artistshould become a technician involving themselves in semi-scientific researchesand investigations into the aesthetic, physical and functional propertiesinherent in the materials that they wished to use.The artist, Alexsei Gan was at the centre of the ‘Production Art’ debateand wrote a theoretical work Constructivism in 1922 whose purpose was tofight a battle against the re-emergence of a popular realist art after NEP hadbeen established. This book embodied his ideas visually and philosophically,containing the slogan ‘Art is Dead’ surrounded by a black border, a fineexample of the new typography with its heavy rules, sans serif type andangled typography.Two brothers Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg, who called themselves 2Stenberg 2, typify the talented artist of the period in their broad range ofactivities which included painting, illustration, graphic art, set design, metalassemblages and architecture. Along with Konstantin Medunetsky, a stagedesigner, they formed the ‘Constructivists of the World’ 1 in January 1922 atan exhibition in the Poet’s Café (Kafé Poetov). This tied in with the firstpublished statement of the principles behind Constructivism, although theterm had been used for some time.The Stenbergs are now best-known for their film posters and also for bookcovers which show dynamic and structural elements which clearly derive fromtheir earlier metal constructions. As set designers they designed the pavilionfor the ‘First All Russian Exhibition for Agriculture and Cottage Industries’ heldin Moscow in 1925. From 1929-32 they designed the decorations for theOctober Revolution celebrations in Red Square, Moscow.‘Leftist’ artists rallied under the slogan ‘Art into Production’ promotingProductivist art as the means to design practical and industrially producedgoods for the mass market, a rare instance of the production of a utilitarianobject being the central concern for a so-called ‘fine artist’. Prolekultencouraged these activities by providing many of these artists with regularwork which was welcome in a country with wide-spread poverty.Work and encouragement came from the Worker’s Clubs whose buildingsbecame a focal point for communities all over Russia helping to educate andentertain the semi-illiterate work force. Seven thousand were opened in thefirst two years of the revolution and a typical club would install displaycabinets with books and magazines, display windows for posters, maps andnewspapers. There was also furniture and utensils to be made and each1 Back in 1919 they were part of ‘OBMOKhU’, an agitational group who decoratedthe streets and buildings for revolutionary festivals and in the metal workshops mademetal assemblages and posters for illiteracy and other causes.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 193

One of twophotographs of thethird OBMOKhUexhibition in Moscow in1921 shows a selectionof constructions. Thethree in the foregroundare by KonstantinMedunetsky. One ofRodchenko’s spatialconstructions can beseen top right.would have a Lenin corner to acquaint the proletariat with the requirementsof the revolution.The Constructivist’s industrial design was based on geometrical principlesand like De Stijl the products were not particularly functional or ergonomicallysuitable. Tatlin got round this problem by designing tables and chairs etc.which used organic forms taken from nature. He produced a breast-shapeddrinking cup for infants and an efficient stove that minimised fuel whilemaximising heat. He worked in a metallurgical factory near Petrograd tofurther his aim to be an ‘artist-engineer’ and of all the Constructivists was themost successful in adapting to industrial design. He rejected Rodchenko’sreliance on Euclidean geometry and later criticised many Constructivists formechanically applying technology to their art saying that he wanted to makeRodchenko’s design fora Worker’s Club wherethe Constructivists wereable to put theiraltruistic principles intopractice withcontemporary design,194 ART IN REVOLUTION

Two agit-prop posters byGustav Klutsis. (Top) Theelectrification of theentire country (1920)and (below) Workers,everyone must vote inthe election of Soviets!(1930). Simple colouredcollage posters wereeffective in putting themessage across.the machine with art not mechanise art. In the late nineteen-twentiesand thirties Tatlin’s particular interest in spatial and organic structureslead him to design an organically formed non-motorised glider withthe punning name Letatlin: Letat in Russian means to fly. The gliderwas made of wood, whalebone, cork, leather and silk and was basedon the minute observation of young cranes and baby insects, thelatter especially bred for his researches. The large insect-like gliderwas basically a winged bicycle but sadly it was never able to fly,another example – literally and metaphorically – of not being able toget an imaginative conception off the ground, scuppered by acombination of technical shortcomings and a lack of resources.Graphic art, particularly in the form of poster design, was the areaof activity most suited to painters who had rejected fine art. Postercampaigns were launched to educate the public and poster designand typography were rewarding areas of pursuit for the ‘artistengineer’.The printing press was ideologically sound as well as beingthe most convenient, direct and understandable method of massproduction. In a cash-strapped country it could be used without greatcapital expense and provided an immediate and effective way ofcommunicating to the populace. Photographs, illustrations andsymbols provided an easily assimilated shorthand for the large, semiliteratepopulation. Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Vesnin, the Stenbergbrothers, Alexei Gan and Gustav Klutsis all flourished in the printmedium and their imaginative work would inspire the avant-gardethroughout Europe in the nineteen-twenties. The radically newimages that these artists produced would form an important linkbetween commercial design and fine art.Gustav Klutsis was a good example of the highly motivatedBolshevik artist. Influenced by Suprematism he became particularlyinterested in agitational art. Early in his career he made suspendedmetal spatial constructions in the manner of Rodchenko but wassoon to become the outstanding exponent of the propaganda poster.Dynamic city of 1920 is the first known use of photomontage by aRussian artist. The electrification of the entire country of the sameyear includes an image of Lenin carrying a electricity pylon with anappreciative crowd and modern architecture.in the background. Thiswas a graphic interpretation of Lenin’s rallying cry that ‘Communismis Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country’. Thesesimple direct and effective images were presented with a ‘dynamicaxis’ taken from Suprematism; that is the use of angled photographicand typographic geometric forms. Printing costs had to be kept to a minimumwith a limited but effective colour range, often only red and black.‘Agitational stands’ were provided to carry typographic slogans, posters, ascreen for newsreels and a raised stand for speeches and were to bepositioned in the steets and squares of Moscow. Klutsis designed a number ofthese painted in a bold colour range of black, grey, white and red. Smallerand easily dismantled kiosks were also made creating a Constructivistarchitectural language in miniature.Lasar (El) Lissitzky (1890-1941) had also been impressed with thegeometric art of Malevich’s Suprematism. He joined up with fellow JewishA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 195

El Lissitzky’s Beat theWhites with the RedWedge was his wittycommentary on the civilwar from the Bolshevikperspective presentedin a Suprematist form.El Lissitzky worked on abook To be read outloud with a text byMayakovsky in 1923(below). All the pictureswere made fromprinter’s blocks andtype. This page reads‘Left march to thesailors. Form ranks!Forward march! Nosquabbling adnauseam. Silencespeakers.’artist Marc Chagall who had been appointed director at Vitebsk School of Artin present day Belarus. El Lissitzky became professor of architecture and thegraphic arts and as an expert lithographer was responsible for running theprint shop where amongst other things he printed Futurist-style illustratedbooks. Lissitzky. Before training in Moscow as an architect had been anengineer and this helped him to apply his talents to a wide variety of media,and master the ideas behind Production art.Lissitzky cleverly synthesised the Constructivist ideas of Tatlin andRodchenko and Malevich’s Suprematism, the latter assuming a particularlyimportant influence with its asymmetry and ‘dynamic axis’ to create spatialeffects. An early example of this was the 1919 civil war poster Beat theWhites with the Red Wedge which combined Suprematist geometric art withtypography. In this witty example of Bolshevik propaganda, a red triangle ofthe Bolsheviks aggressively penetrates a white circle symbolising the WhiteRussians. Like a lot of his work this was weighted atthe top, one of the innovative characteristics takenfrom Malevich’s abstract painting.Before this ‘conversion’ Lissitzky had produced aseries of Jewish picture books in a traditional style,but in the The Story of Two Squares, a children’sgraphic story of 1920, he was using simple geometricshapes to tell the story of two squares, one red andone black that fly to earth. The black square wasintended to represent the world economy and the redsquare a world revolution in the arts. Published twoyears later in De Stijl 6-7 it was one of the earliestexamples of the ‘New Typography’ and made a greatimpression in avant-garde circles. In 1923 he workedwith Mayakovsky on To Be Read Out Loud from the196 ART IN REVOLUTION

El Lissitzky and photographySelf portrait, Constructor 1924Lissitzky was an expert atphotomontage andphotography and produceddynamic assemblages of blackand white photographs bycropping, angling,superimposing andjuxtaposing the images, oftenin combination with words.He also made camera-lessphotographs or photopaintingand images like these wereused on book covers aboutarchitecture and relatedsubjects.Book cover from 1930using a camera-lessphotographRussian ‘Dlja Golosa’ (literally ‘For the voice’), a revolutionary book of poemsset and printed in Berlin. The illustrations, ingenious representations of thesubject of the poem, such as ‘boat on water’, are made solely out of printer’smaterials, with different sized and weighted rules and symbols combined withtype. Legend has it that the typesetter thought him crazy but followed hisinstructions anyway. On the title-page Lissitzky described himself as a ‘bookconstructor’ and he drew the parallel of using the printers typecaseas a piano might accompany a violin in a piece of music.He thought that by carefully designing a sequence of pages in abook, one could come up with a graphic equivalent to cinemaand to aid this he used an innovative thumb index on the righthand page.Lissitzky and Malevich together developed ‘architektona’, asystem where geometry is used to create visionary new shapesin space. There was a feeling of weightlessness that had comefrom the floating colour forms in Malevich’s Suprematistpaintings and Lissitzky was keen to explore this in architectonicpaintings he named Prouns, a Russian abbreviation for ‘Projectfor the affirmation of the new’. These cool rational paintingsthat relate to modernist architecture and sculpture oftensuggest a third dimension, the total effect. He described themas ‘the interchange station between painting and architecture’and they were an inspiration for the new forms of Europeangraphic design that emerged in the nineteen-twenties.Malevich had in his own way come to terms with the declineof painting, claiming in his elliptical way that ‘consciousness hasEl Lissitzky’s Proun 12 E (1920) was one of a number ofarchitectonic paintings that he made. These creations ofnew abstract forms and relationships were a combinationof architecture, sculpture and painting.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 197

Malevich’s teapot.More a Suprematistsculpture than apractical object.Nikolai Suetin was afollower of Malevich’sSuprematism whomade designs for platesat The State PorcelainFactory. This designdates from 1922.A modern reconstructionof Gota 1 (c1923) one ofMalevich’s Architectonsculptural structures fora future architecture.surmounted the surface and climbed to the art of spatial design’. After 1918he had devoted a good deal of his life to teaching and furthering hisSuprematist system and in 1919 he was invited to join Lissitzky at the VitebskSchool of Art. In Chagall’s absence he managed an artistic coup d’état bychanging the teaching methods, informing Chagall on his return that hiswork, a mixture of folk art and fantasy, was old-fashioned and irrelevant.Malevich’s persistence got him his way and Chagall left the college. Owing toto Lissitzky and Malevich’s teaching the Vitebsk School of Art, like Vkhutemasshould be regarded as a prototype for the Bauhaus school in Germany.Once established Malevich wrote and published On the New System in Arta theoretical work that expounded his thoughts on recent art trends, which toa reader of this book seem obvious but fresh to a contemporary Russianaudience; these included the toughts that Cézanne had created a new way ofusing the surface of the painting; that Cubism had brought about a liberationfrom the object through its many viewpoints; and that Futurism was able tomake time visual. He also published Suprematism: thirty-four drawings; whichhelped to further his cult status and the considerable impression he had madeon his pupils. By the early 1920s the influence of Malevich’s pioneeringabstract work, often referred to as Dynamic Suprematism, was also seen in thework of Klutsis, Ilya Chashnik, Ivan Kluin and Alexsandra Exter who usedSuprematism for her Agit-Prop designs.An organisation UNOVIS or ‘Affirmation of the New Art’ within Vitebskwas formed to promote the application of Suprematist art. By 1919 theSuprematist look had become so influential that it could be seen on shops,cafés and street signs all over Moscow. Malevich’s followers helped to make itan all embracing system for posters, book design and jackets, streetdecoration and banners, clothes, bags, cushions, embroidery, crockery andporcelain, as well as architecture. IZO under Narkompros gave artists access tothe ceramic and textiles industry and two of Malevich’s pupil’s Nikolai Suetinand Ilya Chashnik worked in The State Porcelain Factory and decorated whitedinner and tea sets with Suprematist designs; Malevich designed anextraordinary teaset for the factory, rigidly geometric with a pure white teapotand two mirror-image half-cups. It should be said that UNOVIS had a creepycultish aspect to it, as members were supplied with passwords and worespecial white clothing with a black square on the inside of the cuffs.Malevich spent the years up to 1926 working out his ideas on how artcould become the basis of architecture. These were expressed in ‘Architectons’towering rectilinear sculptures in white that show imaginary buildings inrectilinear form which unfortunately only survive in photographs.There had long been a tradition in Russia for disseminating information to themasses in the form of printed broadsheets with woodcut images combinedwith simple messages. The Flying Federation of Futurists thought of up-datingthis idea by encouraging artists to decorate ‘the ever onrushing flocks ofrailroad cars’. Within a few months brightly coloured Agit-prop trainsdecorated with greenery, flags and posters and replete with slogans were sentall over the country from Moscow and Petrograd with political activists onboard promoting Bolshevism. The carriages included a meeting room, abookshop, a cinema, printing presses, and a phonograph for broadcastingLenin’s speeches. The novelty value of these trains caused people from the198 ART IN REVOLUTION

A highly decoratedAgit-prop train whichtravelled around thecountry to spreadBolshevik propaganda.local communities to rush out of their homes, peer at the posters, and thosethat could read the propaganda, and bring (so it was said) laughter and funto the peasant communities!Artists became involved in street parades, designing banners anddecorating theatre floats carrying propaganda. River-boat steamers were alsoused to spread the word. In Vitebsk after the October celebrations one visitorremarked ‘the town still blazed with Malevich’s decorations – circles, squares,dots and lines in various colours, it was like arriving in an enchanted city’. Filmdirector Sergei Eisenstein witnessed the 1920 celebrations and wrote that ‘allthe main streets are covered with white paint splashed over the red brickwalls, and against this white background are green circles, reddish-orangesquares and blue rectangles... Malevich’s brushes have passed over its walls’.Lissitzky’s stay at Vitebsk was short-lived. By 1920 he was professor atVkhutemas in Moscow, but a lot of his work in the 1920s would be outsideof Russia, as he travelled around Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland,Holland, and New York, in his role as an unofficial Russian culturalambassador. His wanderings made him a vital international catalyst for thenew concerns of applied and non-objective art as he was in contact with allthe main figures of the European modern movement. A Prounroom wasassembled in a Berlin exhibition, a three-dimensional realisation of hisarchitectural paintings. Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Dutchabstract artist Theo van Doesburg were impressed and together they formed‘G’, the letter standing for ‘Gestaltung’ or design. A periodical under thesame name showed a broad range of interests with film, automobiles andaeroplanes mixed in with Man Ray’s Rayograms, Arp’s woodcuts, Heartfield’sphotomontages, Grosz’s satirical drawings and paintings by Mondrian. 1 ‘G’was edited by the Dadaist artist and filmmaker Hans Richter who was workingwith geometric forms in the form of animated film. His first abstract filmRhythmus 21 in 1921 was produced by a new method of painting directlyonto film. Squares and rectangles reminiscent of Malevich and Mondrian1 There were little avant-garde movements all over eastern Europe in the nineteentwenties and many of these journals were published in countries such as Romania,Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia.2 The version I saw on You Tube had added a ragtime score which seemed entirelyappropriateA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 199

dance rhythmically on the screen metamorphosing painted geometry intoanimation. 2‘G’ was one of many art journals in the 1920s – a tradition that dated backto the Der Blaue Reiter’s ‘Almanac’ in 1912. With no significant galleries toshow new work internationally an art magazine was seen as the best meansto promote new work to a small but select readership. Constructivism alonewas reputed to have spawned a couple of dozen magazines and organisationsaround Europe by the middle of the decade.Throughout the decadeEl Lissitzky continued topioneer experimentalgraphic design. His coverfor the book Vkhumetas,Architecture of 1927 isdesigned in the style ofthe ‘new typography’with its combination ofphotography, geometry,assymetry and a reducedcolour range.Russian Constructivism, unlike Productivism, was to include the wholespectrum of the arts, including literature, cinema and theatre continuing thecountry’s recent tradition in the collaborative arts. The stage had always beencentral to Russian culture and so it was important that contemporary Russianartists became involved particularly after the loss of the Ballet Russes to Franceand the emigration there of its foremost artist and designer, NataliaGoncharova. The legacy of her dazzling designs continued through Exter,Popova and Stepanova who between them produced hundreds of costumeand set designs for theatre productions. Before Exter left Russia to teach stagedesign at Leger’s art school in Paris she brought a Cubist influenced design toa production of Romeo and Juliet. Popova helped to found Constructivisttheatre design in 1922 with producer Meyerkhold who became known for hisaustere approach which aimed to remove any superfluous movement, gestureand expression. In a production called The Magnanimous Cuckold the actorsperformed alongside a large machine-like apparatus with ladders, revolvingdoors and rotating wheels. Stepanova’s collaboration with Meyerkhold in thesame year on Death of Tarelkin had collapsing furniture and a human meatgrinder. His spirit of adventure allowed him to introduce vaudeville, circus andfilm into his productions. Tatlin’s first known theatre design was in 1923, acollaboration with the poet Khlebnikov on his play Zan-Gesi staged inPetrograd. Sadly Khlebnikov died in the great famine of the same year.Meanwhile Tatlin also worked on prototypes for mass clothing at theDepartment of Material Culture in Petrograd. Among his designs were an allweathercoat and a worker’s suit but it is not clearif they ever got beyond the drawing board.Stepanova and Lyubov Popova, shortly before thelatter’s early death from Scarlet fever in 1924,designed innovatory textile and clothing designsfor the First State Textile Print factory in Moscow.Both wanted to replace the traditional floraldesigns with attractive geometric patterns in alimited range of colours with combinations ofoverlapping rectangles, circles, triangles andstripes. Popova said that ‘no artistic success hasgiven me such satisfaction as the sight of apeasant or a worker buying a length of materialOne of Popova’s Constructivist stage designsfor Meyerkhold’s production of TheMagnanimous Cuckold in, on and aroundwhich the actors performed in costumes shealso designed.200 ART IN REVOLUTION

HEALTH THROUGH SPORTDuring the nineteen twenties architects and artist/designers became moreinterested in health and sport. After so much death from war and theconsequent flu pandemic, hygiene and fitness became animportant concern for progressive thinkers of thetwenties. Le Corbusier, a keen swimmer, hadincluded sport in his journal L’ésprit Nouveau, andimages of dance and gymnastics were frequentlyfeatured in the architectural and design press of thetime. The Olympic Games became progressivelymore popular in the inter-war years. The Russiansencouraged physical culture as suitable for thewell-being of the masses but were wary ofsome forms of sport as being too competitivefor socialist ideology. Nevertheless Stepanovadesigned a variety of football strips ideallysuited for her geometric designs and RussianbornSonia Delaunay in France appliedsimilar principles to swimming costumes.Stepanova’s geometric design for a football stripSonia Delaunay’s geometricdesign for a knitted ‘unisex’swimming costume shows thetwenties modernist interest ina healthy sporting life style.An example of one ofStepanova’s manygeometric textiledesigns.designed by me’. Osip Brik considered ‘a cotton print asmuch a part of artistic culture as a painting’, a sentimentshared by Malevich who stated that art belongs more topeasant women making haberdashery than to the men.Rodchenko and his wife Stepanova together designedworker’s clothes. The photograph of Rodchenko withshaved head (see page 166), shows him wearing a jump suitwith fastenings and a number of storage pockets exposedcould have been taken yesterday. Stepanova becamedissatisfied with the limited decorative function of the artistin the textile and clothes industry suggesting that theyshould have more participation in dyeing, development ofnew fabric textures and materials. Alexsandra Exter, insupport of the ‘Industrial Dress’, said that economy and function were themost important considerations as ‘present day fashions change according tothe whims of the merchants. We must counteract with a way of dressing thatis functional, and beautiful in its simplicity’.‘ROSTA’ was a state agency founded to transmit news and information bytelegraph. In the years of its existence from 1919-22 it produced brightlycoloured but basic stencilled posters that were sent all over the country to bedisplayed prominently in shop windows and other suitable locations.Mayakovsky, who had trained as an artist, wrote and drew some of the onethousand six-hundred posters that were produced. Many of these wereproduced by the political cartoonist Mikhail Cheremnykh, who was reputed tohave produced fifty in one night! One of his that I have seen has twelveA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 201

separate images in four rows of three, each with a shortcaption that points out aspects of health and hygiene. Someof the posters were over ten foot high but due to the basicprinting process the images were simplified shapescomposed of flat colours drawn in a comic-book form toappeal to a mass public. The topical themes taken fromcurrent news stories could be worked up quickly and verycheaply; three days was often all that was needed toproduce and print three hundred copies.Following his work for ROSTA, Mayakovsky wasdetermined to counteract the burgeoning private sector andthe NEP 'fatcats'. As a copywriter he dreamt up slogans forposter propaganda, advertising and packaging. These werecombined with Rodchenko’s powerful designs using strongphotographic or illustrative images on plain backgrounds,bold rules and hand-drawn sans-serif type in black and oneother colour. Mayakovsky’s experience in writing agitationalpoetry made him ideally suited to write advertising slogansthat many Moscovites were to come to know by heartespecially when he spiced them with his characteristic wit.There have never been and are no better dummiesYou will want to suck them until old ageA one-off poster for ashop windowadvertising babies’dummies and made forthe state rubberindustry in 1923.Designed by Rodchenkothe words are byMayakovsky. ‘There areand never have beenany better dummies.They are ready forsucking until you reachold age’.Mayakovsky was now able to ease his conscience with an element ofCommunist ideology as he had been the first person to advertise the NEP. Theflamboyant and charismatic Mayakovsky was a man of contradictions. Heenjoyed the good life he saw in Paris and USA, developing a taste for buyingquantities of American Parker pens with ‘their everlasting nibs’, and wouldproudly show off his grey Renault automobile. He had a great belief in poetry,but Productivism turned him against it being used for its own ends.‘Everything in the USSR must work for the proletariat. Give advertising thesame thought’.‘Mayakovsky-Rodchenko Advertising Constructors’ (Reklam – Konsruktor)worked between the years of 1923 and 1925 producing around fifty posters,a hundred signboards, packaging, wrappers, illuminated advertisements andnewspaper advertisements. Their potent blend of Constructivist graphics,lettering, exclamation marks, arrows or other devices available to thetypesetter, form a symbolic visual language. The message was supported byphotographs, an economic use of colour to make direct and elegant imagesstrong enough to attract the passer-by. Rodchenko was to say about thispartnership, ‘we totally conquered Moscow and totally banished or rathertransformed the Tsarist-bourgeois-western style of advertising’.Their work for state-run companies helped them compete in the openmarket. These included Dobrolet the airline, a forerunner of Aeroflot,Mosselprom (The Union of Industrial Enterprises for Processing AgriculturalProduce) which manufactured biscuits, sweets, cigarettes etc., and RESINTRESTthe rubber manufacturing company which was important in satisfying a hugeinexhaustible demand for galoshes for the cold and snowy winters. A typicalslogan was for the department store GUM:202 ART IN REVOLUTION

Want the sunTo shine at nightBuy bulbs at GUM -Cheap and brightAmongst Rodchenko’s many talents was photography which over thefollowing years became increasingly important to him. The small andadaptable Leica cameras were ideal to make an instantaneous recordof the world at large so the camera became the ideal Constructivistmachine. It had the advantage of being relatively cheap, easy to useand manipulate with a capacity to be reproduced endlessly and almostexactly. In 1928 Rodchenko wrote that ‘Art has no place in modern life... Every cultured man must wage war against art ... photograph andbe photographed’. From the seventh floor balcony of the VKhumetasschool where he lived with his wife Stepanova he took foreshortenedaerial pictures. ‘The most interesting visual angles of our age are thebird’s eye view and the worm’s eye view, and we have to adopt themin our work’. His ideas on photography and the new media are veryperceptive. One instance are his thoughts on how Lenin should best beremembered after his death in 1924.Mosselprom’s buildingin the centre ofMoscow for the staterun company servicingagricultural produce.The designs are byRodchenko with theslogans written byMayakovsky advertisingbeers, cigarettes,buiscuits, sweets andother wares that werefor sale there.what should remain of Lenin, a bronze statue, oil portraits, etchings,watercolours, his secretary’s diary, the reminiscence of friends – or afolder of photographs taken when he was working and relaxing, anarchive of his books, notebooks, film-clips, and gramophonerecords.Lenin approved of cinema and photography and encouraged theConstructivists to use photomontage with favourable comments on what hecalled ‘interesting photographs with explanatory notes for propaganda’. It wasproving to be the ideal medium to communicate a cogent visual message asimages could be assembled into a form that was cheaper and even moreaccessible than the propaganda films made by Russian directors such as SergeiEisenstein, although each influenced the other. 1Eisenstein’s first film Strike’ in 1924 had made a big impact with its fastcutting documentary style which was intermixed with montaged theatricaland circus effects learnt from observing Meyerkhold’s theatre productions.Eisenstein in his book Film sense credits Cubism for the use of splicingshowing the multiple viewpoints and juxtapositions that feature heavily in hisfilms. He and his contemporaries were using imaginative editing and featuringdramatic camera angles and composition taken from contemporaryphotography to drive home powerful messages in support of the government.Rodchenko also used photomontage on his designs for book andmagazine covers. Mayakovsky’s anthology of poems About This, and hisslightly subversive A Conversation with a Tax Inspector about Poetry weretwo examples from many books that the Mayakovsky-Rodchenko teamcollaborated on.1 In his 1936 essay The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, the GermanMarxist critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin argued that the era of a unique workof art had been brought to an end with mechanisation’s ability to communicate to amass audience particularly in the mediums of photography and film.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 203

From the back cover ofA conversation with atax inspector (1926), apoem by Mayakovskythat sends up theabsurdity of a nonartisticindividual tryingto assess an artist'sworth. Thephotomontage byRodchenko features aportrait of Mayakovsky.Rodchenko, Popova andStepanova’s combinedcover for the secondissue of LEF (Left frontfor the arts),Mayakovsky and Brik’sjournal to promoteRussian Constructivism.Book and magazine publishing was an integral part of Constructivism. GIZ,otherwise known as Gosizdat, was the state-run book company whichcontrolled the industry and produced the majority of the books. Specialbooths and uniforms for the sales people were designed to sell these. GIZpublished a journal LEF (Left Front of the Arts) in April 1923, the brainchild ofMayakovsky and his close friend Osip Brik. This ran for seven issues until 1925and was an important mouthpiece for the artists and writers concerned withthe development of Russian Constructivism and outspoken in its criticism ofthe political and social compromises brought about by the NEP. It carriedfiction, criticism, and poetry and was aimed at a radical international audiencewith contributions from George Grosz, Tristan Tzara and Robert Delaunay whowere all suggested as foreign correspondents. It promoted the idea thatConstructivists should be fully trained as ‘engineer-constructors’ (or artistconstructors)who combined artistic skills with a specialised technologicalknow-how. Mayakovsky published a manifesto which postulated a technicalmastery and organisation of materials on three principles a) techtonic (art ofcreation) b) the factura (manner of creation) and c) the construction, anothervariation on the endless theorising that had emerged from Inkhuk andelsewhere.Rodchenko was again responsible for the overall design of the journal,producing some striking covers. LEF also published books including Brik’s I amnot a fellow traveller, a response to Trotsky’s criticism of writers who weren’tpart of the proletarian revolution but its artistic fellow travellers. SergeiTretiakov, one of the associated writers, described its motives as ‘theproduction of a new human being through art’, part of a 'starry-eyed' beliefthat the new society would need new forms of art to convey new ideas to thepublic who would then be transformed through their active involvement.Brik wrote an article in LEF From easel-painting to the printed fabric inwhich he argued:easel painting is not only useless for our contemporary artistic culture, itis the greatest brake on its development. Only those artists who haveunderstood once and for all that work associated with production is notjust one art-form among others, but the only possible art-form, are in aposition to find a solution to the problems of contemporary artBy now these kind of ideas were becoming a big bone of contention. DavidShterenberg head of IZO was one of many easel painters who believed thatProduction Art and Fine Art could co-exist. He praised the decoration ofporcelain and considered Production Art could improve the aesthetic quality ofmanufactured goods. This opinion proves that Production Art was non-specificand that it was difficult to establish what it should really stand for. Anotherprominent member of Inkhuk, Mikhail Tarabukin, criticised Constructivismwriting that they didn’t see themselves as painters and are against art, but‘they formed an alliance with technology, engineering and industry withouthaving any specialised knowledge for this and remain essentially artists parexcellence’. The only solution he could see was to have properly trained artistengineersworking at the machine, but as he thought the artist was adilettante a technical training would be alien to his nature.There was also a good deal of criticism of the new styles of graphic artthat were emerging. In 1923 Igor Grabar, an art historian, wrote about a204 ART IN REVOLUTION

cover design by Alexsandr Vesnin. ‘I have in front of me one of today’s manydisasters: the cover of the new journal Architecture ... a cover designconsisting of solely of letters without any ornamental motifs ... it manifestssuch a monstrous level of banality that it can stand for the whole ideology ofVesnin and those who share his views’.Serious criticism of the Constructivists was coming from other directions. InMay 1922 the influential group AKhRR ‘The Association of Artists ofRevolutionary Russia’ was formed at the time of the forty-seventh exhibitionof the Wanderers who after sixty years were still a force to be reckoned with.AKhRR felt that a large illiterate population needed realist art to assimilatesimple messages and that the new forms of art were failing to convey a directmessage that engaged the public. AKhRR was given an official endorsementwhen the party’s Central Committee encouraged them to go into factoriesand show an idealised view of the workforce in everyday situations. Thisanticipated Heroic Realism, the form of Russian Art that would later come tobe the norm in the Stalinist era.Lenin had been responsible for drawing up a list of sixty-six heroes of therevolution who were suitable to be made into statues or monuments toreplace the Tsars. These included Marx and Engels as well as Spartacus,Dostoevsky and Robespierre. Post-Cubist sculpture of friends of the revolutionwere unpopular due the distortion of their hero’s faces, so an old-fashionedapproach was favoured and popular realistic forms were commissioned. Mostlarge Constructivist sculptures got no further than the drawing board due inequal measure to their limited appeal and to the limited supply of thematerials needed to make them.Dissension from a different kind came from the brothers, Naum Gabo andAnton Pevsner. They had thought Suprematism, with its reliance on puregeometric form and colour, too limiting and decided that their non-objectivesculpture should be more dynamic and that ‘space and time should be thebackbone of the constructive arts’. They were against Marxism, so vehementlyopposed the abolition of pure art and the political belief in materialism thatlead to pure functionalism. Gabo also disliked Cubism and made it knownthat he thought Tatlin’s work showed a chaotic clash of composition andmaterials which derived from this movement. Gabo best exemplifies the sharpdividing line between the spiritual and the materialist which ideologicallyseparated post-Revolutionary art.The ‘godless doctrine of Marxism’ had overnight attempted to replace thebeliefs of a deeply religious country under the Russian Orthodox church. ThePevsner brothers were symptomatic of the artists who disagreed with the ideathat art should be practical, believing that art should remain an experimentaland spiritual activity without any function except to represent a particularvision of the world. Similar views were held by Kandinsky although he wasprepared to work in both camps and Malevich whose feelings about thesematters were deep and ambiguous. Several of his paintings in 1918 feature across which he explained was to signify the death of painting which he wasabout to abandon but he did in fact take up again in his later years. ThePevsner brothers caused a controversy in August 1920 when they posted fivethousand copies of their Realistic Manifesto up in public places. These statedthat art had an absolute and independent value which had a role to performin any society whether it be capitalist or communist. Constructivism’s aim wasA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 205

dismissed as a socially orientated art as ‘art will always be alive as one of theindespensable means of human expression and an important means ofcommunication’.Most Constructivist sculpture up to this point had been being nonfunctionalbut had been made to further the marriage between art and thescience of engineering with a socially useful objective. Gabo pioneered thenon-political European Constructivism which utilized similar engineering skillsto Russian Constructivism but were used instead to further Constructivism as acreative act which could discover new non-imitative forms that expressedhuman experience. To achieve this Gabo would often use a highly abstractedform of the human figure. The Pevsner brothers’ aesthetic pronouncementthat space and time should be the backbone of the constructive arts, leadGabo to make sculptures with dynamic and kinetic elements. One made in1920 consisted of a vertical rod vibrated by a motor which was able to showrhythm and movement in time. Other work combined space and geometricplanes in a way that Futurist simultaneity had struggled to. One method thatwas used was the placement of metal strings inside the formal frame of thework; another was to utilize transparent materials like glass or later, whentechnology allowed, clear plastics. Gabo wrote of his method:Instead of carving or moulding a sculpture in one piece, we build it upinto space out of our imagination in the same way as an engineer doeswhen he builds a construction.Naum Gabo’s KineticConstruction (1920) is ametal rod abouteighteen inches high(45cm) which vibratesfrom a base whichholds a motor. It servedno function bar apurely aesthetic one.Antoine Pevsner had taught at the Moscow State Free Art Studios and wroteabout he and his brothers ‘road to new research of which the guiding idea isan attempt at a synthesis of the plastic arts painting, sculpture andarchitecture ... and the execution of imposing structures in vast urban spaces’.This synthesis of all the so-called plastic arts was a vision that he shared withvan Doesburg, Le Corbusier, Lissitzky, Gropius and others in the yearsfollowing the first world war. Like Kandinsky, Gabo and Pevsner wereideologically unsuited for Production art, and indeed life in Russia. In 1923they left the country bound for Berlin.206 ART IN REVOLUTION

3.5 Art asdesign comes ofageIn an attempt toinclude the whole ofthe European avantgardeDoesburgpublished De Stijl fromLeiden, Antwerp, Parisand Rome. He hadupdated the look of thejournal and includedarticles on all aspects ofmodernist artarchitecture anddesign..When Gropius invited Van Doesburg to visit the school in 1921he was acutely aware of the problems that the school wasgoing through. By the time Kandinsky had joined theBauhaus the next year Itten’s overbearing influence was causingructions and Gropius wondered whether they 'should pursue theirindividual talents in opposition to the outside world, or whether weshould seek an affinity with industry’. He now favoured the latter option.Like the peripatetic El Lissitzky, Van Doesburg travelled around Europe inhis efforts to make De Stijl an international movement and knew of thepotential of the Bauhaus as well as its faults. During the years from 1920-24he made no paintings but made influential contacts, wrote, produced andpromoted the De Stijl philosophy through its journal. With Mondrian lessinvolved, De Stijl went through a transformation with several originalmembers resigning through ideological differences or personality clashes withVan Doesburg. The early editions of the journal had a cover design and logoby Huszár and partly due to the cheap paper it was printed on, a fairly dulland traditional presentation. By its fourth issue in January 1921 van Doesburghad become interested in typography and decided to revamp the journal togive it a more contemporary Constructivist look to reflect the post-war imagethat was needed to promote it internationally. The new design was an earlyexample of what was to become known in the 1920s as the New Typographyand an important influence on asymmetric typographic design. The formatchanged from ‘square’ to ‘landscape’ and with some help from Mondrian itintroduced a dynamic asymmetric design within a rigid rectilinear grid. Thechosen type was a sans serif ‘Grotesque’ printed in red and black, presentedin a variety of contrasting sizes and sometimes arranged vertically with stronghorizontal and vertical relationships giving it a cool objective look. Its prestigeand influence would outstrip its small circulation of around 300 copiesalthough that was pretty good for an avant-garde journal. Van Doesburgknew many of the main players of the European avant-garde and collaboratedwith architects and designers on a wide range of projects. These includedfilm-maker Hans Richter and architect Mies van der Rohe, who he met at theFirst International Dada Festival in Berlin. Another important contact wasLissitzky whose Proun paintings he described as ‘changing trains betweenpainting and architecture’. The cross fertilisation ofSuprematism and Constructivism was crucial in thecontinuing influence of De Stijl.Van Doesburg was by now fully committed to amachine aesthetic and mass production, whereas theBauhaus was still commited to hand craftsmanship. Hisawareness of Gropius’ intention to create a betterenvironment through a fusion of art, life and technologyencouraged him to instigate an extraordinary chain ofevents. He accused the Bauhausers as being romanticsand criticised Itten for his semi-mystical approach toteaching, which he described as ‘artistic flummery andcookery’. The charismatic Itten was a difficult man toignore as the individual expression he encouraged waspopular with a lot of the students, but an anathema toA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 207

Klee’s paintingTwittering machine(1922) was a satire onthe internal politicsaffecting the Bauhausat around this time. It isalso a good example ofthe visual language ofsign and symbol that hemade his own.the rigorous intellectual approach of the dogmatic Van Doesburg. BetweenMarch and July 1922 Van Doesburg set up two De Stijl courses and aworkshop in the studio of a Bauhaus student’s flat near the college. Theintention was to turn the Bauhaus students’ interest away from Expressionismwhich he considered outdated having been superseded by the more politicalNeue Sachlichkeit (New-Objectivity) and the astringent social satire of Otto Dixand Georg Grosz. Ultimately though he wished to replace Expressionism witha form of European Constructivism in accordance with the general directionthat the avant-garde was beginning to take.The first course was to introduce the ideas behind this new form of designand the second aimed to develop a total work of art based on these ‘plastic’principles. There was an enthusiastic response and several of the Bauhausstudents refurbished a local theatre in the De Stijl style. It was all too much forthe normally fair-minded Gropius who had to forbid the students fromattending the classes. The battle continued until 1923 when van Doesburgfinally left for Paris, but the seed had been planted and the teaching andoverall direction of the design was to change irrevocably. Gropius now madereferences to art and technology as opposed to art and craft; he designed alight fixture in the De Stijl style for his study, comprising of vertical andhorizontal bars, similar to one that Rietveld had designed. Gropius reorganisedsome of the courses and reasserted some of his original intensions that hadgone astray. Most significantly Itten resigned in April 1923 to teach and run aworkshop at Herrilburg, the centre for the Mazdaznan sect.A painting made by Klee at the time, Twittering machine, shows hisobliquely humorous reaction to some of the disruptions among the warringfactions of the staff. The three birds on the right are pierced by arrows, theone on the left is swallowing an exclamation mark, a sign of danger inthe pictorial language that he often used; their precarious positionleads to the fateful consequences shown by the turning of a crankingmechanism on which they stand.Klee and Kandinsky helped to steer the school away from theseproblems with a more rigorous and intellectual approach to teaching.The preliminary course’s study of colour and form intitiated by Itten wasrevised as a basic design course exploring colour, form, analyticaldrawing and line in a quasi-scientific way. Aspects of artistic creativitywere analysed both in class and in their published writings. Kandinsky’sPoint and Line to Plane and Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook were bothlater published by the Bauhaus press.Kandinsky who had already studied colour, form and composition insome depth came up with some new ideas. The language of colour wasexpressed by its emotional and physical associations – lightness anddarkness – and in terms of temperature, the opposites of warm andcold – the extreme warmth of pure yellow to the extreme cold of pureblue. He demonstrated the polarity of colours, orange and blue, greenand red, yellow and purple known to us now as complementary colours.Particularly relevant for the growth of abstract art was the exploration ofthe effects of the relationship between line, plane and point incomposition. For example when a combination of these lead the eyetowards the top it would be light and free as opposed to one that leadsthe eye towards the bottom which would be heavy and depressive.208 ART IN REVOLUTION

Klee had interesting theories about line and form. His oft quoted simile fora composition is ‘a line going for a walk’ – within this the line is active,passive or medial. The active line is one that moves to a destination or not asthe case may be. The medial line defines a form in two different ways, thefirst is structural, say the bricks and windows of a house, the second isindividual, say the outline of the building. When colour is added to the medialform, it becomes passive as colour becomes the active element. He was alsointerested in visual harmony with balances of line and colour, form and toneetc. Experimenting with the method was also important for him as he woulduse a number of techniques often in the same work whether it be sprayingwatercolours, scratching lines in oil paint or anything else that came to mind.A pivotal moment in the history of the school was the arrival of Itten’sreplacement, László Moholy-Nagy (1896-1946). Moholy-Nagy had served inthe Hungarian army in the war and been injured while fighting in Russia. Hefinished his law studies and began to paint in an abstract style clearlyinfluenced by Malevich. His studio in Berlin became a meeting point for theinternational avant-garde, including El Lissitzky, Schwitters, van Doesburg andhis friend Alfred Kemeny, a fellow Hungarian artist who had recently been toRussia and met a number of the artists from Vkhutemas. Moholy-Nagy hadbeen impressed with a Constructivist and Dadaist Congress organised by vanDoesburg at Weimar in May 1922, which had attracted a number of theEuropean avant-garde including Arp, Schwitters and Tzara. He saw‘Constructivism as the Socialism of vision’ so after his arrival at the Bauhaus in1923 he adopted Russian Constructivism’s rationalist aesthetic offunctionalism, industrial production and objectivity that was replacingindividualism, self-expression and subjectivity. He put it this way:during the last hundred years art and life have had nothing in common.The personal indulgence in creating art has contributed nothing to thehappiness of the masses.In the catalogue of the large Bauhaus exhibition of 1968 at London’s RoyalAcademy Will Grohmann wrote of Moholy-Nagy’s arrival in 1923:the former harmony of the Bauhaus was seriously challenged. He fulfilledthe desire which Gropius had presumably harboured since 1921 – toproduce the new unity of art and technology. He had little to do withKandinsky. The Russians spiritual quality was pure poetry to the Hungarian,intellectual activity was the means of communication for him ... atechnologist who experimented with new materials and their transparency,and who also worked with new concepts of movement and space.’Soon after starting Moholy-Nagy's viewpoint was recorded in the minutes of ameeting where the direction of the college was being discussed:Moholy asks: are the Bauhaus workshops in tune with the times? Asworkshops for the crafts they are not so, and can be regarded asmoribund.Moholy-Nagy in theearly years of his spellat the Bauhaus.For Moholy-Nagy the machine was of central importance and he suggestedthat you could either be its slave or its master making it perfectly clear whichhe intended to be:A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 209

the reality of our century is technology ... to be a user of the machine isto be part of the spirit of this century. It has replaced the transcendentalspritualism of past centuries.’William Wagenfeld andKarl Jucker’s table lampof 1924 was a goodexample of the classicdesign products thatcame from the Bauhausmetalwork department.Marianne Brandt’sKandem lamp whichwas successfullyadapted from a metalworkshop model formass production.His fascination with machinery extended to his attire. Overalls combined withsteel-rimmed spectacles gave him the image of the shop-floor worker, in starkcontrast to Itten’s monk. It entirely appropriate that his first post was Masterof Form in the metal workshop. Here he introduced a wider variety ofmaterials including glass which was to become important in the design oflamps and other domestic products: no more making of ‘spiritual samovars’ asone of the students noted. Moholy-Nagy’s proficiency made him the Bauhausequivalent of Tatlin’s practical Constructivism in Russia. Students wereencouraged to visit factories and acquaint themselves with tools and materialsused for manufacture. By 1924 forty-three objects from the metal workdepartment were ready for industrial production including coffee pots,teapots, dishes and ashtrays. An early success was the classic Bauhaus tablelamp produced by Wilhelm Wagenfeld made in cooperation with otherstudents. This had a round transparent base, a white clouded spherical glassshade and a glass cylindrical shaft with a metal core to carry the wire.Marianne Brandt, formerly a painter, was a rare example of a female studentwho was allowed to work outside the area of decorative arts like tapestry andwallpaper. Encouraged by Moholy-Nagy she made coffee and tea services andthe classic flexible bedside lamp later successfully manufactured by Kandem.When he was put in charge of the preliminary course, he altered itconsiderably. Drawing which was so important to Itten was virtually dropped,In its place he encouraged his students to focus their minds on newtechniques and a good deal of time was spent building three-dimensionalobjects in a variety of materials in the Constructivist manner.Moholy-Nagy had been making ‘Proun-like’ paintings, collages andconstructions described by one as having precise and mathematicallyharmonious shapes filled with emotional quality; the perfect balance betweenfeeling and intellect. A series of three works Em 1, 2 and 3, one design but inthree sizes, were made in Berlin enamel sign factory from colour sample sheetsand specifications drawn on graph paper. He explained that painting could alsobe ordered over the telephone, an idea first suggested by the Dadaists whichanticipated by fifty years a conceptual attitude to art production.One reference to his ‘political’ success in changing the direction of theschool saw him as ‘a pike in a pond full of goldfish’. His popularity helped tochange the reputation and importance of the school making tangible thesynthesis of art and design that Gropius had been aiming to achieve.In the autumn of 1923 the Bauhaus was obliged to hold an exhibition ‘Artand Technology – A New Unity’ to justify their existence to the authorities.Gropius who opened the proceedings with a lecture was worried that it hadcome too soon but it was well advertised and fifteen thousand peopleattended. All the groundwork was falling into place as the school became afocal point for all who were interested in the avant-garde. There were exhibitsfrom the masters as well as the ‘new men’, former students including MarcelBreuer the furniture designer, Herbert Bayer the graphic designer and JosephAlbers the abstract painter. Next to the vegetable plot an experimental onestoreyhouse with a stylish square prefabricated look was built by Adolphe210 ART IN REVOLUTION

Moholy-Nagy’ EM 2(1922). This was one ofa series of threeSuprematist inspiredworks, all the samedesign but in differentsizes, that werespecified to an enamelsign maker over thetelephone.A Constructivistpainting am7 (1926)from the multidisciplinedMoholy-Nagy.The cover for the 1923Bauhaus exhibitionshows a transitionalHerbert Bayer designheralding a new era forthe visual presentationof the school.Meyer. It was based on a design by one of the Masters, Georg Muche andhad a raised roof which helped to light a central living room that wassurrounded by a series of small square rooms made up of a dining room, akitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom and a children’s room. All were equippedwith state of the art fixtures and fittings, including a very early fitted kitchendesigned by Marcel Breuer.Concerts were given with new works by two distinguished visitors, IgorStravinsky and the German composer Paul Hindemith. One of the definitehighlights was the Triadic Ballet designed by the painter Oscar Schlemmerwho ran the theatre department. This was a combination of music, dance andpantomime with figures dressed up as geometricised puppets. These hadbrightly coloured geometrical costumes with mechanical parts that createdmoving abstract patterns. The theatre department was very experimental andgave the Bauhaus an aura of sophistication that other art schools lacked.Kandinsky who had created his Wagner inspired The Yellow Sound back in1912 wrote of his continuing interest in Gesamtkunstwerk (a unity of variousart forms) in his essay of 1923 Abstract Theatre Synthesis.Despite the general foreboding the whole thing was widely publicisedabroad so turned out to be a great public relations success. One unusual highprofile commission which resulted from the exhibition was a series ofemergency banknotes designed by Herbert Bayer for the Thuringian mint of amillion marks and upwards. This was a sign of the desperate economiccircumstances that the severely compromised country was suffering asrampant inflation had hit the shattered German economy as a result of theVersailles treaty. It was difficult to keep afloat in a sea of money worth next tonothing, conditions that Adolph Hitler was soon to exploit to his advantage.The publicity for the exhibition was clearly affected by the efforts of vanDoesburg and De Stijl, whose collaborative philosophy and corporate look hada decisive effect on the new Bauhaus creed. After the exhibition the school,A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 211

The Thuringian mintcommissioned a seriesof emergency banknotesof a million marks andabove from the Bauhaussoon after their ‘Art andTechnology – A NewUnity’ exhibition in1923.Herbert Bayer’s designfor a newspaper kioskin 1924 is perhapstaken in part from theRussian Constructivistswith a stylistic nod toDe Stijl.distancing itself from the influence of Expressionism, was given a newbrand identity. A new image emerged with a use of primary coloursand geometric forms based on the cube, the rectangle and the circle. Itwas a fusion of De Stijl and Constructivism filtered through SyntheticCubism with a few remnants of German Expressionism. A typicalexample of the new look was a newspaper kiosk designed by HerbertBayer, much in the manner of Klutsis in Russia, but with rectangularplanes and a primary colour scheme clearly influenced by De Stijl.Despite this, the principles of DeStijl with their rejection of round or organicshapes and varying degrees of colour were seen to be too single-minded anddogmatic for the Bauhaus.Moholy-Nagy started a course in photography to explore how it could beused in design and even in fine art. His ‘photograms’ or objective lightpaintings, were three-dimensional objects that were layed on film orphotographic paper that were transformed into a light pattern with no detailor shading. This was a technique originally used by William Henry Fox Talbotthe inventor of photography, who had used lace and leaves as negatives. AlvinLangdon Coburn revived the technique in 1917 and named the resultsVortographs. In the next year Zurich dadaist Christian Schad laid objects suchas torn paper, ribbon and string onto photographic paper and called themSchadographs. Man Ray then adapted this direct metod using translucentthree-dimensional objects to make Rayographs.Like El Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy combined his photograms with type andnamed them ‘typophotos’. In his Bauhaus book Malerei, Fotografie, Film of1925 Moholy-Nagy put forward a strong argument for a union of abstractpainting, abstract photography and music.In his The New Vision of 1928, Moholy-Nagy stressed the importance ofphotomicrographs in understanding the natural structure of materials, as wellas their texture and mass. Purist artist Amédée Ozenfant’s had also set outthese ideas in his book Foundations of Modern Art of the same yearpresenting photomicrographs and telephotographs to show diatoms(microscopic algae), minute details of plants, the moon, the nebula ofAndromeda, an electric spark, wave structures etc.. Ozenfant postulated thatnature is not what it seems and that by studying phenomena such as thesewe can get closer to understanding atomic structure and by implication giveart a proper foundation.The indefatigable Moholy-Nagy was also experimenting with a form ofkinetic art, that he named ‘light space modulators’, a means of painting withlight. These electrically driven kinetic devices were three-dimensionalconstructions made of plastics, glass or perforated metal. A light box withbulbs of various colours transmitted light through a variety of openings andacted as a sophisticated kaleidoscope projecting ever changing patterns oflight and shadows onto a screen or stage as it was intended to have atheatrical application. He worked on this throughout his years at the Bauhaus,and some of the effects were recorded on film.During the early years Lyonel Feininger’s print department had producedfine art lithographs, engravings and woodcuts. These included a number ofportfolios by the Masters including Feininger’s woodcuts, and collections ofprints by Gerhard Marcks, Oskar Schlemmer and Kandinsky. Moholy-Nagy, inhis typographer/designer role took over and transformed the department into212 ART IN REVOLUTION

a more typographically based course which veered away from the subjectivityof Dada and Expressionism to a more objective style based on a grid systemand asymmetric design taken from De Stijl and Suprematism. Moholy-Nagy’sassistant here and in the preliminary class was Joseph Albers, the abstractgeometric painter who had graduated from being one of the first Bauhausstudents. Later when he moved to the USA he became known as one of theforerunners of ‘Hard-edge Abstraction’ as well as the ‘Op Art’ movement ofthe ‘60s. His Bauhaus training was evident in an extensive series of paintingswhich he began in 1949 entitled Homage to the Square see page ?, a‘scientific’ experiment in colour contrasts which juxtaposed variations ofcoloured squares inside each other. This rigorously methodical approach wasalready apparent in his classes on the study of materials. A story is told abouthim producing a pile of newspapers and asking the students to respect thematerial and its characteristics so as to make something interesting fromthem, if possible without glue and scissors. The students came up with masks,animals, boats and aeroplanes which he dismissed as childish. A simple butelegant abstract construction folded to suggest wings won his admiration.In 1925 former pupil and graphic designer Herbert Bayer began to teach anew style of graphic design. Importance was given to function with the needsof the user in mind, the correct use of materials, and an understanding ofmodern production methods. Bayer’s strong asymmetric style, in the mannerof El Lissitzky, with heavy rules, type set at right angles and a wide range oftype sizes helped to promote the progressive image of the school. One newidea was to use only a sans serif alphabet, evoking the spirit of the machineage and at the same time getting away from the German tradition of oldCameralessphotography wasconsidered aningenious method toachieve semi-abstractforms that were alsosuitable to be used inconjunction with theNew Typography.Shown here are ManRay’s ‘Rayograph’ (left)and Moholy-Nagy’s‘Photogram’ (right).Herbert Bayer’s poster for an exhibition by his colleague Kandinsky in1926 is good example of the New Typography. It uses a single alphabet(this time all capitals as opposed to all lower case) synthesisingelements of De Stijl, Suprematism, and Constructivism into arecognisable Bauhaus style.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 213

fashioned gothic black letter typefaces: to facilitate this he designed his ownsans-serif font. Another novel idea was an all lower-case alphabet; ‘whyshould we write and print in two alphabets, we do not speak with a capital‘A‘ and a small ‘a’. This attempt at rationalisation meant that the printerneeded less type but it only had a short if effective life and has onlyoccasionally been used since the Bauhaus days, although it is now common ine-mail communication. Some typographers who sympathised with the singlealphabet adopted the classical Roman solution by using an all capital letteralphabet.The most effective way of promoting the school’s ideals was by applyingthe new typographic style to posters, brochures, pamphlets, prospectuses,leaflets and general stationery. Their ambition stretched even further when thedecision was made to start publishing books printed in the workshop, editedby Gropius and Moholy-Nagy, under the Bauhausverlag imprint, and writteneither by the masters or by those ideologically related to the school.MERZIn January 1923 Kurt Schwitters had started to publish the journal Merzfrom his home in Hanover. This was a voice for his one-man movementof the same name as well as being a vehicle for his poetry and an outletfor Constructivism, De Stijl and Dada. Schwitter’s had inherited hisfamily’s good business sense and had had some success in sellingportraits and collages. Over the next ten years the twenty five issues ofMerz had an international outlook, being distributed in sixteen countriesincluding USA and Japan and gradually progressing from a Dadaist slantto one that reflected Constructvism. It featured many of the nineteen-The cover of KurtSchwitters first issue ofMerz in 1923 whichcovered poetry, Dadaand other aspects of the‘20s avant-garde. Thisone has a feature onthe recent Dada tour ofHolland.(Left) A collage ofSchwitter’s made out ofthe remnants of printedmaterial.214 ART IN REVOLUTION

twenties avant-garde – Picabia, van Doesburg, Hannah Höch, Haussmann, Huszár, Mondrian, Lissitzky –and reviewed the modernist architecture of Mies van der Rohe, Oud and Rietveld. The first issue waslaid out in the New Typography style of sans serif type, heavy rules and white space. The cover featurewas an article about ‘Holland Dada’ with a diagrammatic windmill published to coincide with VanDoesburg and Schwitters’ Dada tour of Holland. Van Doesburg wrote of the movement’s early days.‘Dadaism represented the chaos we were living in, it existed in the atmosphere, it did not come intobeing, it was not created – it simply was’. Dada had a natural home in the low countries where itssense of the absurd rang true. It suited the anarchistic side of van Doesburg’s temperament, but wascuriously at odds with the measured coolness of De Stijl. Van Doesburg’s, whose alter ego I.K.Bonsetshowed the influence of the Futurists, Apollinaire and Dada had been writing ‘calligramatic’ poemsunder this pseudonym while editing a magazine ‘Mecano’ (inspired by the children’s construction toy).The Dada tour would see the van Doesburgs on stage with Theo the orator reciting ‘words-in-freedom’and his wife Nelly on the piano playing pieces including some by the eccentric composer Erik Satie.Vilmos Huszár demonstrated his mechanical dancing figure and there was even a barking dog in theaudience which, on the point of being ejected from the auditorium was discovered to be Schwitterswho would then join the rest on stage.Merz 8-9, with the help of Lissitzky, concentrated on the New Typography and showed how it hadgrown out of abstract art and collage to be an important part of twenties design. There was a nod toDer Ring Neuer Werbegestalter ‘The Circle of New Advertising Designers’ which Schwitters had formedwith an international membership including van Doesburg, Piet Zwart, Jan Tschichold and others. EvenJohn Heartfield was involved although his conscience only allowed him to work on political material.Schwitters had some success as a graphic designer mostnotably with his promotional work for the inkmanufacturer Pelikan. Van Doesburg and Schwitters,along with Kathe Steinitz, collaborated on The Scarecrowa fairy story published in issues 14 and 15 in which all theillustrations made out of pieces of type much in themanner of Lissitzky’s and Mayakovsky’s innovative To BeRead Out Loud which had been published in Dutch by vanDoesburg a couple of years earlier. Jan Tschichold who didmore than anyone else to promote modern methods ofgraphic design, wrote in his book Asymmetric Typography‘the works of abstract art are subtle creations of order outof simple, contrasting elements. Because this is exactlywhat typography is trying to do, it can derive stimulus andinstruction from a study of such paintings, whichcommunicate the visual forms of the modern world andare the best teachers of visual order’.A Dadaist approach to printmaking was also practisedby H. N. (Hendrik) Werkman, a Dutch jobbing printer andpart-time oil painter and an important early exponent of Composition with the letter O. bythe ‘new typography’. In the early nineteen-twenties he H.N. Werkman, a Dutch printer whocombined all these skills in making one-off prints from large made remarkable one-off abstractwooden type and woodblocks. These were sometimes compositions from letterpress printscombined with found objects that were fixed to the bed of taken from wood type and blocks.an old hand printing press. The abstract prints producedwere named ‘duksels’ and ‘triksels’ and a selection of these were initially published in his ownmagazine ‘the next call’. More appeared in later in ‘The Blue Barge’ a subversive magazine produced inoccupied Holland. Sadly he was caught and executed by the Nazis at the end of the war.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 215

3.6 Commercialdesign betweenthe warsThe Modern Movement made possible many of the formal andstylistic traits of what became known as Art Deco, a populist formof art and design that was shown at the 1925 Paris Exhibition forIndustrial and Decorative Arts (Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs etIndustriels Modernes). British art historian Bevis Hillier is credited withcoining the label in his 1968 book ‘Art deco of the 20s and 30s’. Unlikemodernism where historicism and electicism were mostly disdained, ArtDeco happily transformed these into first exclusive and then latercommercial contemporary designs.Although a majority of the pavillions were dedicated to French design, the1925 exhibition was the first large scale showcase for an extremelyamorphous trend in design that was appearing in many European countries.Within five years it had been absorbed and transmogrified into Americanculture, encompassing many aspects of their everyday life and culture.The original aims of the Paris exhibition was essentially different from thebehemoth that was on show as the pre-publicity gaily announced that it wasopen to anyone with ‘clearly modern tendencies ... any copying orcounterfeiting of ancient styles is strictly forbidden!’ What was on show was along way from these ideals. It horrified Modernists like Le Corbusier who hadwritten in the same year that ‘the more cultivated that people become, themore decoration disappears.’The extensive site on the left and right banks of the River Seine were linkedby the Pont Alexandre III which was lit up at night with coloured lights. Thebridge was filled by small bijou shops, appropriately named the Rue desBoutiques.Close to the exhibition site, the Eiffel Tower had been decorated with aquarter of a million lights and with a nod to the future, the sponsor’s namealternatively spelt out the words ART and CITROEN. Apart from Melnikov’shighly regarded Russian pavilion the main point of interest for the modernistsMovement was Le Corbusier’s Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau, an ambitiousA postcard showingpart of the site for the‘Exposition des ArtsDecoratifs et IndustrielsModernes’.216 ART IN REVOLUTION

The Eiffel Tower was litup with lights duringthe 1925 exhibitionwith an adverisementfor Citroen, the Frenchautomobile company.Sonia Delaunay was aprominent textile andclothes designer by thetime of the 1925exhibition. This is oneof her Simultanéejackets clearly based onthe ideas she haddeveloped in her prewarabstract paintings.attempt to make avant-garde architecture acceptable to the masses. Insidewere paintings by the Purists, Ozenfant, Gris, Léger and Le Corbusier himself.An enormous range of products right across the board were displayed ashighly fashionable or desirable art objects. Although watered down versionsof Bauhaus and Purist styles could be found many other more faddishinfluences were apparent.Current influences included the exoticism of Egypt made popular by therecent discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb; the lavish styling of the popularBallets Russe productions, negro culture personified by the Paris-based dancerJosephine Baker with dance music incorporating the rhythms of Ragtime andDixieland jazz providing a soundtrack. Greek and Roman classicism helped togive grandiosity and a little later in America the organic forms of Mayan artand the more regular and colourful abstract decoration of Aztec art.West African art was particularly popular with avant-garde designers as itoffered a variety of abstract and geometric patterns which could beincorporated into fabric and wallpaper designs, although the subtle earthycolours were usually brightened up considerably. The French designers usedAfrican forms and exotic materials taken from their colonies. Indigenouswood, ivory and snakeskin were all used in expensive furniture designs.Various shapes and forms were recurrent in Art Deco. There were boldparallel lines which derived from avant-garde graphics, flat stencilled forms ofgeometricised flowers and leafs and devices like chevrons and zigzags whichwere taken from ancient cultures. There were associations with the ciurrentobsession with fitness and health as fountains appeared in metal gates andsunrays decorated domestic items like radios, garden gates and stained glassdesigns above the front door. This all pervasive decoration, although oftengeometrically based, made it essentialy anti-modernist.Sonia Delaunay was one of the exhibitors on the Rue des Boutiques andepitomises the fashionable Parisian designer appealing to an élite at a timewhen Paris was coming to the fore as the fashion capital of the world. Whileshe and husband Robert were holed out in Madrid at the end of the war shehad designed the costumes for one of Diaghilev’s most successful balletproductions, Cléopatre while Robert chipped in with the colourful geometricsets. Sonia continued to design for the theatre after the war but hadmeanwhile opened a successful fashion store the ‘Casa Sonia’ in Madridwhich sold clothes, accessories and Simultanée fabric designs. Back in postwarParis she found fame and fashionability when her clothes were bought byinfluential admirers like Hollywood actress Gloria Swanson and socialite NancyCunard. Other lines included ‘simultaneous scarves’ and ’dress/poems’ onwhich colourful words written by Dadaist poets were animated by themovement of the body.Book jackets helped to commercialise book selling in the 1920s by usingmodern contemporary and fashionable motifs such as cars, aeroplanes, tennis,swimming and the wireless. Poster design took a lead from the paintings ofLeger who was interested in modern advertising, particularly in the form ofbillboards and taught a number of graphic artists who worked in the medium.His illustrations for Blaise Cendrars book of poems La fin du monde of 1919are a colourful combination of semi-abstract images and display lettering,often stencilled, which together could put across a bold visual message.Cassandre who epitomised Art Deco poster design incorporated handA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 217

Cassandre was theforemost Art Deco posterdesigner. Normandieadvertises what was,when built in 1932, thelargest and fastest linerin the world, boastingextravagant Art decointeriors.The Hoover factory inWest London is amodernist structure thatalso combines classicism,in the form of the evencolumns on the facade.Into this is integratedlettering and decoration.lettering and highly stylised but recognisable subjects in his stylish posters forclients like Dubonnet or his advertisements for rail or sea routes. The Parisiantrained American, Edward McKnight Kauffer who made posters for Shell andmany other clients was his equivalent in Britain. In Italy the Futurist FortunatoDepero designed covers for Vogue magazine and made a feature of makingarchitectural forms out of large letters in exhibition displays. The use ofprominent lettering became an integral feature of corporate architecture ofthe interwar years, as in the McGraw offices in New York or the Firestonefactory in West London. Maybe it was an unconscious return to the boldpublic statements carved on classical monuments.The architecture of the period can be broadly pigeon-holed as eithermodernised classicism or decorated modernism although there were somefanciful structures that defied these categories. Movie theatres and businessheadquarters tended to be examples of the former whereas high-risebuildings, factories or blocks of flats the latter, although the boundariesbetween these two became very blurred. New York’s Chrysler Building, askyscraper built in 1930, was an object lesson in Art Deco decoration. Greybricks were combined with the dominant white bricks to form a patternedfacade. Above this, at the base of the tower, is a coloured freeze based on themotif of car wheels, and at each corner a stainless steel gargoyle in the formof an eagle. Surmounting all this is a series of sunbursts in Aztec stylediminishing in size as they reach the spike at the top (an attempt to make thebuilding the tallest in the world!).This was the decade when America adopted, transformed andcommercialised the Art Deco style. Hollywood used its glamorous sheen toproduce extravagant set designs on film spectaculars like Grand Hotel and themusicals of Busby Berkely, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Some see thisexpression of glamour and romance as an obvious reaction to the depressionthat followed the Wall Street crash. Something similar was happening inBritain where expensively assembled and often exotic interior décor becamedemocratic much as it had done with the gin palaces of the Victorian era. Thegreat popularity of the talkies was boosted by the escapism of highlydecorated large cinemas like the Tooting Granada in London which resembleda Moorish palace. This extravagant treatment was also seen at the LyonsCorner Houses, fast food emporiums that catered for Londoners at play, andfurther up the social scale in hotels like the Strand Palace Hotel and companyheadquarters like those of the Daily Express newspaper in Fleet Street.Luxury transport, mindful of competition as well as demonstrating greatimprovements in comfort and performance, became a focus for elaboratedisplays in up-to-the minute styling. Many people are aware of the OrientExpress which ran from Paris to Istanbul but of more significance in thenineteen-thirties was the frantic national competition for dominance in theAtlantic crossing. With improvements in aeroplane technology they were livingon borrowed time. The biggest, fastest and most magnificent of a number ofluxury liners that were built during this period was the Normandie whosesumptuous interiors were the greatest expression of Art Deco elegance andwere conceived by René Lalique and Jean Dunand the top designers of theday. Its sleek streamlined exterior helped it to win the Blue Riband in 1935 butit had cost 60 million dollars and came to be known as France’s floatingnational debt as it was usually half full and was a financial failure.218 ART IN REVOLUTION

The Chrysler building inNew York epitomesAmerican Art Deco withits Aztec sunbursts, andthe American Eaglesstanding guard.The Chrysler Airflow of1934 showed someinfluence of the newcraze for streamliningbut its general designwas too radical toappeal to the generalpublic.The ambiguous and complex relationship between Art Deco andModernism is seen most clearly in America where it blossomed in thenineteen-thirties and was known as American Modern. Unlike the Europeandesigners that have been discussed American designers like Raymond Loewyand Walter Teague had no thoughts of ideology or altruism in their outlook.Their ideals were directed towards giving everything a contemporary gloss orstyling, their god – consumerism. French born Loewy thought big and openedoffices in Paris, London, New York and California. Juke-boxes, Studebakercars, Lucky Strike cigarettes, Coca-cola bottles, Greyhound buses were someof his team’s many design and make-over successes.Speed and dynamism, prevalent in Italian Futurism metamorphosed intostreamlining, a mainly American form of Art Deco. Although it proved to beof little significance in its initial objective of improving the performance of thecars, planes and locomotives it was applied to it nevertheless gave these andother products an illusion of speed and modernity that appealed to the public.The design stylist Norman Bel Geddes promoted streamlining in his 1934 book‘Horizons’. One instance of where it was used to improve performance was inthe design of the Chrysler Airflow of the same year. The advertisements hadGeddes sitting in the car reading a copy of the book but ironically the designwas seen to be too radical for the general public and it didn’t sell well. Otherdesigners took streamlining away from its original context. Loewy applied thetear-drop shape to a pencil sharpener: other similar examples included a tabletopstapling machine and cigarette lighters!Modernism and Art Deco were both interested inappropriating suitable materials for product or architecturaldesigns. Art Deco increasingly used plastics in the many newproducts that were being invented between the wars. Thedepression demanded cheaper materials and throughmoulding techniques they were more adaptable for massproduction than more traditional materials. The Belgianchemist Leo Baekeland had patented Bakelite in 1909 and itwas later marketed as ‘a material of a thousand uses’,replacing ivory for coffee jug handles or drawer handles and under theproprietory name of Formica, for table tops. Other innovative materialsincluded glass bricked panels used for subdued backlighting effects ininteriors; chrome for a cool surface sheen that didn’t need polishing innumerous contexts; aluminium for a cocktail shaker or an Electrolux vacuumcleaner of 1937 that was mainly made of aluminium and streamlined like apassenger locomotive.Raymond Loewy’s pencil sharpener shows how streamlining wasapplied to a number of everyday objects in America to give them a‘state of the art’ appearance.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 219

3.7 The mixedfortunes ofConsructivism,De Stijl andBauhaus in themiddle twentiesKonstantin Melnikov’sSoviet Pavilion at the1925 Paris exhibitionwas a fine andinnovative moderniststructure, one of veryfew on show. It alsohighlights theunfullfilled potential ofRussian architecture atthe time.The unrestrained view of western capitalism that Art decoexemplified was an ocean away from Russian Constructivism’sidealistic aims to champion the Socialism in the USSR.Suprematists, Constructivists or Productivists might have had theirideological differences about aesthetic matters, but as the 1920s progressedthey were living on borrowed time. These avant-garde artists were consideredby many as a bourgeois élite and their aesthetic concerns became increasinglyirrelevant to the the government, who had more pressing concerns.Disillusionment was beginning to creep in and a well-travelled artist likeAlexsandra Exter decided to follow the migration abroad to find a moresympathetic reception. As early as 1920, Pravda the official governmentnewspaper, linked the Russian Futurists with decadent elements and followersof a philosophy that was hostile to Marxism. Despite their best intentionsLenin’s mistrust of the avant-garde had invested the term Futurist into a catchallderogatory term for the modern artist. Lunacharsky attempted to defendthem; ‘the Futurists were the first to come to the aid of the Revolution andwere of all the intelligentsia the most involved and responsive to it.’ When thegovernment finally gave more consideration to the role of the visual arts, theymade it clear that they wanted a more socially focused propaganda art toglorify the revolution, one which they felt that industrial workers, the militaryand the peasants could understand.Many of the more adventurous architectural projects unfortunately nevergot beyond the drawing board due to the impoverished economy and theshortage of materials. One of the few lasting monuments of this period isLenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square by Schusev, the construction of which wasorganised by the Immortalisation Committee, formed shortly after his deathfrom a stroke on 21st January 1924. To the dismay of Lenin’s wife they alsoarranged for his body to be displayed to the general public necessitatingembalming, a practice recently made popular after the discovery ofTutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt. The religiously-minded Malevich made hisobjections known by disagreeing with the idea of sanctifying Lenin as asecular saint. It was also decided to rename Petrograd for the second time inten years; this time it was to be named Leningrad.Even at Constructivism’s peak impressive theatre sets and exhibitiondesigns were, with slender resources and a lack of will from the authorities,the limits of what could be realised architecturally. One good way to promoteSoviet culture and sell Russian produce abroad were at internationalexhibitions and trade fairs. There were important exhibitions in Berlin andAmsterdam in 1922, impressively designed and presented by El Lissitzky in anappropriately modern Constructivist style. He was the ideal man to design theRussian stands as he travelled abroad extensively and had experience withthree-dimensional structures, graphics and photo-montage. A fine pavilionwas designed by Constructivism’s leading architect Konstantin Melnikov forthe ‘Paris Exhibition for Industrial and Decorative Arts’ in 1925 and apart fromthe pavilion designed by Le Corbusier’s pavilion was a rare sign of modernismin the exhibition. The Russian exhibition was organised by Rodchenko andhelped to enforce the impression, perhaps misleadingly, that abstract art anddesign were synonomous with its cultural revolution. The work on showcertainly confirmed that the Constructivists, while not necessarily in tune withthe needs of the Russian people, were as innovative in art and design as well220 ART IN REVOLUTION

The living room of thehouse that Melnikovbuilt for himself in 1927(below).LEF was relaunched asNew LEF in 1927 in anattempt to reviveinterest inConstructivism but it allended in low sales andfrustration.as architectural modernism as anywhere else in Europe. Amongst the exhibitswas a model of Tatlin’s totemic tower, and a Worker’s Club full of inventivenew styles of furniture.Other notable architectural achievements include Melnikov’s very unusualabstract design for a house that he built for himself in 1927 which comprisedof two interlocking cylindrical cubes studded with a lot of hexagonalwindows. Narkomfin, designed by Moise Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis in 1928-30 was a six story block lifted off the ground by piloti – the constructiondevice advocated by Le Corbusier in Towards a new architecture and was anearly example of a modernist collective housing scheme built for workers fromthe Ministry of Finance in Moscow. It featured ‘streets in the air’ and hadshared facilities including a library, a kindergarten, a laundry, a canteen and anexercise area on the roof. Many other schemes remained unbuilt but aremuch admired as they were featured in periodicals and books of the time.Important in this respect was CA (Contemporary Architecture) the journal fora group of Russian architects called OSA and founded by Ginzburg theleading theoretician of Russian Constructist architecture. This ran from 1926until 1930 and featured Russian Constructivist architects as well as the topnames in the international avant-garde like Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier,Gropius and Mendelsohn. Its striking design was mainly the work of AlexseiGan whose wide range of activities included architecture and graphic design.Despite the admiration of the European avant-garde, RussianConstructivism by the late twenties was looking more and more like a failedexperiment. Some writers and commentators now consider that there was anover-reliance on photography in its various guises as a concession to theincreasing popularity of realist art. In an attempt to recapture some interest,Mayakovsky, with Rodchenko’s help, reformed the journal LEF as ‘New LEF’ in1927 but he soon resigned and started another journal REF in 1928. He wasfalling out with the official party thinking about literature and politics, wellillustrated in a couple of satirical plays he wrote at this time, The Bed Bug andThe Bath House. Both were critical of the political and economic direction thecountry had taken since Stalin had gained overall control in 1927.De Stijl goes dutchWhen Mondrian finally left de Stijl in 1924 it was in large part a reaction to a‘heresy’. The ultimate falling out occured when Van Doesburg, after a lapse ofa few years, renewed his interest in painting hitting upon a new style whichhe named ‘Elementarism’. Now totally committed to what he had learnt fromSuprematism and Constructivism he was ready to dismiss the ‘narrow-mindedapplication of neo-plasticism’. One obvious stylistic change was the tilting ofgeometric forms to an angle of forty-five degrees a feature borrowed fromSuprematism. The ‘neutralisation of positive and negative directions by thediagonal’ gave the compositions an element of surprise and a suggestion ofmovement and the dynamism of technology. Dutch graphic designer PietZwart had already made extensive use of the diagonal in his work and thiswas to become a common feature nineteen-twenties graphic design.Although Mondrian had been making paintings on diagonally shapedcanvases he came to dislike these as he was still obsessed by the mysticalproperties of the opposing forces of the horizontal and the vertical (theorthogonal), which for him were the perfect form of expression for theA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 221

Gerrit Rietveldt’sSchröder house inUtrecht (1924) was likehis earlier chair, arealisation of De Stijlpainting or sculpturetransformed this timeinto architecture.mystical unity between man and the universe. He considered that the obliqueform showing ‘eternal movement’, destroyed the ‘cosmic equilibrium’ of thehorizontal and vertical and was an unfortunate departure from thefundamental principles of De Stijl. This story may or may not be apocryphalbut it is an indication of how far the two artists had grown apart and how thephilosophy behind abstract painting was changing. Van Doesburg had littletime for Mondrian’s mystical ideas of ‘ideal forms of universal harmony’ as hehad for some time sought an international outlook taking in Constructivism’sideas of finding a practical role for the artist, dependent on social demandsand technical processes. This battle between the rationalist and the mysticalartist is one of the main aesthetic preoccupations of nineteen-twenties art anddesign and features in most of the post-war stories that I have discussed.Van Doesburg had frequently collaborated with architects like J.J.P. Oud,advising on design and colour schemes for aspects of their buildings thatincluded doors, woodwork, guttering, tiles and plaster. In accordance with thestated aims of the group, original member Van der Leck reverted to hisprevious career as a commercial designer, designing products formanufacturers, like wall-hangings, tiles, carpets and packaging. Huszár likeVan Doesburg concentrated on designing interiors and graphic designer PietZwart also worked closely on architectual visualisations with the architects JanWils and Hendrik Berlage.Gerrit Rietveldt was the architect for the Schröder house inUtrecht, arguably the most perfect realisation of De Stijl designprinciples when it was built in 1924. Described as the half-wayhouse between Neo-Plasticist painting and architecture; thebasic structural form of the cube was broken up by a successionof interlocking rectangular planes or frames projecting at rightangles and reminiscent of a Vantongerloo sculpture. VanDoesburg wrote that ‘it has opened the walls, thus eliminatingthe interior and the exterior. The whole consists of one spacewhich is divided according to the various functional demands.’Folding or sliding partitions, as in a Japanese house, could makethis smaller. The building also avoided ‘frontalism’ by makingeach of the facades equally important, although it may haveconfused the postman. He also became famous for his furnituredesigns including an early example of cheap self-assemblyfurniture designed for young people’s rooms and summerhouses. There was a series of totally asymmetrical furniture; the three-leggedBerlin chair and table of 1923, made up of rectangular planes. Later thesculptural ‘Z’ or ‘Zig-Zag’ chair’ (1932) was just that, four squares of woodend-to-end and joined together at angles.De Stijl’s increasing concern with design and architectural mattersculminated with the Café Aubette project in Strasbourg, a large undertakingthat had originally been offered to ‘native son’ Jean Arp in 1926. The ideawas to convert the interior of a huge complex in the centre of the city into acafé, restaurant, ballroom, cinema and bars, the main building had a strongmilitary history that dated back to the 13th century. Arp thought it was toomuch for him and his wife Sophie Taeuber-Arp to cope with so they called inVan Doesburg, who needed no prompting. The plans were completed inFebruary 1927 and the whole scheme a year later. Sophie was responsible for222 ART IN REVOLUTION

Van Doesburg wasinvited by Hans Arp tohelp him out on theredesign andrefurbishment of alarge and historicbuilding complex, theAubette, in the centreof Strasbourg. VanDoesburg needed noprompting and tookover the huge projectwhich involved manyrooms, cafe, bar,cinema etc. as theperfect opportunity torealise his De Stijldesign principles. Thephotograph shows theCine- dancing room.the patisserie and tea-room, her husband the American bar and dance-hall.Van Doesburg who successfully co-ordinated the enterprise designed thepublic rooms and virtually all the fixture and fittings - ashtrays, crockery andeven the fuse boxes. Some of its inspiration was taken from a Proun roomdevised by Lissitsky and a notable feature were the large coloured geometricplanes suspended from the ceiling and upper walls at angles reminiscent ofVan Doesburg’s Elementarist paintings. All-in-all it was the realisation of theDe Stijl design ethic, a total integration of art and architecture. Van Doesburgwrote that the role of monumental artworks such as this was to ‘place manwithin the painting, instead of in front ... to enable him to participitate in it’.Unfortunately it was too radical for the general public and was soon to betransformed beyond all recognition. Fortunately partial reconstructions of theoriginal scheme have been made for exhibitions from the nineteen-sixtiesonwards, and these were made permanent in the 1990s.De Stijl as a movement was now dead on its feet and its demise wassignalled by Oud’s rival publication ‘i10’ which published a number of articlesby its former contributors. An incensed van Doesburg likened it to thecontents of his dustbin. The last De Stijl issue was put together by his wifeNelly and Oud after his death from chronic asthma in March 1931. In this heleft the world with the thoughts that he deplored ‘temperament, inspiration,sacred fire and all the attributes of genius that conceal an untidy mind’. DeStijl had moved a long way from the days of theosophy and mysticism.The Bauhaus - The best of times, the worst of timesAlthough the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition justified the value of the school thelocal bureaucrats were determined to curb its influence especially after rightwingelements overturned the socialists in the local Thuringian province inFebruary 1924. The school was now accused of being subversive, evenBolshevik, and Gropius threatened with dismissal. Although he privately heldsocialist beliefs, during his years as the head of the school he diplomaticallyopposed all forms of organised politics and discouraged his students fromA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 223

The Bauhaus’ move toDessau was a rebirthfor the school. Gropiuswas able to build anintegrated andinterconnectingcomplex of modernistbuildings whichincluded all thenecessary facilitiesincluding studentresidences.taking part in political demonstrations. He now had to spend a great deal ofhis time and energy justifying and defending the college from attacks in theright-wing press, battling with local politicians and a stifling bureaucracy.Despite his best efforts the Bauhaus grant was halved and the pressure toclose down the school became so intense that, rather than be totallycompromised, he decided to relocate the school.After the 1923 the fame and prestige of the school had spread widely, sothey received a number of offers. The best came from Dessau, a rapidlygrowing industrial town of 70,000 people, north-east of Weimar, and a100km south-west of Berlin. Dessau, a centre for chemical and engineeringindustries, was a flourishing town ruled by Social Democrats. It had managedto remain socialist while most of the country had been turning towards theright. It was a considerable contrast to the complacent conservativism of thevery traditional Weimar.The opening on 1st April 1925 marked a coming of age for the school andwas a tremendous relief after the problems at Weimar. After settling in theearly Dessau years proved to be its most productive period. The new purposebuiltbuildings with three interconnected wings, including studentaccommodation, were the realisation of Gropius’ architectural ideals. Thewhole enterprise presented a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the school’sability to carry a design brief through from a humble spoon to the complexdesign and arrangement of a series of interconnecting buildings. Visitorsarriving in a foggy Dessau described the magical impact of the predominantlyglass main building as a giant dazzling light cube. It even displayed its namevertically in huge sans serif letters, an early example of how lettering andarchitecture could be integrated to make a strong visual statement.The move coincided with a period of growing national prosperity whichlasted until the Wall Street crash in October 1929. Following the 1924 openingof Henry Ford’s car assembly-line production plant in Cologne there was nowa popular belief in the advantages of mass production and Gropius’ statementin March 1926 emphasises his faith in product design for the mass market:224 ART IN REVOLUTION

Only by constant contact with advanced technology, with the diversity ofnew materials and with new methods of construction, is the creativeindividual able to bring new objects into a vital relationship with thepast, and to develop from that a new attitude to design.he added thatThe cover of one offourteen Bauhausbooks that werewritten by many of themodern mastersincluding Gleizes,Malevich, Klee andMoholy-Nagy’s Malerei,Fotographie, Film).Alma Buscher’scoloured geometricbuilding blocks forchildren proved aversatile and popularchildren’s toy.crafts and industry are constantly moving closer together. Traditionalcrafts have changed; the crafts of the future will have a unity of labourin which they will be the medium of experimental work for industrialproduction. Experiments in laboratory workshops will result in models –prototypes for factory production.With the help of investments from Adolf Sommerfeld and local trade unions alimited company was established to market Bauhaus products. This enabled abetter liason with industry and a more successful transference of craft intoproduct design. One success was Alma Buscher’s game of brightly colouredbuilding blocks for children which could be combined to make the shapes offamiliar objects. Dessau was equipped with a well-appointed printingdepartment to serve the publishing, marketing and design side. Theypublished and printed Bauhaus books which Moholy-Nagy hoped wouldrepresent a cross section of the modern movement. Fourteen of theseappeared including J.J.P Oud on Dutch architecture, Gleizes on Cubism, Klee’sPedagogic Sketchbook and Malevich’s The Non-Objective World butunfortunately these important books failed to sell well. A quarterly journalwas published often following a theme: Hannes Meyer had an issue whichheralded the belated opening in 1927 of their first architectural department.An edition edited by Schlemmer was devoted to theatre and Bayer wasresponsible for an issue on advertising, which had become essential to exploitthe commercial potential of the school . He also designed a catalogue listing theproducts for sale, each accompanied by a photograph.The idealism of the old system with Masters of Form and WorkshopMasters on a equal footing, theoretically at least, had been discontinued sothat the craftsmen were now answerable to the more conventionally titled‘professors’. Ex-students who became teachers were named ‘Young Masters’,and their training gave them a flexibility that helped to form the school’sprogressive image that has carried through to the modern era.Weaving turned out to be particularly successful in boosting the financesof the school. This professional training class was run by GuntaStötzl a former student and a great exponent of her craft,whose loosely geometric designs were ideally suited for hand ormachine production. The school bought the rights of many ofthe student’s textile designs so that by April 1925 they had 183items that they were able to sell including blankets, table cloths,carpets and scarves. One student who took up weaving bydefault having been excluded from other disciplines was AnniAlbers. Several of her designs were amongst those that theschool was able to contract out to industry and many yearslater she became one of the most important textile designers inthe world after emigrating to America with her husband JosephAlbers.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 225

Annie Albers was oneof the students in theweaving departmentwho, as in this wallhanging, was able toproduce geometricpatterned designs formachine production,and help to boost therocky finances of theBauhaus.Marcel Breuer’s Wassilychair of 1925 wasinspired by the benthandlebars of his Adlerbicycle.As a student Marcel Breuer had fallen under the influence of De Stijl and in1922 had designed for production a slatted wooden chair covered with horsehair fabric, similar in style to the Rietveld chair that had been painted in theDe Stijl house colours. After the move to Dessau he became the head of thecarpentry department and subsequently made a number of furniture designsthat became classics after being manufactured by the Viennese furniturespecialists Thonet 1 .Tubular steel furniture had been pioneered by the Dutch designer MartStam but these were straight pieces that had been joined together. MarcelBreuer and Mies van der Rohe were the first designers to design cantileveredchairs without back legs in 1927 2 . While cycling around the grounds of theschool, Breuer married these two innovations when he realised that the curvedchrome handles on his Adler bicycle could be adapted to make a cantileveredstructure out of a single piece of bent tubular steel. The local Junkers factorywas able to suppy the metal which was then combined with strengthenedcloth for the seating and back. The first of these in 1925 was called theWassily chair, named after Kandinsky who was the first person to buy one.The department also made great strides in developing a modular systemfor storage units and stacking chairs and Gropius is credited for theproduction of a range of standard unit furniture for his architectural projects.The most successful products in commercial terms were the four and a halfmillion rolls of a range of wallpapers manufactured by Emil Rasch. These weredesigned in the mural painting department and were still manufactured manyyears after the school had ceased to exist. They were matt-textured in onecolour, giving an illusion of space and this restraint was in total contrast to thepopular floral designs of the time. The money earned from products such asthese helped to offset the meagre grants that the school were given.Despite a few activities that brought in much needed capital thecommercial operation was not as successful as was hoped. The emphasis onself-sufficiency meant that the departments of stained glass and muralproduction were phased out due to their poor earning potential.The architectural course was finally introduced to the Bauhaus on 1st April1927. Hannes Meyer, a Swiss architect from Basel and designer of the Leagueof Nations building in Geneva, was brought in to take charge of it. This turnedout to be as controversial and divisive an appointment as that of Itten eightyears earlier but for very different reasons. Meyer soon managed toantagonise many of the other professors due in part to his criticism of theaesthetic behind many of the courses. The very different temperaments ofMoholy-Nagy and Klee/Kandinsky, were for once united in their criticism of him.There were also problems with his uncompromising Marxist beliefs which wereasking for trouble in an age of acquiescence to the authorities. Despite thesedifficulties his appointment enabled the school to concentrate on practicalarchitecture responding to the considerable demands for mass-housing.1 Michael Thonet pioneered bent-wood furniture in the 1830s and later laminatedwood and plywood, thin layers of wood glued together: this allowed for a minimumnumber of pieces in its manufacture. Mechanisation followed in late 19th century.2 Cantilevered chairs and modernist furniture became a source of fun and ridicule.Aldous Huxley in 1930 wrote that ‘to dine off an operating table, to loll about on adentist’s chair, this is not my idea of domestic bliss!’226 ART IN REVOLUTION

The shortage of suitable homes in the Dessau area was an excellentopportunity for Bauhaus schemes for cheap but well-designed mass housing.The local authorities invited Gropius to design an estate on the outskirts ofTörten giving him an opportunity to implement his ideas on prefabrication andstandardised building. The scheme was only partially successful as cracks soonbegan to appear in the concrete load-bearing walls and the budget onlyallowed for outside toilets. Nevertheless it was an important early foray intomass social housing, a very pressing concern at the time.Although the painter’s role was now considered to be less important in itscontribution to the creative process leading towards the design of an industrialproduct, Kandinsky was allowed to oversee a class in painting and sculpture.This was contrary the original principles of the school and with the exceptionof Joseph Albers few painters of any note graduated from the Bauhaus.A hammer blow came for the school In January 1928 when Gropiusdecided to leave. He had been in charge for nine long years and having spenttoo little time on his architectural career he felt that he would lose his touch ifhe didn’t concentrate on this. A majority of his time had been spentdefending the school and renewed attacks from outside authorities affectedhim deeply. The lack of financial support was also a constant source offrustration as the staff were often underpayed or even unpaid.Hannes Meyer had only been there for a year when he was asked to takeover as director. As one student put it ‘Hannes Meyer may be a splendidfellow ... but Hannes Meyer as director of the Bauhaus is a disaster’.Unfortunately three of the most valued members of staff Moholy-Nagy, Breuerand Bayer seemed to agree, and decided to leave at the same time. Thecollege that only had 1250 students in the fourteen years of its existence wasmade less exclusive when Meyer decided to increase the student intake from150 to nearly 200.The teaching was now aimed more towards production and some studentswere made assistants in the workshops and paid to work an eight hour dayhelping to make the workshops more cost-effective. By concentrating on thepracticalities of mass housing a couple of architectural projects were taken onand there was continuing work on the Törten housing estate. Meyer steeredBauhaus teaching away from the aesthetic principles laid down in Gropius’ eraas he felt that it should be a social phenomenon not an artistic idea, ‘ouractivities are a service to the people’. Guided by economies, the productswere to be less elitist and the buildings made with the smallest possiblepractical living units and the most serviceable furnishings. There was anincrease in the number of designs that were both standardised and massproducedand there was now less emphasis placed on primary colours andbasic geometric forms. Weaving was channelled into the more practical areasof curtains, floor coverings and seating material to cover the tubular metalfurniture. More furniture was to be made of plywood, a cheap and adaptablematerial, that would be suitable for assembly as well as folding or ‘collapsing’.Marianne Brandt’s geometrically-based table lamp was a success when it wasmanufactured by Kandem in 1928 and over the next few years 50,000 lampsfrom Bauhaus prototypes were manufactured by this Leipzig manufacturer.Brandt later left to work for Gropius designing mass-produced single unitfurniture.The revenue coming in to subsidise the school doubled during Meyer’sA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 227

period in charge, but his extreme left-wing views got him into trouble withthe Dessau authorities especially when he encouraged his students to takepart in political activities. There were even rumours of the singing of Russianrevolutionary songs during one student party. The municipal authoritieseventually sacked him in August 1930 using a convenient excuse that he hadcontributed school funds to support striking miners, although they had in factcome out of his own pocket. Compared with the liberal humanitarism of hispredecessor his uncompromising approach had proved unpopular with manyof the students. Meyer who thought that he had achieved a lot and had been‘stabbed in the back’ left for the Soviet Union ‘where a truly proletarianculture is being forged’. He took with him a number of students ‘the BauhausBrigade’ and worked in Moscow on various planning committees,The architect Mies vander Rohe became thedirector of the Bauhausin 1930. This structurefrom 1920-1 is thesecond of his visionaryglass towers in the sky.Although it was neverbuilt it remains as aremarkable exercise inpossibile forms offuture architecture.In the Soviet Union the factory replaces the family in almost all respects.The factory takes care of everything and is the centre of our collectiveexperience. The office worker is no different from his comrade on theconstruction site. The chasm between the worker and the scientist hasceased to exist.By 1936 Meyer returned to Switzerland a wiser man.Paul Klee whose intuitive approach as a fine artist was at odds with thehard-lined functionalism of Meyer’s scientifically based design courses left in1930. He took a less demanding teaching post in Dusseldorf so he coulddevote more time to painting. This departure left only Kandinsky and JosephAlbers of the afore-mentioned masters, the latter having taken over thepreliminary course when Moholy-Nagy left. By now the school was in adepressing downward spiral.Gropius refused the offer to return but recommended a colleaguefrom his days of working for Peter Behrens before the war. The architectMies van der Rohe had opened his architectural practice in Berlin in 1912and managed to keep it going until 1938. As a son of a stone cutter fromAachen, home of the famous medieval cathedral, he had grown upadmiring gothic architecture with its combination of fine stone work andits lavish use of glass. With the use of modern materials he was able totransform his vision into huge structures of steel and glass. A couple ofhis early models just after the war were for glass skyscrapers, crystallinestructures of airiness and transparency, the first angular, mystical andpertaining to the gothic influence, the second more measured, andpractical. Both remained as drawing-board visualisations. Moreappropriately for the needs of the Bauhaus he had built a low-costhousing estate in Stuttgart and had recently made his reputation with thegraceful German Pavilion which had been built around a sun-dappledpool at the Barcelona International Exhibition in 1929. This served as atemplate for the future with its complex use of space made up ofpolished marble and travertine; large areas of plate glass betweenchrome-plated steel columns that supported a flat concrete ceiling. Hisfamous and still manufactured Barcelona chair was designed for thepavilion as a one-off, not suitable for mass production, which explains thehigh price charged for a reproduction of it today. All his work whether itbe architecture, or the furniture he designed for these buildings, Miesalways showed that he was the aesthetic master of proportion and form.228 ART IN REVOLUTION

Mies van der Rohe‘slavish BarcelonaPavilion was the big hitof the international fairof 1929 with its lavishand stylish use of glass,marble, and openspaces arranged arounda pool.The appointment of Mies made the internal tensions within the schooleven worse as some of the left wing students were upset at the treatment ofMeyer and protested vigorously. The statutes were annulled and the schoolclosed down while five expelled students were carried in triumph to therailway station. When it reopened on 31st October 1930, studentrepresentation on the Council of Masters was ended along with any form ofpolitical activity which might cause problems. By now the school was receivingverbal attacks from both the extreme left and right, the former for theexpulsion of dissenting students and the latter who considered theinternational outlook of the school as anti-German.Mies was resolutely apolitical so wasn’t interested in the economies andsocial dimension that Meyer had introduced into the courses. He brought inan ‘artistic’ dimension to the school which went beyond pure function. Thelandmark preliminary course (Vorkurs) was no longer compulsory and theschool became in effect a school of architecture, with a number of the otherdepartments being lumped together as an interior design department.Unfortunately the municipal authorities cut their grant by half so they wereforced to raised the student’s fees. They were now more reliant than ever onthe outside manufacturing contracts for Bauhaus products like the cheapcloth designs for furnishing and the range of wallpapers which were to befound in pattern books in many architectural offices of the time. Somestudents were unhappy that much of the profits from their work was nowgoing towards the Masters’ salaries and keeping the college afloat. Aftermore meetings fifteen more students were expelled.By 1932 they had to contend with an even greater enemy from outside.After the world depression of 1929 Adolph Hitler’s National Socialistsemerged strongly in the the elections of the next year. In the elections ofOctober 1931 the Nazis gained control of the province of Anhalt whichincluded Dessau. The Nazis had campaigned against the Bauhaus who theyconsidered degenerate, subversive and a hot-bed of Bolshevism and intendedA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 229

to stop its funding, send the ‘foreign’ teachers home and even pull thebuilding down – thankfully the last of these threats never materialised. InAugust 1932, despite international protest, the school was closed down. Miesfound an old telephone factory in a Berlin suburb and managed to keep theschool going as salaries had been promised until 1935 and they still held thelicences to Bauhaus products.The economic crisis that brought Germany close to revolution in the early30s brought the Weimar constitution to an end in January 1933 when theNazis came to power with Adolph Hitler as the new Chancellor. No time waswasted in suppressing anything they disagreed with. On 11 April 1933 aftersix months in their new home the Gestapo entered and searched the building,arrested thirty two students and forced it to close immediately. Themisfortunes of the school were to make it internationally famous.A few years later Gropius was to write reflectively:our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor amaterial affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessaryfor everyone in a civilized society. our ambition was to rouse the creativeartist from his other-worldliness and to reintegrate him into theworkaday world of realities and, at the same time, to broaden andhumanize the rigid, almost exclusively material mind of the businessman,our conception of the basic unity of all design in relation to life was indiametric opposition to that of “art for art’s sake” and the much moredangerous philosophy it sprang from, business as an end in itself.He added that there was never any intention to impose any style, system ordogma but simply to exert a revitalising influence on design.Realism kicks in: Constructivism kicked outOver the next few years Stalin and his apparatchiks tightened their grip onpower forcing Trotsky, his main rival, into exile. Trotsky was later to say thatimagination was put on hold in 1928 and his dream of an internationalsocialist revolution was seen to be unrealistic. Stalin’s main concern was topush ahead with rapid industrial and agricultural expansion at the expense ofeverything that got in its way. The First Five-Year Plan for heavy industry andagriculture was introduced in 1928 after food shortages; the enforcedcollectivisation of land for intensive agriculture was made at the expense ofsmall landowners. As early as 1921 Pravda had predicted that ‘a conflict withone million revolting peasants awaits’ and indeed the Kulaks, the better offpeasants who the authorities considered had exploitative and capitalisttendencies, reacted to the collectivisation of farms by underachieving or evendestroying grain rather than yielding their land and produce to the authorities.After the attacks on the countryside ‘the terror’ became a normal part of therunning of the country and in the following years famine and millions ofdeaths were the eventual consequence.In 1928, fifty-three mining engineers were convicted of sabotaging mininginstallations in the North Caucasus and from this moment on the state carriedout extensive purges identifying dissidents in every branch of industry. Showtrials throughout the country became a convenient way of explaining awaythe failure of impossible targets. The ‘terror’ of the nineteen thirties showed230 ART IN REVOLUTION

Malevich’s Girls in thefield is characteristic ofhis paintings of the late1920s which can beinterpreted as a veiledcriticism of Stalinistattitudes to theanonimity of theproletariat.the autocratic Stalin as a throwback to the Tsars, a sinister combination of Peterthe Great with his agricultural reforms and the tyranny of Ivan the Terrible.In 1928 a number of prominent Constructivists including El Lissitzky, Gan,Klutsis, Rodchenko and Vesnin formed a group called OKTYABR (October)which intended to bridge the growing gap between art and the workingclasses. That this organisation was necessary indicates the severe breakdownin the relationship of the artist and the society that they wished to serve. Bynow the Constructivists were suffering from incurable problems as Stalinlaunched a full scale attack on the cultural intelligentsia and radical forms ofart. By the end of the decade all forms of media were expected tocommunicate a clear ideological message understandable to the averageworker. The idealism of the early years of the revolution with its intention toraise the educational level of the masses no longer seemed important. Ayawning gap of incomprehension between the radical aesthetics of theprogressive artists and the taste and needs of the mass populace was patentlyapparent. The beautiful geometric textile designs of Popova and Stepanovawere never likely to be popular with an artistically unsophisticated populacewho preferred traditional floral design.A possible sign of the troubles ahead came with the alarming news ofMayakovsky’s suicide in April 1930. Shortly before he shot himself in the headhe had written ‘love’s boat has crashed on philistine reefs’. The reasons for hissuicide were complex. He was certainly profoundly disillusioned by thecollapse of the ideals of the early years of the Bolshevik revolution and feltostracised from artistic and political affairs but another reason was hisimpossible love for his friend Osip Brik’s wife Lili.Malevich, a reluctant supporter of the revolution, had been dismissed in1927 from the Institute of Art in Leningrad (renamed from Petrograd afterLenin’s death). Half-hoping to get himself a teaching post at the Bauhaus heexhibited seventy paintings, drawings and architectural models in Berlin butwas not offered a position. He’d resumed painting in a semi-representationalstyle, often using abstracted peasant subjects with thinly veiled politicalcriticism. The figures often had blank ovals for faces, similar to the facelessdolls his protege Nikolai Suetin was using to decorateporcelain. By 1929 the repression of art was beginning toshow when the director of the Tretiakov Gallery inMoscow was imprisoned for showing some of Malevich’swork. Back home in 1930 he was arrested andinterrogated over several days, spending three weeks inprison. His family later had to flee for their lives, endingup in a remote small provincial town to escape Stalin’spurges. After his death of cancer in 1935 Malevich’s oldrival Tatlin turned up at the funeral to pay his respects,and Suetin designed him a white square Suprematisttombstone which featured a large black square on thefront.In 1930 when designs were submitted for the ‘Palaceof the Soviets’ several good modernist proposals includingone each by Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius butLunarcharsky, obviously a man of expedience, was nowrecommending a classical Greek style as being appropriateA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 231

for public buildings. so a monstrous neo-Classical wedding cake building wasdesigned with a huge statue of Lenin perched on top. Fortunately thismasterpiece of kitsch was never built but it clearly showed in which directionthe arbiters of taste were heading.In the same year Vkhutemas, the Russian Bauhaus was closed down andby 1932 Constructivist art had been completely suppressed as Stalin insistedon a single union of artists controlled by the party. The country resorted to anofficially endorsed and very conservative new style of art, ‘Socialist Realism’which helped to deify him in heroic poses and was, it is said, consistent withMarx’s ‘historical materialism’ the philosophy sanctioned for economic progress.Stalin introduced the second phase of his five year plan in 1933collectivising all the farms and forcing the reluctant peasants to work for thestate. In 1934 there was a purge on the Party itself and anybody who wassuspected of opposition or even a lack of enthusiasm was exiled to the campsor sometimes shot. Millions of Russians were jailed or executed and manyartists suffered one or other of these fates. The lucky ones that carried on hadmanaged to adapt their work to serve the new régime.In thirties Russia photography was officially sanctioned as an important artformwhich could show the country’s economic and social progress in aglowing, airbrushed, light, as skillfully manipulated photomomontages couldtell the official story. Rodchenko’s photography had been denounced as‘bourgeois formalism’ so he now concentrated on being a documentaryphotographer:[I} stopped rebelling and trying to be original; I am no longer rash inshooting my photos; I no longer photograph perspective for perspective’ssake, nor from a bird’s eye view, whether it is necessary or not. I work onthe content, rather than the appearance of pictures.His despair was apparent when he wrote:it is not easy to speak when one’s whole life-work is being called intoquestion. And who should be the first to question it, but the artisthimself. This is a difficult problem, painful to talk about, for one not onlyhas to judge works that required tremendous creative effort, but also toexplain their contents, technique and method. Every piece of my workwas created in the spirit of the attitude to life that I had fought for.From all reports he became a good sports photographer and one of the morefortunate artists who chose to reshape his life to conform with the newrestrictions. One of his photo-journalist assignments in 1933, a piece ofpropaganda on the building of a dam at Karelia on the canal from the WhiteSea to the Baltic, later transpired to be a major gulag 1 for Russians who hadstrayed from the path of Russian orthodoxy, and in which 200,000 people died.Many artists were less fortunate. The Constructivist artist Gustav Klutsishad been one of the most impressive photomontage artists whose committedposters had publicised the electrification of Russia in the early years of theLenin era and later Stalin’s First Five Year Plan. Like many he fell out of favour1 These gulags were labour camps where millions of unfortunate prisoners wereforced to work in mines and on huge engineering works in the most inhospitableclimate and where a majority died within a year or two.232 ART IN REVOLUTION

with the party and eventually died in a labour camp ‘gulag’ in 1944 as didtwo more Constructivists, writer Sergei Tretiakov and the artist Alexei Gan.Rodchenko wrote ‘art which fails to enter life will be put under acatalogue number in an archaeological museum of antiquities’. Towards theend of his life he expressed his real feelings of what had gone wrong. ‘Art isto serve the people but the people are being led goodness knows where. Iwant to lead the people to art, not use art to lead them somewhere else. WasI born too early or too late? Art must be separate from politics...’So was Russian Constructivism a brave but misguided attempt by artists touse avant-garde aesthetics and technology to improve the quality of life in avast country struggling to find its feet in a post-revolutionary society.There is little doubt that this was the first time that art had the courage toinvolve itself in the central issues of state, taking art from its cultural pedestalto reposition itself amongst the people. In the early years it had some successin conveying a political message from the government to the people and inhelping to educate the public. Ultimately the political system never found aproper role for the leftist artists whose involvement in making practicalproducts for everyday life was less successful than the more entrepreneurialspirit bred at the Bauhaus.ART AND FASCISMPolitics in Russia and in Germany gave rise to and then repressed a broadbased-art founded on utility and social awareness, proving that art and politics are mutually exclusive.Both were discarded when they were seen to be a threat or no longer of service by despots who wereintent on exploiting the political and social instability of the time. Further evidence of the problemscaused if politics and art are merged can be drawn from the uneasy ride of Futurism, the only pre-warart movement that survived the first world war.Benito Mussolini’s attitude to the visual arts in the 1920s was surprisingly tolerant as he saw modernart as a potent vehicle for his belief in a clean sweep from the past. Mussolini’s complicated relationshipwith Marinetti and Futurism began from his time as editor of the revolutionary socialist paper L’Avantiin 1912 when he had met Boccioni and expressed his admiration for Futurism. Marinetti had been keento enter politics and founded the ‘Fasci Politici Futuristici’ in 1918 which was in effect a FuturisticPolitical party for his followers. The first world war left Italy in a state of political and economic chaoswhich Mussolini was keen to exploit after he had been expelled from the Socialist party in 1919. Hefounded the ’Fasci di Combattimento’ and in November of that year he and Marinetti stood ascandidates for this newly formed party but were soundly defeated. Mussollini had thought thatMarinetti would be a useful ally to promote his own agenda, exploiting his skill as a propagandist, anorator and an organiser of demonstrations. The Futurist celebration of youth, masculinity and theglorification of the machine were taken up by fascism as were their aggressive methods of imposingtheir opinions at street level, ridiculing those who disagreed, stage-managing brawls and violentdemonstrations, all helping to create a climate in which a new political system could breed.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 233

Marinetti was by now advocating an almost Bolshevik-like, anti-bourgeois and anti-papal revolution,calling for the overthrowal of the monarchy, heavy taxes on inherited wealth, equal pay for women,easier divorce and socialisation of the land. This was way too controversial for Mussolini’s populiststance so he began to distance himself from Marinetti who prophetically described his former colleagueas a ‘megalomaniac who will eventually become a reactionary’. Mussolini in turn described Marinetti asan ‘extrovert buffoon who wants to play politics and whom no-one ... takes seriously’.Political expediency encouraged Mussolini to align himself with the Catholic church and themonarchy. Marinetti resigned from the party in May 1920 as he and his Futurist followers becameincreasingly disillusioned with the reactionary nature of the party. Marinetti then attempted to set up analliance with left wing politicians in an ‘Italian Revolution’ which unlike its Russian counterpart wasmore concerned with culture than politics. Marinetti was later to describe the Italian Communist Partyas ‘provincial plagiarists’, although he praised the Bolsheviks, saying ‘I am delighted to learn that theRussian Futurists are all Bolsheviks and that for a while Futurism was the official Russian art’. Meanwhilethe PSI, the ruling socialist party in Italy collapsed due to an abuse of power and a fatal split in thesocialist movement provided a political vacuum. This wasfilled in large areas of the country by fascist squadsculminating in Mussolini’s well-choreographed ‘March onRome’ in October 1922.Marinetti with Balla, Fortunato Depero, EnricoPrampolini and other new recruits kept Futurism aliveright up to the second world war, although its youthfulenegy and creativity had partly been dissipated by thefirst world war. Prampolini was associated with the avantgardemovements across Europe including RussianConstructivism and Dutch De Stijl and provocativelypainted a Légeresque painting of Mussolini’s black shirtstrampling Communist Red Flags as early as 1919.Enrico Prampolini’s painting of 1919showing Mussolini’s Blackshirtstrampling the Russian flaghad a manifesto signedat the beginning of thenineteen-thirties by Balla, Depero, Prampolini, Dottori, Tato, Marinetti’swife Bendeta and others. This tapped into the widespread fascinationfor all things aeronautical, at a time when aviators were being madeinto cultural heroes. An imaginative form of aerial display wasexpounded by a pilot and a painter Fedele Azari in a manifesto onFuturist Aerial Theatre. Marinetti had made a flight before the war thathad first inspired his ‘words-in-liberty’. Many years later in 1929 hereturned to this theme and wrote an essay on Perspectives of Flight andAeropainting. Aeropittura covered a range of interests. There were thesemi-abstract Cubist-like impressions of Francesco Dottori who hadpainted an impressive mural about flight at Ostia airport. The otherextreme is represented by the aggressive, almost fascistic images ofTato who in one painting Aerial mission shows the plane emergingfrom stormy clouds as a bird of prey, weaponry intact. Tullio Cralli’s1939 image of a city seen from the airplane cockpit was a thinly veiledview of a bombing raid.Tactilism, in other words ‘feely art’ and FuturisticRadiophonic Theatre were two short lived enthusiasms.More successful was ‘Aeropittura’ or aeropainting whichGerardo Dottori’sAeropittura shows a semiabstractlandscapeinspired by aerial flight.234 ART IN REVOLUTION

Tullio Cralli’s Nose diving onthe city (1939) is a thrillingyet morally dubiousexample of aerial painting,on the eve of the secondworld war.(Below) Fortunato Depero’spavillion for the publisherBestetti Tuminelli Treves ata decorative arts exhibitionat Monza in 1927 showsFuturism’s ‘words infreedom’ in an architecturalform.Depero was one of several several designers and graphic artists associated with the second phase ofFuturism. Working from Rome he had joined the Futurists in 1914 and proved to be the Italian versionof the twenties all-rounder, working in a number of fields including painting, advertising graphics,furniture and theatre design. With Balla he had published a manifesto in 1915 on the FuturistReconstruction of the Universe which advocated a move into all forms of applied arts and included theidea of ‘sound and kinetic three-dimensional advertisements’ made of ephemeral materials. At adecorative art’s fair in Monza in 1927 he designed and built a thirty foot high building for a publisherwhich consisted of enormous letters which were repeated inside on a smaller scale as part of the designof the shelves and other detailing. In the same year he published Depero Futurista, a book of moderntypographic designs for advertising, bound together with a couple of chunky chrome nuts and bolts; ifyou were lucky you couldacquire an early copy thatwas covered in tin plate. Helater moved to the USAwhere he designed coversand illustrations for Vogue,Vanity Fair and The NewYorker magazines.Nineteen-thirties Europeshowed the extremepolarities in politics andintellectual thought like noother era, and manyprogressive writers andartists were drawn to the farleft or the far right.Marinetti’s equivalents fromthe English VorticistA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 235

Depero’s book Depero Futuristawas devoted to typographicdesigns for advertising and wasbound together with nuts andbolts.movement, the artist and writerWyndham-Lewis and the Americanpoet Ezra Pound both got themselvesinto trouble. Early in the decade Lewiswrote a sympathetic account ofNational Socialism in Germany naivelybelieving that Hitler would be abeneficial force in Europe. Although hewould later retract these views, hebecame an isolated figure in theintellectual world, described by the poet W.H.Auden as ‘that lonely old volcano of the right’. In 1939he went to Canada and became an official war artist but returned to Britain after the war where hewent some way to recovering his reputation, becoming an art critic for the BBC journal The Listener,and championing young artists such as Francis Bacon. The onset of blindness that overcame him in1951 limited his art, but the interest in his work was by now sufficiently high for a retrospective of hiswork to be held at the Tate Gallery in 1956. His former friend, poet Ezra Pound, moved to Italy in the1920s and became an admirer of Mussolini. After making pro-fascist broadcasts for Rome Radioduring the war, he was arrested for treason and incarcerated in a outdoor cage in 1945 whichunsuprisingly resulted in a nervous breakdown. He eventually died in Venice in 1972.Official Italian art in the nineteen-thirties endorsed the neo-classicism of the ‘Novecento’movement, a modernised form of the classical revival which had become a facile and pompousmetaphor for power. This vacuous style of self-importance had found favour for public architecture inHitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia and even in the United States which can be a world champion inoverblown kitsch. Nevertheless the Caso del Fascio (Fascist headquarters), now the Casa del Popolo,built in Como by the architect Guiseppe Teragni from 1932-6 is a greatly admired modernist building,square in plan based on a masonry podium arranged around a courtyard with a rigid and plaingeometric structure containing an extensive use of glass. Rationalist architecture like this fell out offavour with Mussolini in the middle nineteen-thirties and several architects were arrested for opposingthe régime. Even Marinetti and his Futurist followers were picked on by Fascist extremists who wereinfluenced by the Nazi’s racism and wished to ban so-called degenerate modernist art. Despiteeverything Marinetti remained an on-and-offFascist supporter and became a propagandistfor the war effort in 1940. Already in his midsixties,he fought in 1942 on the Russianfront. At the end of a very turbulent life hedied peacefully in Bellagio in December 1944.Guiseppe Teragni’s Caso del Fascio (nowCaso del Popolo) in Como is a muchadmired modernist building built on therigid geometric principles of the cube.236 ART IN REVOLUTION