Full Description
With these words the sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner pronounced the official birth of constructivist art, the most revolutionary, challenging, and enigmatic of twentieth-century artistic movements. Since the time of their "Realistic Manifesto," constructivism has spread throughout the world, opposing personal, expressionistic art with abstraction and formal construction. In this book, Stephen Bann has collected the most important constructivist documents, including the writings of EI Lissitzky, Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Victor Vasarely, and Charles Biederman,many of which have never before been available in English,and supplemented them with a critical introduction, a chronology of constructivism, and an invaluable bibliography of close to four hundred items. This volume is illustrated with thirty-eight constructivist prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some of them are rare and previously unpublished.
Contents
Part 1 Constructivism in Russia - 1920-23: from "Art in Production" (1921). Part 2 Toward international constructivism - 1921-11: congress of international progressive artists (1922); from the catalogue of the "First Exhibition of Russian Art", Van Diemen Gallery, Berlin (1922). Part 3 Constructivism and the little magazines - 1923-24: from "Lef"(1923); from "G"(1923-24); from "Disk"(1923); from "Blok"(1924). Part 4 Extension of constructivist principles - 1923-28. Part 5 Retrospect, theory and prognosis - 1928-32: from "The Construction of Architectural and Mechanical Forms" by Jakob Chernikov (1931). Part 6 The constructive idea in Europe - 1930-42: from "Circle - International Survey of Constructive Art"(1937). Part 7 The constructive idea in the Postwar World - 1948-65: from "Structure"(1959-64).
