Modernism

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. It had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20^th Century, influencing major trends such as Bauhaus and the De Stijl (The Style) movement. It had a great impact upon architecture, graphic and industrial design, theatre, film, dance, fashion and to some extent music.

Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938) Latvian painter, sculptor, graphic artist, designer and teacher, active in Russia. He was an important exponent of Russian Constructivism. He studied in Riga and Petrograd (now St Petersburg), but in the 1917 October Revolution joined the Latvian Rifle Regiment to defend the Bolshevik government, his sketches of Lenin and his fellow soldiers show Cubist influences. In 1918 he designed posters and decorations for the May Day celebrations and he entered the Free Art studios in Moscow, where he studied Malevich and Antoine Pevsner. He adopted the suprematist style and in 1920 joined the Communist Party. In 1920-21 he experimented with materials, making constructions from wood and paper that combined the geometry of Suprematism with a more Constructivist concern with actual volumes in space.

 1922 untitled                                    1919 Dinamicheskii gord 

El Lissitzky (1890-1941)  abstract artist and theorist, photographer and propagandist.

Beat the Whites with The Red Wedge, 1919

This is Lissitzky’s earliest attempts at propagandistic art. He produced this politically charged work in support of the Red Army shortly after the Bolsheviks had waged their revolution in 1917.

Fritz Lang, Metropolis, 1927

A German Expressionist Science-fiction film directed by Fritz Lang. It was a silent film. Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia, and follows the attempts of Freder, the wealthy son of the city’s ruler, and Maria, whose background is not fully explained in the film, to overcome the vast gulf separating the classist nature of the city.

Metropolis features a range of elaborate special effects and set designs, ranging from a huge gothic cathedral to a futuristic cityscape.

 Tower of Babel, modelled after Brueghel's 1563 painting  

The film was cut down in length to remove “inappropriate” communist subtext and religious imagery. The film was very popular in Germany especially amongst Nazi propagandists who took the film’s message literally to heart.

Form and Function in Germany

 

 Between 1919 and 1933, the Bauhaus school, based first in Weimer and then in Dessau, revolutionaries architectural and aesthetic concepts and practices. The buildings put up and decorated by the school’s professors (Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky) Launched the Modern Movement, shaping much of the architecture of the 20^th Century.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) Between 1919 and 1933, the Bauhaus school, based first in Weimer and then in Dessau, revolutionaries architectural and aesthetic concepts and practices. The buildings put up and decorated by the school’s professors (Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky) Launched the Modern Movement, shaping much of the architecture of the

After studying law in Budapest, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy took interest in photography and painting after the First World War. He blended the two medias while associating with the Dadaists and Constructivists while in Vienne and Berlin. He developed images that he called “photogram’s” non-objective works made from a subject without the use of a camera. He joined the Bauhaus in 1925, and provided the building blocks for the New Photographer’s Movement.

       
                  

The Decisive Moment

Henri Cartier-Bresson(1908-2004) was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He adopted the use of the 35mm format, and was a master of candid photography. He helped develop “street photography” or “reportage” style that has influenced generations of photographers.

‘Behind Saint-Lazare Station, Paris, France, 1932’ is an excellent example of ‘the decisive moment’. This picture is a perfect moment captured, and it makes it hard to believe that it wasn’t staged. Cartier-Bresson never edited or cropped his images. The photograph is a very important portray of its time because the man jumping and taking a leap is symbolic of taking a chance in the hard times of the 30s.



America

The turn of the 2oth Century saw America transform from an agricultural economy to the foremost industrial power in the world, with more than a third of the global industrial output.

Paul Strand (1890-1976) An American photographer and filmmaker who along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20^th Century. His pictorials of the 1910s, followed by his coolly seductive machine photographs of the 1920s, helped define early American modernism and set its premium on the elegant print. Experimenting with artist Charles Sheeler, Strand pushed further in describing the movement of the city in the short film Manhatta (1920). By the 1930s he was heavily involved with documentary film, and from the 1940s onwards he was committed to making photographic books. After 1950s when he went to live in France, landscape and portraiture (traditional humanist genre) continued to inspire him.

                                 

        

American Society:  The camera as a tool for reform

The FSA was created in 1937 as a New Deal program to ameliorate the effects of the Great depression.

The above is the official FSA logo - It is a photograph of Allie Mae Burroughs, a symbol of the great depression.

Dorothea Lange – The photograph above “migrant mother” is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. She was there photographing migratory farm labour around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration.

The images were made using a Graflex camera, the original negatives are 4x5” film.

Europe descends into war

John Heartfield – a pioneer in the use of art as a political weapon. His photomontages were anti-Nazi, anti-fascist statements.

The meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little Man Asks for Big Gifts. Motto: Millions Stand Behind Me! 1932

 

The picture is composed of different photographs, manipulated for the purpose of Heartfield’s work. In the picture Heartfield sarcastically suggests the reason why Hitler’s personal gesture of Nazi salute is so particular. The typical way of saluting is masculine, hard and virile. Hitler’s hand tilts back, and doing so loses hardness and aggression. It becomes soft and passive. Heartfield explains that it’s because with his hand Hitler receives an over-generous donation from big business from behind, secretly.