The Russian Constructivists, who pursued a rational, materialist approach to art shortly after the Russian Revolution of 1917, used geometry and modern industrial materials as metaphors for order and stability in a society ravaged by chaos. Beauty became subservient to utility in their work, and the role of the artist was recast as that of engineer.Painting became a superfluous activity, unless it carried a political message. Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International (which was designed in 1919 20 but never built) exemplifies this technological, socially oriented approach to abstraction, using a composition of geometric forms as the basis for a multifunctional government building.
Similarly, at Germany's Bauhaus the art school founded in 1919 in Weimar by architect Walter Gropius artists such as Josef Albers promoted the integration of art, architecture, and design within an abstract, geometric idiom that they believed was the embodiment of modernity, universality, and capitalist mass production.
The antithesis to these rational views of art, Dada was a loose-knit movement of writers and artists that flourished in Berlin, Hannover, New York, Paris, and Zurich beginning in 1915 and 1916. Appalled by the horrors of World War I and the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, Dada artists used abstraction as a form of protest, rejecting conventional representation and beauty as a means of attacking social norms. Kurt Schwitters, in his Merz collages, for example, juxtaposed discarded remnants of commercial enterprise, with the aim of destroying objective logic and celebrating the randomness and absurdity of life.
Beginning in 1924, the Surrealists in Paris transformed the Dadaists negation of ordinary reality into an affirmation of the heightened perception of reality. Surrealism, although characterized by a wide range of visual styles (including representational painting), shared Dada's radical political orientation, marrying it to the imaginative freedom of dreams and the unconscious. The Surrealists looked inward in their quest to strip the veneer from the realities of everyday life, rejecting logic and order while exploring realms of the human psyche and the irrational. The biomorphic abstractions of Jean Arp and Joan Mir— incorporate chance effects and unpremeditated design to unlock poetic suggestions of human emotion and experience. The use of childlike drawing in some of their works signifies a less-studied, and thus more genuine, understanding of form.
The Museum of Non-Objective PaintingAbstraction in the Twentieth Century
Abstraction in:
Photography