Additional links, as I am able to provide them, will enhance the summary of the Constructivist impulse that appears here. Useful sites for the exploration of Constructivism and related aspects of the history of modern art and architecture include the index at the Bauhaus page. The work of Lyonel Feininger, American born artist of German abstraction and instructor at the Bauhaus, reveals the combination of design influences that gave an identifiably modern style to the architecture of post World War II America and Europe. locally, works by Feininger are available at the Fogg Museum and the Currier Gallery of Art. To fully appreciate the aesthetics of compostion as they relate to modern design, familiarity with the works of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee is also essential.

Lyonel Feininger Der Grützturm in Treptow

Composition No. 10. 1939-42 (80 Kb); Oil on canvas, 80 x 73 cm  Private collection

Compositions by Piet Mondrian  transform our feel for quotidian reality; however; Mondrian's work is also more rigorously transcendental. Where Klee's work, for instance, evokes a tactile response, Mondrian's is far more cerebral and purifying in its intensity.

There is a tension between the underlying thrust of works related to the Bauhaus, like those of Kandinsky, Klee, and Mondrian (aesthetic productions that bend art to the purposes of enhancing life); and the the revolutionary thrust of works that seek to join the revolution in art with the revolution in politics represented by the idealistic phase of communism under Lenin in the U.S.S.R. Roughly the complicated history of this mix of aesthetic and social or political impulses might be stated in this way:

In the West, the collaborative spirit of the Bauhaus led to the application of modern abstraction to the design of furniture, fabrics, and buildings in the "International Style." Central also to the emergence of the modern style in architecture is the feeling for machines described in the Futurism page on this site and the images of power drawn from the American industrial landscape. For the latter see images by Feininger, Demuth and Sheeler, as well as photographs by Edward Steichen, among others. Kurt Schwitter's attraction to both Dada and the "der Stil" (a movement in Holland similar in spirit to the Bauhaus) is indicative of this mix of forces. Schwitters was, in fact, employed by the graphic design department of Pelikan, a manufacturer of inks, and brings both his appreciation of draftsmanship and dada to his commercial designs.

In Russia, the proposition that the purpose of art was to enhance the quality of life, bringing aesthetics to a practical level, came under attack as an anti-revolutionary celebration of a bourgeoisie privilege. The call for "art in the service of the revolution" produced an exciting array of Constructivist works, including agitprop and other display technologies. With the passing of Lenin, the influence of Stalin led to a repression of the abstract qualities of Constructivism in art and a new push toward realism, one that can be observed in the poster art of a figure like Gustav Klutsis. Many Russian Constructivists joined their Bauhaus colleagues in Germany as a result of this direct pressure to produce mass propaganda. In turn, with the emergence of Hitler in Germany, Constructivists were labeled as degenerate. Many went into exile, first going to other European cultural centers then emigrating to the U.S.A.