Erik's Graphic Art History: Constructivism and De Stijl

With World War I come and gone, cubism started branching off into multiple subgenres. During the 1920’s Russia was undergoing many changes to its political structure, through civil war between the Czar loyalists and the Bolsheviks’ Red Army. Despite the civil turmoil erupting all across the country, creativity blossomed and changed much about how graphic design stands today. Russian avant-garde artists quickly adapted to cubism and futurism and found common themes that resonated between the two. With these common themes they created a subgenre called cubo-futurism which experimented and focused a lot on typography.

During the time frame that artist Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovski was working with ROSTA an artists named Kasimir Malevich was founding his own style of artwork that he called suprematism. Suprematism took cubo-futurism a step further, rejecting all representations and simply using expression to connect with people. Malevich once said that art should be an “expression of feeling, seeking no practical values, no ideas, no promised land.”

Color became a very important issue to deal with for artwork of this time. Malevich firmly believed that color and form were the two most crucial points of artwork and should be the most effective elements of design. This same idea was held with the artists of another new style of artwork called De Stijl from Netherlands in the summer of 1917. It was founded by Theo van Doesburg who later collaborated with Piet Mondrian, Bart Anthony van der Leck, and Pieter Oud. They created a style of artwork for the movement that closely related to Malevich’s in the sense that cubism played a major role through abstract geometric shapes. What really set off De Stijl from its former movement was its use of color. It used color as a structural element alongside geometric shapes, for example red was a very strong contrasting color symbolizing rebellion and was therefore used often in printing and graphic design.

De Stijl also made its way into architecture where artists like Van Doesburg and Gerrit Reitveld were designing and constructing buildings that were extremely profound. Doesburg was using De Stijl to design shapes with asymmetrical marriages. Meanwhile Rietveld designed the Schroeder House which was very radical for the time. So radical in fact that neighbors threw rocks and the children living there were taunted and made fun of by classmates.

Before the war had finished Cubism had taken hold in and were widely favored in Russia and the Netherlands yet there was the gaping split in design in between both countries. After the War had ended however the bridge between the two was being built as smaller countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland adopted these styles. One such artists influenced by De Stjl was Henryk Berlewi. In Germany Berlewi felt that design had been killed with illusions that proved to be major downfalls in his opinion to modern art. He then pushed his theory of mecho-faktura in which he “mechanized painting and graphic design”. In doing this he eliminated any three dimensional features he believed were prevalent in the artwork around him. From here his work was introduced into the Polish community where it later reached into Russia to connect the gap that had been opened by the War.