Pre Revolutionary Russian Art Essay

A term, first appearing around 1840, describing a new socio-economic structure as a ‘’social system based on collective ownership’’ became the policy adopted by Lenin as a solution to the issue of backwardness that existed in Russian and lead to the unrest of the early 20th century. This term was communism. The concept of communal sharing and ownership adopted by this collective implied the eradication of social classes and, especially, the bourgeois. Essentially this was translated into a process that would completely reform the existing social structure in pre-revolutionary Russia in an attempt to develop a new stronger economic and political power. This was the thinking that formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922, recognised

The ideas of rapid industrialisation as a means of pushing Soviet Russia into a steady growing curve was the direct inspiration for the designs of the installations presented in the third exhibition of the OBMOKhU in 1921. Their interest in using industrial materials and structures to inform the three dimensional designs of the sculptures created a very evident visual distinction between previously accepted works of art and the new art of constructivism. The revolution was seen as a challenge to the arts: to create new and innovative special arrangement, compositions, graphics and an overall aesthetic. This shift in ideas from pre-revolutionary Russia and the post-revolutionary Soviet Union can easily be seen in the designs of the Vesnin Brothers throughout the time period. The Vesnin Brothers work before 1917 shows a great deal of classical forms and architectural details (Image 0.3). However, immediately after 1917, their drawings take on the fresh new aesthetic that later becomes constructivist (Image 0.4). The relationship between the OBMOKhU and the group the Vesnin Brothers later join become the main artistic and architectural examples of abstraction taking place in an attempt to achieve the socialist and communist

Moisei Yakovlevich Ginzburg was the first constructivist architect to formulate an understanding of constructivist theory. In his writings Cтиль и Эпоха (Style and Epoch) he explained the relationship that the constructivist aesthetic had with the industrial process, how it was a new art form that depicted the socio-economic ideals of the revolutionary period. As the industrialisation of Russia made materials like steel and concrete readily available they often became the building block for constructivist architects. However, stylistic preferences were never the only thing that made an architectural project constructivist. The key, as can be interpreted from Ginzburg’s writing was these buildings served the individual and the government. His own design, the House of Narkomfin, shows how important he felt that tackling the issue of feeling isolation by an individual in a growing urban landscape should be addressed by the detailed planning and arrangement of living spaces. His design featured a communal kitchen and dining room, a library, double height spaces for the private residences and long wide corridors for communal interactions to take place (Image 0.5). This approach to treating the architecture of a residence as a place where communal acts can take place is where the political abstraction of the soviet government takes place. The provision for