Разработанный и Написана Рокси Блакхам
Designed & Written by
Roxxie Blackham
Russian Avant-Garde Design
Zdanevich's 1923 poster for his and Tristan Tzara's SoirĂŠe du coeur Ă barbe (Evening of the bearded heart) is a widely known example of Avant-Garde Typography and Graphic Design.
During the last forty years of his life in Paris, Zdanevich was active in a variety of areas. He did analyses of church elevations, created fabrics for Chanel, and above all consecrated himself to the creation of artist's books with
the collaboration of Picasso, Max Ernst, Miro, and others. His innovative typographic and design work has been exhibited at the New York Public Library, MOMA, in Montreal, in Tbilisi in 1989 in a joint exhibition with his brother Kiril, and in many other venues. Catalogs for many of these exhibitions exist and contain considerably more detailed information about his life and works.
de Boulogne; in the course of two and a half hours (each chapter has an exact time for a title, from 11.51 to 14.09) they all manage to betray each other, and the novel itself breaks all manner of orthographic, punctuational, and compositional rules. He continued working on this “hyperformalist” novel (which he described as an opis’, or “inventory”) until 1926, but it was not published until 1994. His second novel, Voskhishchenie (“Rapture”), was published in a small edition in 1930 and was ignored at the time. Set in a mythical Georgia among mountaineers, on the surface a crime novel, it is actually a fictionalized history of the Russian avant-garde, full of allusions to world literature; it could be said to anticipate magic realism. The language of the novel is innovative and poetic, and the Slavist Milivoje Jovanović called it:
“undoubtedly the summit toward which the Russian Avant-Garde was striving”
A Brief History... краткая история
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El Lissitzky Эль Лисицкий
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Kazimir Malevich Казимир Малевич
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Ilia Zdanevic Илья Зданевич
Ilia Mikhailovich Zdanevich was a Georgian and French writer and artist, and an active participant in such Avant-Garde movements as Russian Futurism and Dada. Ilia and his brother, the painter Kirill, formed the dynamic but short-lived 41 degree group in Tiflis, Georgia. The group produced publications that were fascinating in content, design and typography. Iliadz worked on typography and wrote several transrational plays in which he made perhaps the most consistent and large-scale use of zaum in Russian futurist literature. He played a role in the Paris Dada movement, but mostly he is remembered by his graphic art and as a champion of sound poetry. In 1949 he published one of the first anthologies, “Poésie de mots inconnus,” which was a collection of Dadaist sound poetry and Russian zaum. In 1923 he began his novel Parizhachi, about four couples who agree to dine together in the Bois
The Russian Avant-Garde is an umbrella term used to define the large, influential wave of modern art that flourished in Russia (or more accurately, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union) approximately 1890 to 1930. The term covers many separate, but totally related, art movements that occurred at the time; namely Neo-primitivism, suprematism, constructivism, and futurism. Given that many of these Avant-Garde artists were born or grew up in what is present day Belarus and Ukraine (including Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Archipenko), some sources also talk about Ukrainian Avant-Garde. The Russian Avant-Garde reached its creative and popular height in the during the Russian Revolution (1917 to 1932), at which point the ideas of the Avant-Garde clashed with the newly emerged state-sponsored direction of Socialist Realism.
Russian Avant-Garde art was already in ferment before 1914, but World War I and the Bolshevik revolution transformed the cultural life of the nation. By late 1917 the private art market was shattered and avant-garde artists had taken charge of existing pedagogical institutions and founded new ones. The Constructivist and Suprematist movements gained a brief ascendancy. Constructivism rejected easel painting as an expression of bourgeois dominated society. It’s most famous representative, Vladimir Tatlin, announced the death of traditional art and constructed three dimensional, machine inspired, abstract sculptures and reliefs. Other Constructivists designed utilitarian products (chairs, clothes, dishware) with a distinctly industrial veneer to help “urbanize the psychology of the masses” and usher in the new Communist stage of civilization. Suprematism was born with Kazimir Malevich’s painting “Black Square” (1915) and
other geometrical abstractions, which were supposed to point humanity away from capitalist exploitation and the horrors of the world war and toward the “crossroads of celestial paths.” A philosophical idealist, Malevich believed that his two dimensional shapes provided a kind of intellectual “passage into the fourth dimension” comprehension of which was vital if mankind were to imagine a higher reality, and thereby alleviate earthly suffering. Both Constructivists and Suprematists were radical utopians who yearned for the creation of a new society and the destruction of the old.
In 1919 he started teaching at the art school at Vitebsk, where he exerted a profound influence on Lissitzky, and in 1922 he moved to Leningrad, where he lived for the rest of his life. In the late 1920s he returned to figurative painting, but was out of favor with a political system that now demanded Socialist Realism from its artists and he died in neglect. However, his influence on abstract art, in the west as well as Russia,
was enormous. The best collection of his work is in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
“I have broken the blue boundary of colour limits, come out into the white; beside me, comrade pilots swim in this infinity.”
up abstract painting, turning more to teaching, writing, and making three-dimensional models that were important in the growth of Constructivism.
of Constructivism with the visual elements of Suprematism. The goal was to subliminally alter the mentality of the people, infusing in them the values of both artistic movements and, relatedly, Communism.
“Only dull and impotent artists screen their work with sincerity. In art there is need for truth, not sincerity.” Malevich moved away from absolute austerity, tilting rectangles from the vertical, adding more colors and introducing a suggestion of the third dimension and even a degree of painterly handling, but around 1918 he returned to his purest ideals with a series of White on White paintings. After this he seems to have realized he could go no further along this road and virtually gave
As one of their German followers put it, these designs “little by little… hammered into the mass soul.”
The two movements merged in the figures of El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko. Both of these artists made important contributions to the cultural life of the twentieth century - Rodchenko in the areas of furniture design and photography, Lissitzky in exhibition design and architecture. But their most far-reaching innovations were in the graphic arts: Soviet propaganda posters and advertising using geometrical shapes and bold, block lettering that combined the functionality
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian painter and art theoretician. He was a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the avant-garde, Suprematist movement.
Some believe that the third Black Square (also at the Tretyakov Gallery) was painted in 1929 for Malevich's solo exhibition, because of the poor condition of the 1915 square.
In 1915, Malevich laid down the foundations of Suprematism when he published his manifesto, From Cubism to Suprematism.
One more Black Square, the smallest and probably the last, may have been intended as a diptych, together with the Red Square
“I ripped through the blue shade of the constraints of colour.” In 1915–1916 he worked with other Suprematist artists in a peasant/ artisan co-operative in Skoptsi and Verbovka village. Malevich exhibited his first Black Square, now at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, at the Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in Petrograd in 1915. A black square placed against the sun appeared for the first time in the 1913 scenery designs for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. The second Black Square was painted around 1923.
for the exhibition Artists of the RSFSR: 15 Years, held in Leningrad (1932). The two squares, Black and Red, were the centerpiece of the show.
“We brought the canvas into circles... and while we turn, we raise ourselves into the space.� Lazar Markovich Lissitzky, better known as El Lissitzy was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect.
movements, and he experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate 20th-century graphic design.
He was an important figure of the Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the Soviet Union.
Lissitzky, of Jewish Đžrigin, began his career illustrating Yiddish children's books in an effort to promote Jewish culture in Russia, a country that was undergoing massive change at the time and that had just repealed its antisemitic laws.
His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus and constructivist
photomontage, and book design, producing critically respected works and winning international acclaim for his exhibition design. This continued until his deathbed, where in 1941 he produced one of his last works - a Soviet propaganda poster rallying the people to construct more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany. Proun
He took this ethic with him when he worked with Malevich in heading the suprematist art group UNOVIS, when he developed a variant suprematist series of his own, Proun, and further still in 1921, when he took up a job as the Russian cultural ambassador to Weimar Germany, working with and influencing important figures of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements during his stay. In his remaining years he brought significant innovation and change to typography, exhibition design,
During this period Lissitzky proceeded to develop a suprematist style of his own, a series of abstract, geometric paintings which he called Proun (pronounced "pro-oon"). The exact meaning of "Proun" was never fully revealed, with some suggesting that it is a contraction of proekt unovisa (designed by UNOVIS) or proekt utverzhdenya novogo (Design for the confirmation of the new). Later, Lissitzky defined them ambiguously as "the station where one changes from painting to architecture."
Proun was essentially Lissitzky's exploration of the visual language of suprematism with spatial elements, utilizing shifting axes and multiple perspectives; both uncommon ideas in suprematism. Suprematism at the time was conducted almost exclusively in flat, 2D forms and shapes, and Lissitzky, with a taste for architecture and other 3D concepts, tried to expand suprematism beyond this.
His Proun works spanned over a half a decade and evolved from straightforward paintings and lithographs into fully three dimensional installations. Through his Prouns, utopian models for a new and better world were developed. This approach, in which the artist creates art with socially defined purpose, could aptly be summarized with his edict "das zielbewuĂ&#x;te Schaffen" – "task oriented creation."