I. From Theosophy to Utopia
[Suprematism] will liberate all those engaged in creative activity and make the work into a true model of perfection.—El Lissitzky, 1920
Abstract art, I thought, creates new types of spatial relationships, new inventions of forms, new visual laws—basic and simple—as the visual counterpart to a more purposeful, cooperative human society.— László Moholy-Nagy, 1928
In the future, the realization of pure plastic expression in palpable reality will replace the work of art. But in order to achieve this, orientation toward a universal conception and detachment from the oppression of nature is necessary. Then we will no longer have the need of pictures and sculpture, for we will live in realized art.—Piet Mondrian, 1942
To construct a utopia is always an act of negation toward an existing reality, a desire to transform it.—Leszek Kolakowski, 1968
Abstract art—painting and sculpture that makes no direct, immediately discernible reference to recognizable objects—was born of an alliance of modernist aesthetics and the occult doctrines of theosophy in the second decade of the twentieth century. Its first masterworks were produced by Vasily Kandinsky in Germany, Piet Mondrian in the Netherlands, and Kazimir Malevich in Russia. Yet no sooner was this new artistic convention established as an influence on the European avant-garde than it was quickly appropriated by still another mode of thought—utopianism—which similarly rejected commonly held conceptions of “reality” in the name of a visionary ideal. This utopian ideal, while no less mystical in some respects than that of theosophy, nonetheless differed from it in locating the realm of future perfection in the material world. Toward the material world utopian ideology adopted an attitude as radical—and, in fact, as otherworldly—as any to be found in occult doctrine, but it did not question the existence of the material world. Its goal was to change it—to eliminate its imperfections in order to establish an ideal harmony, at once social and spiritual, in every sphere of earthly human endeavor.
Whereas theosophical belief is essentially religious in nature, utopian thought is fundamentally political, for it seeks to realize its model of human perfection by bringing about a radical transformation of society and its institutions. While both envision an ideal future, it is in the nature of utopian thought to imagine that the particular “heaven” it hypothesizes can be created on earth.
It should not be supposed, however, that an allegiance to mysticism precludes a commitment to utopian ideology. On the contrary, these apparently contradictory doctrines have proved to be highly compatible systems of belief. Both refuse to acknowledge either the limits of human nature or the legitimate conflicts of interest that characterize virtually every form of human society. Both are attempts to transcend the contingencies of history for the purpose of achieving an eternal order so perfect as to lie beyond the need of dissension or modification. Yet utopian ideology departs from occult belief in a fierce yearning to effect a sweeping transformation of material life by means of political action.
The political models to which the pioneers of abstract art attached their utopian dreams, though generally of a socialist character, were by no means uniform, however much they may have been thought to resemble each other in the eyes of their adversaries. The leading figures of the Russian avant-garde—Malevich, Tatlin, Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Popova, et al.—were fervent supporters of revolution, and welcomed the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 as the dawn of a new millennium. And it was in Russia, in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1917, that these champions of abstraction came to enjoy an unprecedented authority over the conduct of cultural life.
The utopian impulses of the De Stijl movement in the Netherlands, which also dates from 1917, were more restricted, and certainly less strident. While no less militant than the Russian avant-garde in its artistic objectives—and initially sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause—the De Stijl group remained aloof from any organized involvement in revolutionary politics. De Stijl was a movement confined to avant-garde artists, architects, designers, and art theorists. While in some respects an anti-war movement that took the horrors of the First World War to represent everything that was moribund in the European past, it never came under the jurisdiction of political commissars or party functionaries. Its primary influence—its primary achievement, too—would always be aesthetic. Its concept of utopia had more to do with ideas about painting and a redesign of the man-made environment than with programs of political action. It helped, of course, that the Netherlands itself remained neutral in the war.
In Germany, and in Central and Eastern Europe, where both Russian modernism and the De Stijl movement wielded immense influence in avant-garde circles, the relation that obtained between the aesthetics of abstraction and the utopian impulse varied from group to group—and sometimes from year to year—in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and the termination of the First World War.
The most celebrated citadel of avant-garde design to be established in Europe in the period between the two world wars—the Bauhaus, founded by the German architect Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919—initially billed itself as the “Cathedral of Socialism,” and from the outset was imbued with a radical fervor that was believed, especially by its enemies on the political right, to reflect revolutionary goals. Yet the radicalism of the Bauhaus, while generally socialist in its announced ideals, was in practice a more volatile and bizarre amalgam of artistic, mystical, and collectivist ideas than its socialist reputation suggests. Its ranks were rife with the followers of occult sects, bohemian lifestyles, food cults, and sundry other manifestations of a freewheeling counterculture.
At the same time, practical considerations required the Bauhaus to collaborate with industry and commerce, for its principal endeavors were addressed to the theory and practice of architectural, industrial, and graphic design, not to the production of fine art. In its early years its contribution to abstraction was more theoretical than practical. It wasn’t until the late 1920s, when the Bauhaus had entered upon the crisis that preceded its shutdown in 1933, that the most distinguished artists on its teaching staff—Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee—were first permitted to offer studio instruction in abstract painting.
It was in Russia, far more decisively than elsewhere, that abstraction was first drawn into the orbit of utopian thought in ways that determined its fate. In no other country did its peculiar combination of aesthetic radicalism and metaphysical yearning so quickly impel abstraction in the direction of political revolution. And in no other country did a triumphant revolution go so far in embracing abstraction as an instrument of cultural and political change. It was therefore in Russia, in the decade following the Revolution of 1917, that a new alliance of abstract art and utopian ideology was put to its severest historical test.
The artistic momentum that set the Russian avant-garde on this radical course was already well established before the Revolution itself. The roots of Russian modernism—abstract art included—are to be found in the cosmopolitan culture of the pre-Soviet Russian liberal intelligentsia that was in close touch with the latest artistic and intellectual developments in France, Germany, and Italy. The ideas of the Expressionist movement in Germany, including Kandinsky’s Blue Rider group in Munich, and those of the Futurist movement in Italy were well known in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but it was the art of the Paris avant-garde that dominated the thinking of the Russian modernists in their accelerating quest for the absolute.
Crucial to this development were the great collections of the modernist School of Paris that had been amassed by two remarkable Russian businessmen, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. With their immense holdings in the most advanced painting of the Paris school—especially the works of Matisse and Picasso—these collections played a central role in acquainting the artists of the burgeoning Russian avant-garde with splendid examples of the new Fauvist and Cubist art long before such objects were exhibited in significant numbers in the museums of the Western world. Then, too, a number of the artists who would shortly be counted among the early creators of abstract art in Russia made their personal pilgrimages to the French capital. Mikhail Larionov, who in 1913 issued a manifesto on behalf of Rayonist painting—a more or less abstract pictorial style claiming to be based on “forms chosen by the will of the artist”—had visited Paris as early as 1906 in connection with the Russian exhibition organized by Sergei Diaghilev for that year’s Salon d’automne. (It was in the Salon d’automne a year before that the Fauvist paintings of Matisse were first exhibited.) Liubov Popova, one of the stars of the early Soviet avant-garde, served an apprenticeship to Cubism in Paris in 1912–1913.
Around that time, too, Vladimir Tatlin, who would win lasting fame for his Monument to the Third International (1919), wangled his way into Picasso’s Paris studio, where he had his first glimpse of the artist’s constructed Cubist reliefs—a new mode of sculpture not yet known to the public. This led, in 1915–1916, to the creation of Tatlin’s even more radical Corner Counter-Reliefs, abstract constructions made of metal and other materials that, unlike Picasso’s constructed sculpture, no longer made any discernible reference to recognizable objects. Similar pilgrimages to Paris were made by Naum Gabo, Ivan Puni, and others, and key documents of the Paris avant-garde, like the writings of Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger on Cubism, were promptly translated into Russian.
Russian modernists were by no means alone, of course, in submit-ting to the influence of the Paris avant-garde in this period, but what they made of that influence was nonetheless remarkable even in an era known for its artistic audacities. For it was in the nature of Russian modernism to seize upon every innovation imported from abroad and propel its development in an even more radical direction than its originators had envisioned. As a result, the pre-Soviet Russian avant-garde promptly created more extreme varieties of pure abstraction than could be found in the advanced art of any Western European or North American art capital.
In this headlong rush into pure abstraction, a volcanic mixture of occult doctrine, political fervor, futuristic fantasy, and incendiary dreams of cultural revolution acted as a powerful stimulus. However pure or simplified its forms, abstract art in Russia was seldom looked upon as art-for-art’s-sake even by pronounced aesthetes. Whatever its roots in mystical doctrine, abstraction was conceived to serve social, historical, and other purposes larger than itself. In the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917, cultural life in Russia acquired an increasingly apocalyptic character that favored extreme solutions to all the problems of art, life, and thought. In this circumstance, abstract art—precisely to the extent that it eliminated all trace of or reverence for the world as it was—had the advantage of addressing its public as, in Leszek Kolakowki’s words, “an act of negation toward an existing reality.” This in itself gave to the aesthetics of abstraction a utopian imperative.
II. Theo van Doesburg and De Stijl’s Utopian Aesthetic
The creation of a new world has commenced.—Theo van Doesburg, De Stijl, August 1921
To succeed in elevating its acts of negation to the level of a comprehensive and influential artistic program, every avant-garde movement requires, in addition to the achievement of a master talent to set its aesthetic course, the services of a robust animateur—an artist-activist capable of commanding attention, forging alliances, winning converts, and otherwise advancing the cause. Mondrian, while undoubtedly De Stijl’s master talent and the only major artist to be closely associated with the group, was temperamentally ill-equipped to perform such worldly tasks. The role of the movement’s animateur therefore fell to Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), a determined avant-gardist painter, writer, and intellectual whose artistic ambitions often exceeded the scope of his talents but whose gifts as a cultural impresario and propagandist were irrepressible.
It was van Doesburg who organized De Stijl as a movement and established its presence in the European avant-garde in the 1920s. He wrote some of its key documents, he was the editor of its journal—called De Stijl—and he was its principal liaison with other avant-garde groups, particularly Dada and the Bauhaus. He became, in fact, something like the movement’s Apollinaire or Marinetti—a tireless proselytizer of its radical aesthetic who was himself “the prototype of the anti-bourgeois,” as the Dutch writer Joost Baljeu called him. As early as 1914, though he had yet to produce a significant work of art or anything like an artistic manifesto, van Doesburg imagined himself making, as he said, “a daring, spiritual crusade throughout artistic and intellectual Europe.” His opportunity came with the founding of De Stijl in 1917.
The ideas and aspirations that Mondrian and van Doesburg brought to De Stijl were anything but identical, however. For Mondrian, painting was a spiritual vocation. Once established, the principles of his Neo-Plasticism—the reduction of pictorial form to the square and the rectangle, with a palette limited to black, white, and the primary colors—remained inviolate. Anything that suggested a residual dependency on subjective expression was regarded as a failure to conform to the universal “reality” Mondrian believed he had achieved in his Neo-Plastic compositions. Hence the strict observance of a pictorial syntax based on the right angle. As Mondrian once observed to the American painter Carl Holty: “Curved lines are too emotional.” “Curved lines,” of course, was a reference to Nature. Even shades of grey had to be eliminated from the painter’s palette as an impermissible compromise.
Whatever may have been his interest in some possible equivalent of Neo-Plasticism in the fields of architecture and design—he seems to have been content to consign such endeavors to some hypothetical future—Mondrian himself remained exclusively occupied with the “reality” of his own painting and the synthesis of aesthetic and occult ideas governing its creation. Yet under van Doesburg’s leadership, De Stijl embraced a cultural agenda that went beyond painting to include not only architecture and design but literature, music, and indeed—at least in theory—all of cultural life. As a consequence, Mondrian’s relation to De Stijl was bound to be more problematic than anyone, least of all van Doesburg, was willing to acknowledge at the outset of their collaboration. Mondrian was nothing if not candid in underscoring for van Doesburg the exact nature of his own artistic interests. “You must remember,” he wrote to van Doesburg in February 1917, “that my things are still intended to be paintings, that is to say, not part of a building. Furthermore, they have been made in a small room.” Which, at the very least, placed his painting at a certain distance from the architectural ambitions van Doesburg envisioned for De Stijl.
Yet the originality of Mondrian’s achievement as a pure abstractionist was fundamental to the founding of De Stijl. The aesthetic that Mondrian was perfecting during the early years of the war was understood to be essential to the movement’s success—so much so that van Doesburg agreed to postpone the publication of the journal that became De Stijl until Mondrian felt ready to participate. This proved to be a shrewd decision, for the treatise that Mondrian wrote for De Stijl at van Doesburg’s instigation on “Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art,” which was serialized in the issues of 1917–1918, did much to define the radical aesthetic character of the entire movement. For the moment, moreover, van Doesburg’s own work as an abstract painter, though it still derived from the kind of representational subject matter that Mondrian had now permanently abandoned, showed every outward sign of conforming to the master’s prohibitions. So certain fundamental differences that separated their respective views not only of art but of the movement itself were left in abeyance.
Yet painting was never more than one of van Doesburg’s many avant-garde interests, and not always the dominant one. He certainly did not share Mondrian’s view of painting as a spiritual vocation. For the whole mystical element in Neo-Plasticism he seems to have felt little affinity. He was more interested in the social functions of abstract art than in its religious significance or its occult sources. He was thus just the animateur that was needed to bring De Stijl’s mystical conception of abstract art into alignment with the aspirations of utopian politics. It is no easy task, however, to establish the exact character of van Doesburg’s own political beliefs. He was anything but a stickler for ideological clarity or linguistic precision.
“Capitalists are deceivers,” he wrote in 1921, “and so are the Socialists.” And further: “The first, second and third Socialist Internationals constituted ridiculous nonsense,” and so on. What he then called for as an alternative to this “nonsense” was an “International of the Mind,” which he seems to have conceived of as something resembling De Stijl’s ambition to transcend what was stigmatized as Europe’s tradition of “intellectual and material individualism.” In the utopian “International of the Mind” that van Doesburg envisioned, individualism in society was—like lyricism in art—rejected in favor of something more “universal.” In practice, this might mean nothing more revolutionary than the effort of abstract artists like himself, who made an absolute of straight lines, geometric form, and unmixed color, to ally themselves with like-minded modernist architects in creating immaculate urban designs devoid of traditional decorative embellishments. Or it might signify something more political—the dream of a utopian collectivism in which the De Stijl aesthetic would inevitably be established as the final arbiter not only of art and design but of all cultural life. Van Doesburg’s writings on the subject, while unmistakably collectivist in spirit, are consistently vague about particulars.
Lecturing on “The Will to Style” in Germany in 1922, for example, he insisted that “Only collective solutions can be decisive in the realms of both politics and art,” which seemed to place his program squarely in the camp of the Bauhaus radicals and the Bolshevik loyalists in the Soviet avant-garde. Yet van Doesburg himself turned out to be too much of an unreconstructed, ego-driven modern individualist to conform even to the very limited “collective solutions” of his comrades in the De Stijl circle—Mondrian in particular—never mind the more sweeping solutions advocated by his counterparts in the Soviet avant-garde.
By 1926 van Doesburg had openly broken with the principles of Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism in order to advance his own mode of abstraction. This was grandly dubbed Counter-Plastic Elementarism, which amounted to little more than the introduction of the diagonal into Neo-Plasticism’s orthogonal orthodoxy. Then he compounded the heresy by ridiculing the concept of “spirit,” which he now ascribed to “witches, fortune-tellers and Theosophists”—in other words, charlatans. This was, of course, a calculated affront. Theosophy was the philosophical foundation on which Mondrian had based his entire abstract oeuvre. It was one of the core doctrines on which De Stijl had been founded. The very terms “De Stijl” and “Neo-Plasticism” were derived from the mystical writings of Mondrian’s philosophical mentor, M. H. J. Schoenmaekers. This was heresy indeed. It was also a sign that van Doesburg, having established relations with Dada and the Bauhaus, now saw himself as the animateur of a much larger project—a Europe-wide, if not worldwide, avant-garde in the service of a utopian aesthetic.
In retrospect, van Doesburg can be seen to have been preparing himself for this larger role for some years. A man much given to adopting pseudonyms—even “Theo van Doesburg” was a pseudonym; his real name was Christiaan Emil Marie Küpper—van Doesburg had established a separate identity as a Dutch Dadaist poet, calling himself I. K. Bonset, as early as 1918 when he began a correspondence under that name with Tristan Tzara, one of the original instigators of Dada. (Mondrian, who was at first unaware of the deception, actually cautioned van Doesburg not to publish I. K. Bonset in De Stijl.) “There is little doubt,” writes Joost Baljeu, “that van Doesburg saw Dada’s revolutionary character and its engagement in the destruction of an old culture as a necessary preparation for the realization of De Stijl’s utopian aims.” Be that as it may, van Doesburg was clearly attracted to the anarchist-nihilist element in Dada even as he was promoting the principles of utopian order as the leader of De Stijl. Under still another pseudonym—Aldo Camini—van Doesburg also adopted the stance of a Dada anti-philosopher, drawing his inspiration from Tzara’s Manifesto of Mr. Aa the Anti-philosopher (1918), to attack Kant, Hegel, and the whole school of German idealist philosophy (for which other members of the De Stijl circle felt a close affinity) as well as Schoenmaekers, De Stijl’s resident philosopher.
Meanwhile, van Doesburg was also busily at work establishing his bona fides with the leadership of the Bauhaus. He later claimed that Gropius had invited him to join the Bauhaus faculty, but this, like so many of van Doesburg’s boasts, turned out to be something of a fiction. According to Gropius,
I have never invited van Doesburg to the Bauhaus. He came there of his own initiative because he was attracted by our courses. He hoped to become a professor here at the Bauhaus, but I did not give him a position, since I judged him to be aggressive and fanatic and considered that he possessed such a narrow, theoretical view that he could not tolerate any diversity of opinion.
The latter point isn’t quite correct, however, for van Doesburg wasn’t at all averse to a “diversity of opinion” so long as he was free to claim every one of the diverse ideas he espoused as wholly his own.
In the end, it remains difficult to know what, if anything, van Doesburg really believed in beyond a vague, idealized utopian future from which the “old culture” of Europe had at last been expunged—a project in which the aesthetics of abstraction was seen to play a key role, and in which van Doesburg himself would be the intellectual leader. It was not to be, of course. By the end of the 1920s the modernist avant-garde was already in retreat in the Soviet Union. In Western Europe, Dada was succumbing to the blandishments of Surrealism, which rejected the aesthetics of abstraction, and the Bauhaus was heading toward political disaster. As it was, van Doesburg was probably fortunate to die when he did—in 1931, at the age of fifty-eight—with his utopian dreams intact and his megalomania undiminished. Had he lived another decade, he would probably have ended up as a university professor in capitalist America, which, while not a fate worse than death, would not have borne much resemblance to that “daring, spiritual crusade throughout artistic and intellectual Europe” that he had imagined for himself in 1914. But then, the entire character of “artistic and intellectual Europe” was altered when Hitler came to power in 1933 in ways that van Doesburg had never imagined, and, in that altered Europe, De Stijl’s vision of a utopian future was one of the many avant-garde dreams that died of inanition.
Mondrian, however, proved to be a hardy survivor of De Stijl’s demise and illusions. Working in Paris in the heyday of Surrealism’s dominion in the 1930s, he went his own way, secure in his convictions, confident of his goals, never wavering in the faith that supported an art untouched by adverse circumstance; and in the end, in New York City of all places, found his final inspiration in the closest thing to the utopian future he had ever encountered.
III. Abstraction and Revolution
Utopias are an expression of aspirations that cannot be realized, of efforts that are not equal to the resistance they encounter.— Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star (1908)
A revolution strengthens the impulse of invention. That is why there is a flourishing of art following a revolution. . . . Invention is always the working out of impulses and desires of the collective and not of the individual.—Vladimir Tatlin, International Iskusstv (1919)
The reality principle— la force des choses —will, in the end, always prevail over utopian passions.—Irving Kristol, “The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals” (1979)
The fate of abstract art in Russia in the decade following the Revolution of 1917 proved to be one of the most tragic chapters in the annals of twentieth-century modernism. Its only near rival among the political calamities that beset the modernist movement in the early decades of the century occurred in Germany in the 1930s with the unleashing of Hitler’s war on “degenerate” art. There was this important difference, however, between the Nazi campaign to abolish modernist art in Germany and that of the Soviet Union under Lenin. Hitler never pretended to set up as a patron of modernist art. However grudgingly, Lenin—or the regime over which he presided as dictator, anyway—did so pretend for a very short but crucial period, thus inducing the illusion among members of the Russian avant-garde that modernism in the arts would be embraced by the Bolsheviks as a privileged coefficient of their political revolution.
The fragility of this ill-fated misalliance between modernist art and political revolution was signaled by the fact that the Bolshevik loyalist to whom Lenin entrusted authority over the arts in the early years of the Soviet regime—Anatoly Lunacharsky, named People’s Commissar for Public Enlightenment in 1917—was not himself exactly an enthusiast for avant-garde art. He was, to be sure, far more closely acquainted with the modernist movement than Lenin and far more tolerant of its innovations, having come to know some of the émigré Russian modernist painters in Paris before the First World War. Yet, while not as paranoid about the avant-garde as Lenin, who regarded it—not wholly incorrectly, alas—as a refuge for “escapees from the bourgeois intelligentsia,” Lunacharsky clearly harbored serious doubts about the modernists he officially supported. To direct the Visual Arts Section of Narkkompros, the huge bureaucracy in his charge, Lunacharsky appointed not one of the militant advocates of Russian abstraction but David Shterenberg, a modernist painter he had met in Paris who was more amenable to welcoming a broader range of artistic loyalties than was common among the doctrinaire abstractionists. (Shterenberg, though a supporter of the Revolution, was not himself a Bolshevik.) Lunacharsky also named Marc Chagall, another of the modernist painters he got to know in Paris, as Commissar of Art in the artist’s home town of Vitebsk. Abstract art, which in retrospect remains the most significant achievement of the Soviet avant-garde in this period, was never a branch of cultural life to which either Lunacharsky or his comrades in the Bolshevik hierarchy felt any personal or ideological commitment. On the contrary, abstraction was often under attack in the official Soviet press as a development inimical to the goals of proletarian culture even while the abstractionists enjoyed the official support of Lunacharsky’s bureaucracy.
From the outset, then, the relation that obtained between an avant-garde that made an orthodoxy of abstraction and the firebrands of what, in the period from 1917 to 1921, was called War Communism, was highly problematic. Within the ranks of the dedicated abstractionists, moreover, loyalty to the Bolshevik regime was similarly riddled with doubt and suspicion. Vasily Kandinsky, the most accomplished of the abstract painters to enjoy official support, was never a true believer in the Revolution. Forced by the outbreak of the world war to leave Germany for his native Russia, where he was living when the Revolution erupted, Kandinsky married the daughter of a Russian general, and in 1922, having correctly perceived that the avant-garde would have no future in the Soviet Union, he decamped for the Bauhaus in Weimar.
Artistically, however, Kandinsky’s period of repatriation in Russia brought a major change in his work. Under the influence of Malevich and his Suprematist circle, Kandinsky abandoned the painterly expressionist manner that had marked his first abstract paintings for the geometric and other hardedge forms now favored by the Russian abstractionists. Indeed, he became enough of a militant in his pursuit of this newly adopted pictorial orthodoxy to join Malevich in ousting Chagall from his official post in Vitebsk on the grounds that the latter’s work was insufficiently abstract—and thus, in the minds of the abstractionist militants, insufficiently revolutionary. In 1921 a disillusioned Chagall departed once again for Paris, where he had made his first reputation as a member of the European avant-garde before the Revolution. He thus preceded Kandinsky into permanent exile in Western Europe by a year. Whatever differences divided Kandinsky and Chagall in the realm of pictorial aesthetics, they turned out to be very much alike in rejecting the political control of art that was already in progress in the Soviet Union.
Another prominent defector from the Soviet avant-garde was the sculptor Naum Gabo (1890 –1978), who left Russia for Germany the same year as Kandinsky. Gabo was one of the pioneers of the kind of open-form abstract sculpture that, somewhat confusingly, has come to be called Constructivist. What lends confusion to the term in relation to sculpture like Gabo’s is that while the latter is literally a construction of thin, sheetlike materials—first painted cardboard, then wood and metal and transparent plastics—that are cut and joined to shape three-dimensional “volumes” consisting of space rather than mass, Constructivism as a movement in the Soviet avant-garde represented a philosophy of art diametrically opposed to Gabo’s. Gabo regarded his constructions as works of art conceived in a spirit that reflected new scientific thinking about space and matter. This was why he called his constructed sculptures “Realist” rather than Constructivist. For, in the Soviet context, Constructivism was one of the names given to a movement that repudiated fine art—art that was now stigmatized as mere “speculative activity”—in favor of the kind of functionalist art that was more explicitly designed to serve the practical and propaganda interests of the Revolution: posters, photography, book illustration, even the design of clothing, tableware, and furniture. It was mainly in the West that sculptures like Gabo’s came to be called Constructivist, and Gabo himself eventually accepted the name when he came to live first in England and then in the United States.
What adds still another layer of confusion to the issue is the fact that many of the leading advocates of Constructivism in the Soviet Union—Tatlin, Rodchenko, and Lissitzky, among them—first distinguished themselves as votaries of abstractionist fine art. Then, to advance the cause of Constructivist applied art, they adapted the formal vocabularies they had themselves invented for their fine-art abstraction to the design of useful objects, while at the same time declaring in the absolutist political spirit of the time that the fine arts, as traditionally conceived, must now be permanently rejected as a useless and harmful relic of a reactionary bourgeois culture. In a manifesto written in May 1921, Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956), one of the most gifted abstract artists of his generation, thus repudiated all of his past artistic accomplishments when he announced that “up to now we did not see this simple thing called life, we did not know that it was so simple, clear, which has to be organized and purged of all kinds of adornment.”
Having succeeded in purging painting and sculpture of everything but their most minimal abstract forms, Rodchenko and his Constructivist cohorts then undertook the much larger task of redesigning the objects of daily life for the Soviet masses along similarly minimalist lines. This was yet another utopian endeavor bound to fail—and fail it largely did in a very short time. Whatever small success this Constructivist initiative could make claim to was largely confined to the VKhUTEMAS, the government-sponsored design workshops where revolutionary theory enjoyed a distinct priority over the actual production of makable objects. This is one of the reasons, incidentally, why theory-obsessed academics in our own day feel such a strong affinity for the failed experiments of the Soviet Constructivists: they exist mainly in the realm of theory.
Given the conditions of Soviet society in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1917, it was the very nature of the Constructivist enterprise that doomed it to failure. For one thing, the Bolshevik commissars on whose support these experiments in modernist design depended were, if anything, even more philistine in their aesthetic tastes than the pre-Revolutionary bourgeoisie the Constructivists scorned. Then, too, the faltering Soviet economy was simply not equipped to produce most of the projects that were proposed. As a consequence, most of these projects remained on the drawing board. And needless to say, the Russian masses weren’t exactly clamoring for modernist design, and it certainly wasn’t in order to drink out of Suprematist teacups or buy their daily copies of Izvestia at a Constructivist kiosk that the Bolsheviks had fought a bloody civil war.
The ultimate historical irony of the whole Constructivist misadventure is that what survives of its endeavors—Rodchenko’s brilliant photographs, Popova’s extraordinary textile designs, and Alexandra Exter’s sets and costumes for certain theatrical productions—are now admired for precisely the aesthetic, which is to say, the formal, ideas they embody rather than for the political motives that prompted their creation. What also needs to be noted about this failed utopian venture is the role it played in terminating one of the most remarkable chapters in the entire history of abstract art. Years before Stalin was in a position to demonize abstraction as “bourgeois formalism,” the campaign to condemn the creation of abstract painting and sculpture as a cultural activity politically at odds with the goals of the Revolution and thereby to render abstraction officially insupportable was initiated from within the ranks of the Soviet avant-garde itself. Stalin only codified and criminalized what Constructivist militants like Tatlin and Rodchenko had first proposed in rejecting abstract art, and then promptly condemned Constructivism as well.
IV. Abstraction and the Bauhaus
“Art and Technology, a New Unity” is the slogan on our Bauhaus poster at the railroad station. Oh dear, will there really be no more art than the technology necessary to become profitable from now on? Since times are bad, art has to give in, and authority is granted it by associating with usable things—a hateful conception.—Lyonel Feininger to Julia Feininger, 1923
Our aims are becoming more and more clear and have been expressed very precisely in an article by Moholy. They go against my grain in every respect, distress me terribly. What has been “art” for ages is to be discarded—to be replaced by new ideals. There is talk only about optics, mechanics and moving pictures. . . . Klee was very depressed yesterday when we talked about Moholy. He called it the “prefabricated spirit of the time.”—Lyonel Feininger to Julia Feininger, 1925
The concepts of mechanics, dynamics, statics and kinetics, the problem of stability, of balance, were examined in terms of three-dimensional forms and the relationship between materials was investigated as were methods of construction and montage. . . .Today’s sculptor knows scarcely anything about the new fields in which the engineer works.—László Moholy-Nagy, 1928
It took quite a while to get under way the kind of work which later made the Bauhaus a leader in designing for the lighting fixture industry.—László Moholy-Nagy, 1938
It is one of the paradoxes of the legend of the Bauhaus, which the German architect Walter Gropius founded in Weimar in 1919 to reform and revitalize modern architectural practice, that it is often thought to have been one of the principal citadels of abstract art in Europe in the 1920s. The fact is, however, that no instruction in abstract painting—or, indeed, painting itself—was permitted at the Bauhaus until the last five years of its fourteen-year existence, and even then it was accorded a very low priority. Gropius disliked easel drawing, and his aversion to it was shared by Mies van der Rohe, who presided over the school in its final years. Traditional instruction in drawing and painting was never part of the Bauhaus curriculum.
The legend of the Bauhaus as a citadel of abstraction nonetheless persisted because a number of distinguished artists who have passed into history as masters of abstract art—Kandinsky, Klee, Albers, and Moholy-Nagy—were among the best-known members of the Bauhaus faculty. Then, too, an even larger number of lesser painters who had been students at the Bauhaus in the 1920s went on to acquire reputations as abstract artists working in what came to be recognized as a Bauhaus style. Most important of all was the fact that the basic course of instruction at the Bauhaus was designed to comprehend the entire range of visual experience in ways that eliminated from consideration all but its most universal and axiomatic attributes. As a consequence, abstraction of a certain kind—geometrical, Constructivist, and depersonalized—came to look as if it had been conceived to illustrate the theoretical principles of Bauhaus pedagogy.
The Vorkurs, or required preliminary course at the Bauhaus, was concentrated on theories of form and perception, on the one hand, and on the nature of materials, on the other, as a preparation for training in crafts and design. “What made the Bauhaus preliminary course . . . unique,” writes Frank Whitford, “was the amount and quality of its theoretical teaching, the intellectual rigor with which it examined the essentials of visual experience and artistic creativity.” What this meant in practice may be seen in a passage from an essay written in 1916 by the Austrian artist Johannes Itten, who three years later was brought to Weimar to create the original Vorkurs for the Bauhaus:
The clear geometric form is the one most easily comprehended and its basic elements are the circle, the square and the triangle. Every possible form lies dormant in these formal elements. They are visible to him who sees, invisible to him who does not.
Form is also color. Without color there is no form. Form and color are one. The colors of the spectrum are those most easily comprehended. Every possible color lies dormant in them. Visible to him who sees—invisible to him who does not. . . .
Geometric forms and the colors of the spectrum are the simplest, most sensitive forms and colors and therefore the most precise means of expression in a work of art.
By the time Itten arrived at the Bauhaus in 1919 to set up its Vorkurs, such ideas were already well established in the De Stijl group in the Netherlands and the Suprematist circle in Russia, and in fact both De Stijl and Suprematism were to exert a profound influence on Bauhaus theory and practice as well as its disposition to think of both in utopian terms. It was certainly not the purpose of the Vorkurs to prepare its students for careers as abstract artists. Its goal was to prepare students for a much more ambitious task: the application of such theories of abstraction to a redesign of the entire man-made universe. In this respect, Bauhaus pedagogy had much in common with that of the VKhUTEMAS in the Soviet Union, especially after 1923 when the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) was appointed to replace Itten as director of the preliminary course.
Itten, who was more of a mystic than a political ideologue, had derived some of his ideas about color and form from Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art, published in 1912. (It was to teach in Itten’s version of the Vorkurs, to which his own ideas had already contributed a good deal, that Kandinsky was invited to join the Bauhaus in 1922.) Spiritual matters were not of compelling interest to Moholy, however. In politics he was a radical who had supported Bela Kun’s short-lived Soviet in his native Hungary in 1919, and was still identifying himself as a Communist in the early 1920s. As a radical he was inevitably drawn both to the révolté art and politics of the Dadaists and to the authoritarian absolutism of the Russian Constructivists. (Whatever differences may have divided Dada from Constructivism, both had formed an alliance against the despised bourgeoisie.) In some respects, Moholy took the Bauhaus’s commitment to socialism more seriously than Gropius himself—though Gropius had been a supporter of the ill-fated German revolution in 1919 and designed a Monument to the Fallen of the March Insurrection in 1920–1921.
What Moholy’s arrival at the Bauhaus signified was a change in the atmosphere as well as the ideas that would now govern the Bauhaus. “Even Moholy’s appearance,” writes Frank Whitford, “proclaimed his artistic sympathies”—and his political sympathies, too, as Whitford’s further account makes clear.
Itten had worn something like a monk’s habit and had kept his head immaculately shaved with the intention of creating an aura of spirituality and communion with the transcendental. Moholy sported the kind of overall worn by workers in modern industry. His nickel-rimmed spectacles contributed further to an image of sobriety and calculation belonging to a man mistrustful of the emotions, more at home among machines than human beings. His dress stamped him as a Constructivist, as a follower to Vladimir Tatlin and El Lissitzky, who rejected all subjective definitions of art and were scornful of the idea of the artist as the inspired maker of unique objects stamped by his personality.
Like Rodchenko, to whose example he was also strongly drawn, Moholy was a man of remarkably versatile talents, excelling as a painter, photographer, graphic designer, product designer, sculptor, and visual theorist. Unlike Rodchenko and the Soviet militants, however, he was not prepared to reject the art of painting in order to concentrate exclusively on the applied arts. Nor, for that matter, did his radical sympathies prevent him from allying himself with capitalist industry in the realm of the applied arts. In this respect, Moholy’s career—first in Germany, and then in America, where he later founded the so-called New Bauhaus in 1937—marked the demise of the utopianism which had prompted the creation of the Bauhaus as the “Cathedral of Socialism” in the immediate aftermath of Germany’s defeat in the First World War. The hope of redesigning the man-made universe did not entirely fail, to be sure, but whatever successes were realized proved to be peculiarly dependent upon the least utopian of all economic and social systems: capitalism. It was as a handmaiden to capitalist enterprise and corporate competition in the marketplace that many of the Bauhaus’s modernist design ideas enjoyed their greatest prosperity and influence. It was a happier fate than that suffered by modernism in the Soviet Union under Stalin, but it was no less a refutation of the utopianism to which the founders of the Bauhaus had initially aspired.
All utopian endeavors derive their moral force from a firm belief in the perfectibility of man. It was one of the purposes of the original Vorkurs at the Bauhaus to achieve this radical transformation of the human species by, in effect, creating the conditions for a radical revision of human consciousness. The late Reyner Banham put it very well when, in a discussion of the Vorkurs in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), he cited “the determination to cleanse every incoming student’s mind of all preconceptions and to put him, so to speak, back into Kindergarten to start again from scratch” as one of the defining innovations of the Bauhaus preliminary course. This, as Banham further observed, was clearly designed
to return incoming students to the noble savagery of childhood. To have gone so far against established precedent without moving forward into a mechanized culture, meant that Itten had to go right outside the general body of Western, rational thought and under his influence Bauhaus students involved themselves in the study of mediaeval mystics like Eckhart, and Eastern spiritual discipline such as Mazdaznan, Tao and Zen.
Thus the socialist utopianism to which the Bauhaus dedicated its fortunes at the outset contained a large admixture of occult belief that was not to be exorcised until the arrival of Moholy, a man “more at home among machines than human beings.” Under the guidance of this radical materialist, it was no longer the perfectibility of man that occupied the Bauhaus agenda but the perfectibility of machines, and that effectively closed the book on the utopian aspiration.
[1997]