Before Class, Chapter 15

Supremastism and constructivism started in Russia after WWI around 1920. Russia had just executed their Czar Nicholas II and his family and civil war and the Red Army was taking over. Kasimir Malevich started suprematism. He'd worked with cubism and futurism and he created an elemental geometry of abstraction that was new and nonobjective. He sought the supreme expression of feeling, with no practical values or ideas or promised land. He believed the core of the art experience is through the color and form. The movement was moved forward with the revolution, and art as a whole was given a new social role.

An early attempt for the constrivists was with Aleksei Gan with his 1922 broschure, however the real idea was examplified by El Lissitzky.  He was a painter, architect, graphic designer and photographer who profoundly influenced the course of grpahic design. He was a major influence on PROUNS (projects for the extablishment affirmation of new art), which introduced three dimensional illusions that receded behind the picture plane and projected from the picture plane. In 1921 he went to Berlin and the Netherlands and found De Stijl, Bauhaus and Dadists and other constructivists.

De Stijl was started in the Netherlands in 1917. Theo Van Doesburg was the founder and joined by other artists. They worked with abstract geometrics and sought equilibrium and harmony in art. Many of these works had reduced visual  vocabulary, primary and neutral colors, straight horizontal and vertical lines, flat planes, and a lot of rectangles and squares. They believed beauty and purity in art.  Van Doesburg used De Stijl techniques in architecture, sculpture and typography. Van Doesburg saw Dada as De Stijl's opposite. While Dada would tear down the old order, De Stijl rebuilt it but in a new form.