Abstraction: The Red Square

 This and the following four installment chapters are from another exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art: Engineer, Agitator, Constructor:  The Artist Reinvented.

The examples of posters, photomontages, magazines, and paintings illustrate the fertilization and tension between art and politics, advertising and uses of art to manipulate people's behavior.   The show is particularly rich with art from the Soviet Union after the Revolution and into the 1930's, 'agitation propaganda.'

Following are selections on abstraction, a leading Latvian graphic artist Gustav Klutsis, a selection of Soviet women artists, a few German examples, and finally art and advertising.  Quotation marks indicate text taken from museum labels.

"Abstraction for Radical Ends:  Already committed to Kazimir Malevich's Suprematism, an approach he first presented in 1915 that rejected the deliberate illusions of representational painting, many artists in Russia responded to the imperatives of the 1917 Russian Revolution by deploying abstraction for radical ends.  Basic shapers were utilizes, as Gustav Klutsis put it, to construct 'a new reality not yet in existence,' to call, in effect, for world revolution.  In the early years of Soviet Russia, the red square exemplified this utopian stance...  In the following years, the red square would proliferate across Europe.  While at times less explicitly agitational, it continued to represent the revolutionary impulses of this period  in Russia and to embody aspirations for the new - an ongoing reminder of abstraction's experimental leap."

Kazimir Malevich, Russian born Ukraine, Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack- Color Masses in Fourth Dimension.  1915.

El Lissitzky, Russian.  About Two Squares:  A Suprematist Tale of Two Squares in Six Constructions.  1922.

Liubov Popova, Russian, Painterly Architectonic.  1917.