The Realistic Manifesto is a key text of
Constructivism
Constructivism may refer to:
Art and architecture
* Constructivism (art), an early 20th-century artistic movement that extols art as a practice for social purposes
* Constructivist architecture, an architectural movement in Russia in the 1920s a ...
. Written by Naum Gabo and cosigned by his brother,
Antoine Pevsner
Antoine Pevsner (12 April 1962) was a Russian-born sculptor and the older brother of Alexii Pevsner and Naum Gabo. Both Antoine and Naum are considered pioneers of twentieth-century sculpture.
Biography
Pevsner was born as Natan Borisovich P ...
, the ''Manifesto'' laid out their theories of
artistic expression in the form of five "fundamental principles" of their constructivist practice. The Manifesto focused largely on divorcing art from such conventions as use of lines, color, volume, and mass. In the text, Gabo and Pevsner reject the successive stylistic innovations of modern art as mere illusionism (beginning with
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage ...
, and including
Cubism and
Futurism), advocating instead an art grounded in the material reality of space and time: "The realization of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time is the only aim of our pictorial and plastic art."
The text was first published on August 5, 1920, in poster form, on the occasion of an exhibition with
Gustav Klucis in Moscow.
[Editors' introduction to "The Realistic Manifesto." In Art in Theory, 1900-2000, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 298. Malden: Blackwell, 2003.] Extracts were reproduced in the first issue of ''
G'' in 1923.
References
External links
*Audio (MP3) of Naum Gabo reading th
Realistic Manifesto*Audio (MP3) of Naum Gabo reading th
* Website on the Realistic Manifesto http://www.terezakis.com/realist-manifesto.html
Modern art
Russian avant-garde
Constructivism (art)
Art manifestos
1920 documents
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