Alexander Rodchenko
Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko (; – 3 December 1956) was a Russian and Soviet artist, sculptor, photographer, and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova. Rodchenko was one of the most versatile constructivist and productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or down below—to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: "One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again." He is also known ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601,911 residents as of 2021, with more than 6.4 million people living in the Saint Petersburg metropolitan area, metropolitan area. Saint Petersburg is the List of European cities by population within city limits, fourth-most populous city in Europe, the List of cities and towns around the Baltic Sea, most populous city on the Baltic Sea, and the world's List of northernmost items#Cities and settlements, northernmost city of more than 1 million residents. As the former capital of the Russian Empire, and a Ports of the Baltic Sea, historically strategic port, it is governed as a Federal cities of Russia, federal city. The city was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on 27 May 1703 on the s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Suprematism
Suprematism () is an early 20th-century art movement focused on the fundamentals of geometry (circles, squares, rectangles), painted in a limited range of colors. The term ''suprematism'' refers to an abstract art based upon "the supremacy of pure artistic feeling" rather than on the figurative depiction of real-life subjects. Founded by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich in 1913, Supremus () conceived of the artist as liberated from everything that predetermined the ideal structure of life and art. Projecting that vision onto Cubism, which Malevich admired for its ability to deconstruct art, and in the process change its reference points of art, he led a group of Russian avant-garde artists—including Aleksandra Ekster, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Ivan Kliun, Ivan Puni, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Nina Genke-Meller, Ksenia Boguslavskaya and others—in what has been described as the first attempt to independently found a Russian avant-garde movement, seceding from the trajecto ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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LEF (journal)
''LEF'' ("''ЛЕФ''") was the journal of the Left Front of the Arts ("Левый фронт искусств"''"Levy Front Iskusstv"''), a widely ranging association of avant-garde writers, photographers, critics and designers in the Soviet Union. It had two runs, one from 1923 to 1925 as LEF, and later from 1927 to 1929 as '' Novy LEF'' ('New LEF'). The journal's objective, as set out in one of its first issues, was to "re-examine the ideology and practices of so-called leftist art, and to abandon individualism to increase art's value for developing communism." Productivism Although ''LEF'' was catholic in its choices of writers, it broadly reflected the concerns of the Productivist left-wing of Constructivism. The editors were Osip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky: fittingly, one a Russian Formalist critic and one a poet and designer who helped compose the 1912 manifesto of Russian Futurists entitled, "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste". The covers were designed by Alexander ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Vladimir Mayakovsky
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky ( – 14 April 1930) was a Russian poet, playwright, artist, and actor. During his early, Russian Revolution, pre-Revolution period leading into 1917, Mayakovsky became renowned as a prominent figure of the Russian Futurist movement. He co-signed the Futurist manifesto, ''A Slap in the Face of Public Taste'' (1913), and wrote such poems as ''A Cloud in Trousers'' (1915) and ''Backbone Flute'' (1916). Mayakovsky produced a large and diverse body of work during the course of his career: he wrote poems, wrote and directed plays, appeared in films, edited the art journal LEF (journal), ''LEF'', and produced agitprop posters in support of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Communist Party during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. Though Mayakovsky's work regularly demonstrated ideological and patriotic support for the ideology of the Bolsheviks and a strong admiration of Vladimir Lenin, his relationship with the Soviet state was always comp ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Dadaist
Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had spread to New York City and a variety of artistic centers in Europe and Asia. Within the umbrella of the movement, people used a wide variety of artistic forms to protest the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalism and modern war. To develop their protest, artists tended to make use of nonsense, irrationality, and an anti-bourgeois sensibility. The art of the movement began primarily as performance art, but eventually spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up technique, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent toward violence, war, and nationalism and maintained political affinities with radical politics on the left-wing and far-left politics. The movem ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Dziga Vertov
Dziga Vertov (born David Abelevich Kaufman; – 12 February 1954) was a Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary movie-making and the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical film-making cooperative which was active from 1968 to 1972. He was a member of the Kinoks collective, with Elizaveta Svilova and Mikhail Kaufman. In the 2012 ''Sight & Sound'' poll, critics voted Vertov's '' Man with a Movie Camera'' (1929) the eighth-greatest film ever made. Vertov's younger brothers Boris Kaufman and Mikhail Kaufman were also noted filmmakers, as was his wife, Yelizaveta Svilova. He worked with Boris Kaufman and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman on his most famous film ''Man with a Movie Camera''. Biography Early years Vertov was born David Abelevich Kaufman into a Jewish family in Białystok, Poland, then a part of the Russian Empire. He Russified his Jewish name ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Aleksei Gan
Aleksei Mikhailovich Gan (Russian language, Russian: Алексей Михайлович Ган; born Imberkh; 1887 or 1893 – 8 September, 1942) was a Russian anarchist and later Marxism, Marxist avant-garde artist, art theorist and graphic designer. Gan was a key figure in the development of Constructivism (art), Constructivism after the Russian Revolution. Life Gan's involvement with creative activity began in 1917 when he became involved with the Moscow Union of Food Workers with whom he set up an amateur theatrical group. The group encompassed various political groupings and following the October Revolution, Bolshevik seizure of power, some joined the Red Army, others the Black Guards or affiliated to the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Gan reorganised the group as the Proletarian Theatre, which affiliated to the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups. Gan was the first to write on art in the anarchist newspaper ''Anarkhiia'' (Anarchy) when it introduced an art section i ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were a radical Faction (political), faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with the Mensheviks at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, Second Party Congress in 1903. The Bolshevik party, formally established in 1912, seized power in Russia in the October Revolution of 1917, and was later renamed the Russian Communist Party, All-Union Communist Party, and ultimately the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Its ideology, based on Leninism, Leninist and later Marxism–Leninism, Marxist–Leninist principles, became known as Bolshevism. The origin of the RSDLP split was Lenin's support for a smaller party of professional revolutionaries, as opposed to the Menshevik desire for a broad party membership. The influence of the factions fluctuated in the years up to 1912, when the RSDLP formally split in two. The political philosophy of the Bolsheviks was based on the Leninist pr ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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RABIS
RABIS () or Sorabis (), the widespread Trade Union of Art Workers in Bolshevik Russia and later in the Soviet Union, was a Soviet creative union (a type of Soviet trade union) formed in May 1919. The Russian РАБИС and Сорабис are the abbreviations of the Russian phrases "РАботники ИСкусства" () and "СОюз РАботников ИСкусства" (), the two first characters of the words "СОюз", "РАботники" and "ИСкусства" used to add abbreviations. In 1920 a massive professional organization was formed in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and named Vserabis () — "ВСЕроссийский профессиональный союз РАботников ИСкусства" (). The abbreviations RABIS or Sorabis were used for local and regional Trade Unions and sometimes as short names of "Vserabis". After the creation of the Soviet Union, from 1924 the Vserabis () was known by the abbreviation "ВСЕсоюз ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Narkompros
The People's Commissariat for Education (or Narkompros; , directly translated as the "People's Commissariat for Enlightenment") was the Soviet agency charged with the administration of public education and most other issues related to culture. In 1946, it was transformed into the Ministry of Education. Its first head was Anatoly Lunacharsky. However he described Nadezhda Krupskaya as the "soul of Narkompros". Mikhail Pokrovsky, Dmitry Leshchenko and Evgraf Litkens also played important roles. Lunacharsky protected most of the avant-garde artists such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Despite his efforts, the official policy after Joseph Stalin put him in disgrace. Narkompros had seventeen sections, in addition to the main ones related to general education, e.g., * Likbez, a section for liquidation of illiteracy, * " Profobr", a section for professional education, * Glavlit, a section for literature and publishing (also in charge o ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Futurism
Futurism ( ) was an Art movement, artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Its key figures included Italian artists Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Luigi Russolo. Italian Futurism glorified modernity and, according to its doctrine, "aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past." Important Futurist works included Marinetti's 1909 ''Manifesto of Futurism'', Boccioni's 1913 sculpture ''Unique Forms of Continuity in Space'', Balla's 1913–1914 painting ''Abstract Speed + Sound'', and Russolo's ''The Art of Noises'' (1913). Although Futurism was largely an Italian phenomenon, parallel movements emerged in Russia, where some Russian Futurism , Russian Futurists would later go on to found gr ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |