Soviet Abstract Art: A thread.

The Soviet or Russian avant-garde movement has its origins before the Great October Socialist Revolution. With the iconic artists such as Kandinsky, Nataliya Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, and others developing it throughout the early 20th century.

However, it was not until the development of Constructivism in 1915 by Alexandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin when this form of art started adopting its illustrious post-revolutionary shape. Propagandistic plaques and buildings were extremely popular in this epoque.

After the October Revolution, there was a huge cultural shift, with the popularization of innovative forms of art, such as the Constructivism and Prolekult (proletarian culture), which were supposed to represent the new, socialist, progressive reality of the Soviet lifestyle.

Constructivist art had a similar conceptual purpose as the prior Russian formalism: to encourage an active observation of the art work.
The constructivists defined their movement as a combination of faktura (the object's material properties) and tektonika (its spacial presence).

Constructivism was first incorporated exclusively into 3 dimensional works, with conceptual constructions that had some kinetic elements, such as Tatlin's sculptures. Then it was applied to 2 dimensional works, such as posters, postcards, books, photomontages and factographies.

Constructivist architecture intended to represent the modern, recently industrialized and urbanized Soviet society. It rejected ornamentation in order to embrace the beauty of raw materials and bold, heavily geometric shapes.

The constructivist photomontage shared a lot in common with Dadaism, since both of them respond for collages of photographs and brightly colored painted sections. However, constructivism focused less on cathartisism and chaos and more on creating a flashy futuristic atmosphere.

The last but not least constructivist medium was the constructivist graphic design, which could be found in books, posters and in cinema. Their brightly colored, geometric illustrations inspired many western avant-garde and socialist designers.

Another Soviet avant-garde movement was suprematism, defined by the use of basic geometric forms and a limited color scheme. Malevich, the founder of this movement, emphasized that suprematism, as opposed to constructivism, was based on anti-matrialism and anti-utilitarianism.

Russian futurism, or cubo-futurism combined elements from Analytical Cubism and Futurism, characterized by the free integrstion of lines, shapes, colors, viewpoints and textures. This movement emerged from the artists' free, visual interpretation of the revolutionary ideals.

The Soviet futurists were fascinated by the dynamism of modern machinery and the new urban lifestyle. Their influence can be found in paintings, films such as the ones by Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Eisenstein and Vertov, and even in poetic literature, such as the one by Mayakovskiy.

With the appearance of Socialist Realism the 1920s, the two movements had a hard time coexisting with such different philosophies. However, arguments on which is more valuable are pointless, since both made their beautiful contributions to the development of Socialist art.