The Avant Garde Trio: Suprematism, Constructivism, De Stijl

Around 1915, Kasimir Malevich devised a style called Suprematism, which proved to have a lasting impact on Russian graphic design, as well as the future of modern graphic design. Malevich’s Suprematist paintings carried Cubist abstraction to its logical extreme, consisting of colorful squares and rectangles that appear to float in an infinite space. The blocks of color are unmodulated, the compositional structures often diagonal and suggestive of dynamic movement. This is reductive geometric abstraction par excellence; Malevich desired to invent a new universal language with strong parallels to the later work of De Stijl in the Netherlands. Like the mature works of De Stijl artists, Suprematist compositions are entirely non-objective, meaning they bear no representational relationship to the natural world. Malevich christened his work Suprematism in reference to “the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art.” Malevich was optimistic that his work was a perfect fit for the new society that was arising after the Russian Revolution.

For many Russian designers and intellectuals after the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the newly founded Soviet Union obliged them to originate new artistic styles for their new, utopian society. Perhaps the most influential group of artists who tried to serve the state was the Constructivists, a group of artists who based their aesthetic on the pioneering sculpture of Vladimir Tatlin.

• Constructivism as an active force lasted until around 1934, having a great deal of effect on developments in the art of the Weimar Republic and elsewhere, before being replaced by Socialist Realism. Its motifs have sporadically recurred in other art movements since.
  
• The First Working Group of Constructivists (including Liubov Popova, Alexander Vesnin, Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and the theorists Alexei Gan, Boris Arvatov and Osip Brik) would arrive at a definition of Constructivism as the combination of faktura: the particular material properties of the object, and tektonika, its spatial presence.
• In general, De Stijl proposed ultimate simplicity and abstraction, both in architecture and painting, by using only straight horizontal and vertical lines and rectangular forms.
  
• The formal vocabulary was limited to the primary colours, red, yellow, and blue, and the three primary values, black, white, and grey.
• Piet Mondrian (Dutch) was the group's leading figure. He published a manifesto titled Neo-Plasticism in 1920.
  
• Painter Theo van Doesberg had started a journal named De Stijl in 1917, which continued publication until 1928, spreading the theories of the group, which also included the painter George Vantongerloo, along with the architects Jacobus Johannes P. Oud and Gerrit Rietveld. Their work exerted tremendous influence on the Bauhaus and the International Style.