Art of the 20th Century




A Revolution in the Arts

 

Art Styles in 20th century Art Map


 

The Great Avant-garde Movements

Year by Year - 1924 -1929


 

see also ADDITION:

From Surrealism to Fantastic Art 

(Dream art, Visionary art, Neo-surrealism, Magic realism, Psychedelic art, Visual art, Fantastic realism)

Surrealist Painting
 

Although the Metaphysical movement had declined by the 1920s, the advent of Surrealism rekindled interest in this type of painting. The Metaphysical School has been described as the precursor of Surrealism. However, the rational control that governed Metaphysical invention is absent from Surrealism, which sought to convey its message to the subconscious, exploiting involuntary psychic connections of ideas for self-expression. The immediate predecessor to Surrealism in art was, in fact, Dada. Developing from this movement. Surrealism absorbed certain Dadaist principles: in particular, its concepts of complete freedom and of the total interdependence of art and life. However, Surrealism put a positive and constructive emphasis on these motivations, in contrast with Dadaism's nihilistic attitude. Surrealism became politically involved with Marxism and, in 1930, the name of its official mouthpiece was changed from La revolution surrealiste to Le surrealisme ait service de la revolution. The movement's official date of birth was in 1924, when Andre Breton's literary manifesto appeared, in which he explained the theory of "automatism" - acts of spontaneous creation, on which the Surrealist theories were based. Two years later, Breton wrote another article devoted mainly to Surrealist painting. When the German Max Ernst (1891-1976), the Frenchman Andre Masson, and the Spaniard Joan Miro met at Kahnweiler's gallery in Paris in 1923, a certain common direction was agreed upon, although it is difficult to identify a specific Surrealist style since each artist developed his own interpretation of Surrealism. The influence of Freud's psychoanalytical theories is discernible in all Surrealist painters' work. His theories identified the psychological processes of the unconscious, stressed the significance of dreams, and gave meaning to apparently incongruous thought-associations and seemingly illogical free associative ideas. Max Ernst's famous definition of beauty echoes this Freudian influence: "As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine with an umbrella on a dissection table", suggesting that by matching incompatible realities, new and intriguing aesthetic meanings would be revealed.

Ernst was a highly imaginative painter, endowing dreams and tricks of the mind with a convincing and coherent figurative appearance. His Elephant Celebes (1921) and Oedipus Rex (1922) are considered a Surrealist masterpieces even though they were painted before the movement was founded. From 1929 onwards, the eccentric artist Salvador Dali (1904-89) employed a visionary and hallucinatory technique in his paranoiac and psychopathological paintings, seeking to call reality into question and to be rid of any rational foundation. The Belgian artist Rene Magritte (1898-1967) was the extraordinary creator of paintings with strong conceptual tensions, which emphasized contradictions and double meanings, confounding the observer's expectations and challenging perceptions. Surrealism occupied centre stage in the panorama of interwar European culture, partly due to the high quality of Surrealist paintings, and partly because of its ability to encompass artistic, social, and political issues. Although Paris remained the hub of their activity, talented Surrealist artists such as Arshile Gorky, Roberto Matta, and Wifredo Lam were also based in the US.

Surrealism

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism's emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published “The Surrealist Manifesto” in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.

In the poetry of Breton, Paul Éluard, Pierre Reverdy, and others, Surrealism manifested itself in a juxtaposition of words that was startling because it was determined not by logical but by psychological—that is, unconscious—thought processes. Its major achievements, however, were in the field of painting. Surrealist painting was influenced not only by Dadaism but also by the fantastic and grotesque images of such earlier painters as Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco de Goya and of closer contemporaries such as Odilon Redon, Giorgio de Chirico, and Marc Chagall. The practice of Surrealist art strongly emphasized methodological research and experimentation, stressing the work of art as a means for prompting personal psychic investigation and revelation. Breton, however, demanded firm doctrinal allegiance. Thus, although the Surrealists held a group show in Paris in 1925, the history of the movement is full of expulsions, defections, and personal attacks.

The major Surrealist painters were Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Andre Masson, Rene Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali, Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux, and Joan Miro. The work of these artists is too diverse to be summarized categorically as the Surrealist approach in the visual arts. Each artist sought his own means of self-exploration. Some single-mindedly pursued a spontaneous revelation of the unconscious, freed from the controls of the conscious mind; others, notably Miro, used Surrealism as a liberating starting point for an exploration of personal fantasies, conscious or unconscious, often through formal means of great beauty. A range of possibilities falling between the two extremes can be distinguished. At one pole, exemplified at its purest by the works of Arp, the viewer is confronted with images, usually biomorphic, that are suggestive but indefinite. As the viewer's mind works with the provocative image, unconscious associations are liberated, and the creative imagination asserts itself in a totally open-ended investigative process. To a greater or lesser extent, Ernst, Masson, and Miro also followed this approach, variously called organic, emblematic, or absolute Surrealism. At the other pole the viewer is confronted by a world that is completely defined and minutely depicted but that makes no rational sense: fully recognizable, realistically painted images are removed from their normal contexts and reassembled within an ambiguous, paradoxical, or shocking framework. The work aims to provoke a sympathetic response in the viewer, forcing him to acknowledge the inherent “sense” of the irrational and logically inexplicable. The most direct form of this approach was taken by Magritte in simple but powerful paintings such as that portraying a normal table setting that includes a plate holding a slice of ham, from the centre of which stares a human eye. Dali, Roy, and Delvaux rendered similar but more complex alien worlds that resemble compelling dreamlike scenes.

A number of specific techniques were devised by the Surrealists to evoke psychic responses. Among these were frottage (rubbing with graphite over wood or other grained substances) and grattage (scraping the canvas)—both developed by Ernst to produce partial images, which were to be completed in the mind of the viewer; automatic drawing, a spontaneous, uncensored recording of chaotic images that “erupt” into the consciousness of the artist; and found objects.

With its emphasis on content and free form, Surrealism provided a major alternative to the contemporary, highly formalistic Cubist movement and was largely responsible for perpetuating in modern painting the traditional emphasis on content.
 

see EXPLORATION Surrealist Art (by Sarane Alexandrian) Preface CHAPTER ONE Precursors CHAPTER TWO Anti-art (Dadaism) CHAPTER THREE Conquest of the marvellous (Pittura Metafisica) CHAPTER FOUR Surrealism and painting CHAPTER FIVE Towards a revolutionary art CHAPTER SIX Across the world CHAPTER SEVEN The object CHAPTER EIGHT Festivals of the imagination CHAPTER NINE In the United States CHAPTER TEN Surrealist architecture CHAPTER ELEVEN The post-war period CHAPTER TWELVE Occultation

see EXPLORATION Surrealism "The Dream of Revolution" (by Richard Leslie)   INTRODUCTION BEFORE SURREALISM THERE WAS... THE EUROPEAN AVANT-GARDE THE SURREALIST REVOLUTION THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF SURREALISM POSTSCRIPT: LEGACIES

Automatism

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Technique first used by Surrealist painters and poets to express the creative force of the unconscious in art.

In the 1920s the Surrealist poets André Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault tried writing in a hypnotic or trance like state, recording their train of mental associations without censorship or attempts at formal exposition. These poets were influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic theory and believed that the symbols and images thus produced, though appearing strange or incongruous to the conscious mind, actually constituted a record of a person's unconscious psychic forces and hence possessed an innate artistic significance. Little of lasting value remains from the Surrealists' attempts at “automatic” writing, however.

Automatism was a more productive vehicle for the Surrealist painters. Andre Masson, Arshile Gorky, and Max Ernst, in particular, experimented with fantastic or erotic images that were spontaneously recorded in a kind of visual free association, without the artist's conscious censorship; the images were then either left as originally conceived or were consciously elaborated upon by the artist. Related to automatic drawing are the techniques Ernst devised to involve chance in the creation of a picture. Among them were “frottage,” placing canvas or paper over different materials such as wood and rubbing it with graphite to make an impression of the grain; “grattage,” scratching the painted surface of the canvas with pointed tools to make it more tactile; and “decalcomania,” pressing liquid paint between two canvases and then pulling the canvases apart to produce ridges and bubbles of pigment. The chance forms created by these techniques were then allowed to stand as incomplete, suggestive images, or they were completed by the artist according to his instinctive response to them.

Between 1946 and 1951 a group of Canadian painters—including Paul-Emile Borduas, Albert Dumouchel, Jean Paul Mousseau, and Jean-Paul Riopelle—known as Les Automatistes, practiced automatism. From about 1950 a group of artists in the United States called Action painters adopted automatic methods, some under the direct influence of Masson, Gorky, and Ernst, all of whom had moved to the United States to escape World War II. Seeking abstract pictorial equivalents for states of mind, painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, and Bradley Walker Tomlin variously experimented with chance drippings of paint on the canvas and free, spontaneous brushstrokes. This approach was seen as a means to strip away artifice and unlock basic creative instincts deep within the artist's personality. Automatism has since become a part of the technical repertoire of modern painting, though its prominence declined with that of Action painting itself.

 

Frottage [from Fr. frotter: ‘to rub’].

Technique of reproducing a texture or relief design by laying paper over it and rubbing it with some drawing medium, for example pencil or crayon. Max Ernst and other Surrealist artists incorporated such rubbings into their paintings by means of collage. It is also a popular method of making rubbings of medieval church brasses and other ancient monuments and inscriptions.

 

 Veristic Surrealism

The second tendency of Surrealist painting, sometimes called Veristic Surrealism, was to depict with meticulous clarity and often in great detail a world analogous to the dream world. Before responding to the Metaphysical painting of de Chirico and being brought into the Surrealist Movement in 1929, Salvador Dali had admired the command of detail in artists such as Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891) and the Pre-Raphaelites; his physical technique continued to reflect this admiration. Dali's importance for Surrealism was that he invented his own 'psycho technique', a method he called 'critical paranoia'. He deliberately cultivated delusions similar to those of paranoiacs in the cause of wresting hallucinatory images from his conscious mind. Dali's images - his bent watches, his figures, half human, half chest of drawers - have made him the most famous of all Surrealist painters. But when he changed to a more academic style in 1937 Breton expelled him from the Movement.
The Surrealist paintings of Rene Magritte combine convincing descriptions of people and objects in bizarre juxtapositions with a competent but pedestrian physical painting technique. The results question everyday reality, stand it on its head and present a new surreality. These odd juxtapositions were explored by the English painter Edward Wadsworth, who used tempera to achieve a dreamlike clarity in his work. Surrealists approved of desire in its attack on reason and the Veristic Surrealism of Paul Delvaux , in which women appear in the cool surroundings of noble architecture and exude an hallucinatory eroticism.

Veristic Surrealism subdivides into a second main type in the work of Yves Tanguy. The dreamlike visions that Tanguy produced from the unconscious layers of the mind contain meticulously described yet imaginary objects. There are no bizarre juxtapositions. His is a self consistent world that convinces on its own terms as in a dream. In the work of the Veristic Surrealists, the surface of the painting tends to be flat and glossy: the viewer is reminded as little as possible that the illusion is composed of paint and the hallucinatory effect is thereby enhanced.

 Metamorphism

Term applied to the process by which one shape is transformed into another, especially in Surrealism and other tendencies in 20th-century art. The concept of metamorphosis, encompassing literary sources from Ovid through Dante Alighieri to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was revived in the early 19th century. For the ancient Greeks, as outlined by Ovid, it concerned the miraculous process of the transformation from the world of nature to another sphere of existence; in Goethe’s reformulation of metamorphosis in terms of the evolution of organic life (1790), however, it means a law of formation. Being based on the principles of ‘polarity’ and ‘enhancement’, it rules the transformation of nature and defines art as an enhanced ‘second nature’.

Decalcomania

Technique for generating images used, for example, by the Surrealist artist Oscar Dominguez: paint is applied to a piece of paper that is then either folded, creating a mirrored pattern, or pressed against another sheet . The resulting image can then be elaborated, as in a blot drawing. It is a popular technique with young school children.

 

Oscar Dominguez
Decalcomania
 

_____________

Devetsil
 

Czech avant-garde group of architects, painters, sculptors, collagists, photographers, film makers, designers and writers, active 1920s–30s. Its name is a composite of the words ‘nine’ and ‘forces’. The group’s leader, KAREL TEIGE, advocated a reconciliation between utilitarianism and lyrical subjectivity: ‘Constructivism and Poetism’. Devetsil’s architects, including JAROMÍR KREJCAR and KAREL HONZÍK, invested the geometry of architecture with an element of poetry, while painters and photographers such as Toyen and Jindrich Styrsky moved towards Surrealism, and when the group dissolved many of its members, including Teige, joined the Czech Surrealist group.

_____________
 

_____________

Blue Four [Blauen Vier].

Name applied to a group of German painters, founded at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, on 31 March 1924. The group consisted of Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Alexei Jawlensky and Lyonel Feininger, who were formerly associated with the BLAUE REITER group. The idea for founding the Blue Four came from Galka Scheyer, a former pupil of Jawlensky, who sought to make the work and ideas of these artists better known in the USA through exhibitions, lectures and sales. While the Blue Four was not an official association, its name was chosen to give American audiences an idea about the type of artists involved and also to allude to the artists’ previous association with the Blaue Reiter group. In May 1924 Scheyer travelled to New York, where the first Blue Four exhibition took place at the Charles Daniel Gallery (Feb–March 1925). Scheyer then moved to California, where the first of many Blue Four exhibitions in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas took place at the Oakland Museum in autumn 1925. Further exhibitions, often with lectures by Scheyer, were held in Portland, OR (1927), Seattle, WA (1926, 1936), Spokane, WA (1927), Mexico City (1931) and in Chicago, IL (1932), as well as at the Ferdinand Möller Gallery in Berlin (1929).

_____________
 

_____________

Block group [Pol. Blok].

Polish avant-garde group active in Warsaw between 1924 and 1926. Group members included Henryk Berlewi, J. Golus, W. Kajruksztis, Katarzyna Kobro, K. Krynski, Maria Nicz-Borowiak (1896–1944), Aleksander Rafalowski (1894–1981), Henryk Stazewski, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Mieczyslaw Szczuka, M. Szulc, Teresa Zarnower (d after 1945). Most members of the group had already exhibited together in some of the numerous exhibitions of the avant-garde in Poland in the early 1920s. They shared an enthusiasm for Soviet Constructivism, but there were already significant divisions within the group when it was formally founded in early 1924, holding its first official exhibition in the showroom of the car manufacturer Laurent-Clément in Warsaw in March of that year. The first issue of the group’s own magazine, Blok, appeared at the same time.

_____________

 

_____________

Kapists [Capists; Pol. Kapisci, from ‘Komitet Paryski’: Parisian Committee].

Polish group of painters. In 1924 a number of students of Józef Pankiewicz at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków formed a committee, whose aim was to organize a study trip to Paris. Jan Cybis (1897–1972), Hanna Rudzka-Cybisowa (1897–1988), Zygmunt Waliszewski, Artur Nacht-Samborski, Piotr Potworowski and Józef Czapski were among the painters who therefore founded the Paris branch of the Kraków Academy from 1924 to 1930. They gained fame after two successful exhibitions at the Galerie Zak in Paris (1930) and the Galerie Moos in Geneva (1931). Most of the artists returned to Poland in 1931, where they were still known as the Kapists. They were a loose association, and, although they had no clearly defined programme, they were principally influenced by the work of Pierre Bonnard. The members were Post-Impressionist painters representing the trend known as Polish Colourism, and they stressed the importance of good craftsmanship in painting. Generally their work is associated with a particular sensitivity to colour, its harmony and contrasts. Forms were built with colour, and the use of perspective and chiaroscuro was limited, as in Rudzka-Cybisowa’s Still-life with Armchair (c. 1956; Poznan, N. Mus.). They painted from nature but did not imitate it, and their compositions were sometimes close to abstraction (e.g. Shells by Jan Cybis, 1953–4; Poznan, N. Mus.). Zygmunt Waliszewski was the only member of the group who did not reject literary subject-matter (e.g. the Toilet of Venus, 1933; Warsaw, N. Mus.). Kapists were well-represented on the staff of the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, opened in 1945. Along with Constructivism, the Polish Colourism introduced by the Kapists became one of the most popular trends in Polish painting in the first half of the 20th century.

_____________
 

_____________

Fellowship of St Luke [Brotherhood of St Luke; Pol. Bractwo Swietego Lukasza].

Polish group of painters that flourished in 1925–39. It emerged from the studio of Tadeusz Pruszkowski (1888–1942) at the School of Fine Arts (Sekola Sztuk Pieknych), Warsaw, and was the first post-war group in Warsaw’s largest art school. The fellowship’s 14 members, all pupils of Pruszkowski, included Boleslaw Cybis (1895–1957), Jan Gotard (1898–1943), Antoni Michalak (1902–75) and Jan Zamojski (1901–85). The fellowship modelled itself on the medieval guilds, and the ‘Master’ Pruszkowski ceremoniously emancipated his pupils. The leadership of the group rested with the ‘Chapter’ (Kapitula). The members of the fellowship received special diplomas of emancipation. The group’s artistic programme was also based on former models, primarily on 16th- and 17th-century Dutch painting, although the group was essentially held together by ties of friendship. The artistic character of the fellowship was largely influenced by the personality of Pruszkowski, an admirer of Frans Hals and Diego Velázquez and a colourful character in the Warsaw art world.

_____________

 

_____________

Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine [Ukrain. Asotsiatsiya Revolyutsiynoho Mystetstva Ukrainy].

Ukrainian group of artists active from 1925 to 1930. The association was founded by statute on 25 August 1925 in Kiev, with branches formed subsequently in other Ukrainian cities such as Kharokov (Kharkiv), Odessa, Dnepropetrovs’k (Dnipropetrivs’k) and Uman’. Members also lived in Moscow, Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and Paris. Artists of various artistic backgrounds and different training belonged to the association, but it was best represented by the avant-garde artists Oleksandr Bogomazov(1880-1930),
 

Oleksandr Bogomazov (1880-1930) Armenian Woman

Nina Genke-Meller (1893–1954), Vasyl’ Yermilov (1894–1967), Oleksandr Khvostov (1895–1968), Vadym Meller (1884–1962), Viktor Pal’mov (1888–1929) and Vladimir Tatlin. Its theoretical platform, formulated by Ivan Vrona (1887–1970), rector of the progressive Kiev State Art Institute, was based on Marxist principles, recognizing the era as a transitional stage towards a more cohesive national proletarian reality. The association’s objective was to develop the strengths of Ukrainian artists and to be flexible enough to be able to consolidate a variety of formalist leanings without sacrificing high technical quality. Together with the Association of Artists of Red Ukraine (AKhChU: Asotsiatsiya Khudozhnykiv Chervonoi Ukrainy), it succeeded in organizing one of the first exhibitions devoted to Ukrainian art of the 1920s. By 1927 ARMU was the single most influential body of artists in the country. It came to be dominated by painters who were attracted to the monumental art of MYKHAYLO BOYCHUK, which was inspired by the Byzantine period. Among those who followed Boychuk’s style were Sofiya A. Nalepins’ka-Boychuk (1884–1939), Ivan I. Padalka (1897–1938), Oksana Pavlenko (1895–1991), Mykola Rokyts’ky (1901–44), and Vasyl’ F. Sedlyar (1889–1937). In debating the means whereby ARMU’s aim to revitalize the artistic culture of Ukraine could be realized, Sedlyar (1926) laid equal emphasis on the importance of concepts such as artistic industry and material culture, as well as on the visual arts. He defended the association against its rival, the ASSOCIATION OF ARTISTS OF REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA (AKhRR), a group that turned to 19th-century Realism and by doing so stood in opposition to the left wing and to Productivist art as a whole. By June 1930, internal differences with ARMU had caused its leaders to dissolve it and to organize the group October (Ukrain. Zhovten’) in its place.

_____________
 

_____________

Gresham group

Association of Hungarian artists who met regularly at the Gresham Café in Budapest from the mid-1920s to 1944. A loose and friendly association free from institutional constraints, they were united merely by the approximate similarity of their aesthetic thinking, rather than any particular style. Such leading members of the Hungarian avant-garde as Róbert Berény and Aurél Bernáth were, especially in their youth, among the artists at the Gresham. In the 1920s the group contained such representatives of the nascent Hungarian Expressionist movement as József Egry, István Szonyi, Béni Ferenczy and Pál Pátzay (1896–1979). They are also often referred to as the ‘post-Nagybánya school’, which refers to the principles of the NAGYBÁNYA COLONY, active in the 1910s, and to their desire to uphold the artistic tradition and stance of the group represented primarily by Károly Ferenczy.
_____________

 

_____________

Gruppe Progressiver Kunstler [Gruppe der Progressiven]

German group of artists. It was founded in Cologne in 1925 by Franz Seiwert (1894–1933) and Heinrich Hoerle (1895–1936), with Otto Freundlich, Gerd Arntz (b 1900), Hans Schmitz (1896–1977), Augustin Tschinkel (b 1905) and the photographer August Sander. The group extended the programme of a ‘proletarian’ art that had characterized Seiwert and Hoerle’s STUPID GROUP and their intervening work to include artists from other centres in the Rhineland and throughout Germany. They supported the revolutionary opposition to the ineffectual Weimar Republic, which they saw as a tool of repressive right-wing elements in the establishment. Following collaborations with the idealist and pacifist Berlin periodical Die Aktion, Seiwert and Hoerle started their own artistic publication, A bis Z, in October 1929, beginning the group’s most fertile period. While the periodical attracted contributions from a broad cross-section of artists (including Raoul Haussmann, Jean Hélion and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy), the group favoured a stripped-down figurative style, whose schematized forms and abstract elements drew attention to the mechanization of contemporary existence. With echoes of Oskar Schlemmer’s work and of Parisian Purism, some compositions also tended towards the coldness of Neue Sachlichkeit. Their critical political stance made them an immediate target for Nazi opposition. The group and periodical were ended in 1933, Seiwert died the same year, and Hoerle and Freundlich’s work was subsequently designated as entartete Kunst.

_____________

 

_____________

OSA [Ob’edineniye Sovremennikh Arkhitektorov; Rus.: Union of Contemporary Architects].

Soviet architectural group, active in Moscow from 1925 to 1930. It was founded by MOISEY GINZBURG and Aleksandr Vesnin and it attracted many of Moscow’s Modernist architects by arguing for architecture’s pivotal role in creating the new Soviet society. OSA’s activities passed through several distinct phases in response to changing political circumstances and engaged the public on several fronts: these included an exhibition of contemporary architecture in 1927; architectural conferences in 1928 and 1929; and the bi-monthly journal Sovremennaya arkhitektura, which appeared from 1926 to 1930. Disavowing aesthetic and formal considerations, OSA made functional and technical matters pre-eminent. Starting with general reflections about the USSR, OSA architects then analysed the State’s building requirements in terms of cost, user profile and building types. The group endorsed a view of architecture as an integral part of the State apparatus, with a role in transforming society, for example by evolving new building types, such as the Workers’ Club, and with responsibilities, for example in containing costs by adopting prefabrication methods. Their approach to design was disciplined, with the design process itself being reduced to four distinct phases: the building programme’s spatial organization and technical requirements; the volumetric implications of these factors; their physical implementation; and the consolidation of the previous three steps into architectural coherence and unity. This rigorous design method helped OSA to forge its own identity and to create a legacy of designs challenging the best work of other European and Soviet avant-garde groups. The most characteristic designs by architects associated with the group include: the Vesnin brothers’ unexecuted projects for the Palace of Labour (1922–3), Moscow, and the Leningrad Pravda Building (1924), Moscow; Grigory Barkhin’s Izvestiya Building (1925–7), Moscow; Ginzburg’s unexecuted project for the Orgametals Headquarters (1926–7); Il’ya Golosov’s Zuyev Club (1927–9), Moscow; and Ivan Leonidov’s unexecuted projects for the Lenin Institute (1927) and the Ministry of Heavy Industry (1933–4), both Moscow. All of these designs, however, owed as much to the talents of their respective authors as to OSA’s design method.
_____________
 

_____________

Circle of Artists [Rus. Krug Khudozhnikov].

Russian group of painters and sculptors, active from 1926 to 1932. It was founded in 1926 by graduates in painting from the Higher (State) Artistic and Technical Institute (Vkhutein) in Leningrad (now St Petersburg); most of them had been students of Aleksey Karev (1879–1942), Kuz’ma Petrov-Vodkin and Aleksandr Savinov (1881–1942). The group’s goal, similar to that of the SOCIETY OF EASEL PAINTERS and the FOUR ARTS SOCIETY OF ARTISTS, was to promote the professional role of painters and sculptors and to play an intermediary role between conservative artists and those who were avant-garde extremists. Seeking a modern art that actively drew on the painterly achievements of the past and yet was an expression of contemporary life, the group declared its rejection of literary content and ‘agitprop’ intention. Instead, it concentrated on easel painting and sculpture in the round while at the same time encouraging formal experimentation.
_____________

 

_____________

Gruppo 7

Italian group of architects. It was formed in 1926 by seven students from the Scuola Superiore di Architettura del Politecnico, Milan: GIUSEPPE TERRAGNI, Guido Frette, Ubaldo Castagnoli, Sebastiano Larco, Carlo Enrico Rava, Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini . Castagnoli was replaced in 1927 by Adalberto Libera.

_____________