From Space in Modern Art to a Spatial Art History

Reassessing Constructivism through the Publication "Circle" (1937)

Jutta Vinzent

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110592733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This book traces artists' theories of constructive space in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on these concepts and recent theories on space, it develops a methodology termed 'Spatial Art History' that conceives of artworks as physical spatio-temporal things, which produce the social, to overcome the reductive understanding of art as a mere mirror or facilitator of society.

1 Introduction: Circle, Space and a Spatial Art History

This book focuses on spatial theories and practices in the first half of the twentieth century. Taking the richly illustrated publication Circle – edited by Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson and Leslie Martin with written contributions from Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, Maxwell Fry, Sigfried Giedion, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Read and Jan Tschichold – as a springboard for avant-garde views on space, it argues that spatial theories and practices played a significant role in modernism, particularly in constructive and constructivist art.¹ On the basis of such theories and practices that have been developed against a space understood as closed to resist a Kantian a priori idea of space, and in combination with recent theories which conceive of space as neither simply geography nor an empty container but as being produced by subjects (Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja and the Spatial Turn), the book suggests and probes a new methodology termed Spatial Art History that takes into account constructive and social aspects in the analysis of things, defined in the widest sense as anything that can be exchanged, including art objects and written material.² It thereby understands the relationship between things and social life (in the form of relationships) as correlative and reciprocal, producing each other. The methodology is further enriched by (actor‐) network theories that understand not only the relationships between things and the social as associations, but assume things are related to other things in a network. Things and human beings are actors. It thereby does not understand networks primarily as a challenge to notions of placing art works geographically and politically as fixed, such as for example, brought forward by Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann’s influential book Toward a Geography of Art (2004),³ but rather as a way of describing how art works, ideas and human beings are related to each other, namely by associations that are assumed as infinite. Inspired by Bruno Latour, these associations are characterised by a distancing, by a spacing of things to each other (rather than a placing) and of things in relation to people, being further away or closer to each other, denser or lighter, critiquing strict linearity, originality and one-dimensionality that accepts only cause-effect relationships and assumes of originality as singularity. In view of artists and artworks, this means that the methodology does not conceive of the artist as genius who directs materials and objects without the assumption of their transformation, nor of art works which determine all possibilities of the artist, nor of artists who imagine an artwork ready to be and then create without considering the possibility of processual changes. Hence this book’s methodology focuses on the exchange of ideas of space in writing, the circulation and dissemination through publications, and the relationships between art works and producers (both as artists and as viewers of art works). As the title suggests, this introduction begins with a literature review on space in modern art (as a concept) and moves on to developing a Spatial Art History. Therefore, if the readers are primarily interested in the spatial methodology, they should skip chapter parts 1.1 and 1.2, sections which have been written particularly for those interested in Constructivism and the publication Circle, and continue reading sections 1.3 (especially the part titled ‘correlative and volumised’) and 4.1.

1.1 Significance and Aims in View of Constructivism and Circle

The debate around Constructivism, abstract and constructive art in 1930s Britain is arguably epitomised in Circle subtitled ‘International Survey of Constructive Art’ and published in 1937. Edited by the architect Leslie Martin, the painter Ben Nicholson and the sculptor Naum Gabo, Circle brought together these like-minded British artists and refugee from Nazism; contributors included the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius and the Neo-Plasticist Piet Mondrian and, as already mentioned above, a large number of avant-gardists from across the so-called West, namely Europe and North America, stretching its reach to locations beyond the metropolises of Berlin, Paris and London to places such as cities in Scandinavia, Poland and Malta, which are rather under-researched in light of modern art. Although not being global or crossing colonial and imperial borders beyond the West, investigating this range of entangled network formed around Circle concentrates and widens the view of what has been considered so far as the centres of the avant-garde and of the west in geographical and ideological terms. It will further show exactly how these ideas travelled and how social relations were formed by an exchange of theories and practices.

This book takes its starting-point from an edited publication that per se consists of relationships between contributions authored by a number of people. It focuses on the spatial concepts formulated in Circle, exploring their central role in the shaping of modernism beyond 1930s Britain, as the book brings to the fore a network of internationally renowned artists and those interested in the contemporary context. It will thus introduce the different ideas and visual representations of space for the first time and contribute to a fuller understandings of modern sculpture, painting, exhibitions and art theory at a time when London was considered a central site for modernism for a short period, after first Berlin and then Paris became unsafe because of the spreading of National Socialism and before the art centre moved to New York. The focus on spatiality will also advance theoretical understanding of space and cast a fresh light on the established artists, showing that questions of space occupied much of modernist minds. This space is different from that which concerned the central perspective and the efforts of modern artists until the Cubists and Futurists who critiqued it. It is likewise different from spatial concerns that installation art raised in the 1960s, namely the ‘real’ space of the spectator. In the first half of the twentieth century, there were artists defining space that has variously been described as space-time, infinite, illusionary and constructive. And it is this kind of space, with its differing attitudes, with which this book is concerned, because it allows a comparison to the spatial concepts developed as part of theories and methodologies related to the Spatial Turn.

Based on previous scholarship on Constructivism and constructive art, this book expands the knowledge of abstract, constructive and constructivist art by providing a perspective that puts to the fore the associations and networks of theories and practices created by publications, namely by text and illustrations. Such focus help us see movements and groups in a system marked by social relations that not only form a context or cultural field, but are produced and transformed through the exchange of ideas and practices.

1.2 Literature Review

The central focus of this book, the publication Circle, has received scholarly attention in a number of publications but only in one monograph, namely a catalogue accompanying an exhibition held at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, in 1982.⁴ Edited by Jeremy Lewison, its contributions focus on Circle’s themes of architecture, art and life and mention the collaboration between émigrés and artists from Britain. It does, however, not consider the concepts of space put forward by Circle. Therefore, while the literature, particularly on contributors to Circle and on constructivism in the UK, stresses the relevance of Circle to the formation and dissemination of abstract, constructive and constructivist ideas and practices in the UK, the spatial concepts in Circle have not been considered in detail yet.⁵

Constructivism

Constructivism has received more scholarly attention than Circle. While constructivist ideas have played a larger role in more recent literature in a number of disciplines, scholarship in English on Constructivism as an art movement had its heydays from the 1970s to the 1990s with Stephen Bann (ed.), The Tradition of Constructivism (1974); John Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-garde (1983) and the now classic by Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (1983).⁶ These books considered Constructivism in Russia and its relationship to the West at a time when the Iron Curtain still separated the world along an east-west axis that also divided Europe, politically dominated by such ideological approaches as Socialist Communism and democracy, a time when undertaking research by Western scholars in archives behind the Iron Curtain was much more difficult than today.⁷ Therefore, these publications established also a bridge between Russian Constructivism and the West, highlighting the fore the relationships to the Bauhaus and De Stijl and establishing the movement’s style and theories as being characterised by ‘constructing’ non-figurative art, rather than creating or designing it, to emphasise the closeness to technology, rejecting the idea of autonomous art. Constructivist art is further defined by favouring geometric forms, design and art practice for social purposes. An analysis of the art works therefore always included not only architecture, sculpture and painting, but also graphic design, as it was equated with functionalism and utilitarianism. The latter has conventionally been seen as a difference between Russian/Soviet Constructivism and its forms in the West, which were identified as idealistic rather than utilitarian. These forms are therefore often termed not as Constructivist but as ‘concrete’ and ‘constructive’ ideas and practices.⁸ Bann in particular considered such forms in a context going beyond the UK and produced a diagram that will be discussed in detail further down. However, the scholarship of this period has concentrated on style, movement and artists, on ‘history’ and ‘tradition’ with a view to overcome to some extent research that has a strictly evolutionary and/or linear approach to movements.⁹

After the opening of the Iron Curtain, interest in Constructivism arose again particularly in the English-speaking world, concentrating on women artists in Russian Constructivism and on the question of possessions.¹⁰ It was now also possible to approach Russian Constructivism openly without running the danger of accusations of promoting communist ideas in the West; the Royal Academy of Arts in London organised a large exhibition to mark the centenary of the 1917 Russian Revolution and its aftermath (1917 to 1932), being able to mention in the title ‘Soviet’ art and architecture.¹¹

More recent scholarship on Constructivist art concentrated on countries neglected so far, including former Soviet bloc states, such as the Czech Republic and Hungary, nation-states that play a role in view of Circle, as some of its contributors came from and were published there.¹² Two scholars in more recent years have expanded the discussion of Constructivist art in the UK. In 2005, Alan Fowler submitted a PhD thesis on Constructivist Art in Br...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Circle, Space and a Spatial Art History
• 2 Associations between the Planning, Publication and Reception of Circle
• 3 Spatial Concepts in Circle and Beyond
• 4 Outlook
• Bibliography
• List of Illustrations
• Index