Word: constructivist
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...general title "Trends of the '20s." They focused on German Dada, on the Bauhaus and its circle, and on international constructivism. "Paris-Berlin" overlaps the earlier shows in those areas; many of the "classics" of the '20s, like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's light-space modulators and constructivist paintings, or the ferocious social satires of George Grosz and Otto Dix, or the Dada visions of mechanized man by Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch, are on view again in Paris. But the new show deepens the argument by paying more attention to the social and political aims...
During the '20s, space itself?articulated air?became the subject of constructivist sculpture and painting, whereas before it had been the frame for a subject. In the '60s and '70s, the language of photography rather than the pattern of events tended to become the essential subject for many photographers. The retreat from public posture also combined with personal fantasy, reverie and wit. The result has been a rather low-pressure art that refuses to strum on the heartstrings. For convenience, Szarkowski divides the images in this show into "mirrors"?pictures that mean to describe the photographer's own sensibility?...
Starting with the Brazilian series, Stella used the most precise-looking of all materials, metal, to carry the paint. Designing with it gave Stella's work a more overtly constructivist look than ever, in line with Malevich's prediction written 60 years before: "We see now technical means penetrating into the purely painterly picture, and these means may already be called 'engineering.' " Of course, a piece like Grajaú I, 1975, is only fictive engineering- it does not have to with stand the stresses of the real world, like a truss or a glider wing...
...used by architectural draftsmen, are cut from honeycombed aluminum. But they are loaded with color, blaring with the kind of greedy, apoplectic vitality. On first sight, they look as though a squad of glue-snorting graffitists had been let loose with crayons, spray cans and party glitter in a constructivist warehouse. Surfaces that Stella would once have left pure and flat are loaded with rich, scribbled color. The shapes slice and crash, in and out, mocking the conventions of flatness and integrity of the picture plane...
...Constructivist architecture principally survives on paper. In the inflated, crisis-ridden economy of post-World War I Europe, no financier intended to go broke building glass towers and ideal suburbs that nobody wanted to live in. And quite right too: for little in the history of architecture since the pharaohs quite equals the lofty disregard of human needs-the ordinary instinctive behavior of imperfect people wanting comfort-implicit in so many constructivist/Bauhaus designs...