Word: proun
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Twentieth century art has been rich in didactic rooms, in which an artist set forth to construct an exemplary environment: Lissitzky's Proun Room, Van Doesburg's project for a university hall, Schwitters' Merzbau, Kandinsky's music room, and so on. Nevelson's palace is of their company. Yet its motives are not didactic; they are closer to folk art, to the "ideal palace" made from junk by the French postman Cheval from 1879 to 1912, or the Watts Towers built by Simon Rodia in Los Angeles. Collection, repetition, unification: these are the elements...
...unbuilt tower, the monument to the Third International, was greeted as transcending more bourgeois spectacles like the Eiffel Tower. It was the incarnation of struggle: "For the first time," a critic exclaimed, "iron rebels and wants to acquire its own artistic form!" El Lissitzky's marvelous series of Proun paintings, with their intersecting planes and crystalline forms, were like Utopian landscapes, referring to Russia's industrial future and dismissing its agricultural present...
...avant-garde of the past. Before Lenin died and the hand of Stalin squashed experimental art like a bug, the link between "revolutionary" art and revolutionary politics in Russia was closer than it has ever been in the West. The idealist abstract order of works like Lissitzky's Proun, 1919, was deeply connected to social visions of Utopia: when Tallin designed his extraordinary spiral tower as a monument of the revolulion, there was no doubt in his mind thai the appropriate language for radical politics was radical design. The energy of that period ran through the entire fabric...
| 1 |