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Art and Life

Death to art, declared the Russian Constructivists in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution,
and in its place they envisioned an art devoted, like the revolution, to technology,
utilitarianism and social progress.

''Not the old, not the new, but the necessary,'' was the phrase coined in the early 1920's by
Vladimir Tatlin, the movement's visionary. What he meant was an art concerned neither with
upholding tradition nor inventing fashion but with altering everything, from the way people
dressed and furnished their homes to the way they traveled across town.

Lenin was to stir the masses from Constructivist-designed platforms; laborers were to debate
socialism in Constructivist clubs, and families were to enlighten themselves at Constructivist
films and plays, advertised to the public on Constructivist posters plastered to the walls of
Constructivist buildings.

Lenin cultivated the support of intellectuals like the Constructivists, but he privately
considered their work to be degenerate, and the Russian people never caught on to the idea of
wearing abstractly patterned dresses and living in crisp geometric apartments, so to a
considerable extent Tatlin's cause remained a movement on paper. The paradox, in fact, has
been that this school for mass production became known largely through the one-of-a-kind
drawings its artists left behind. Still, no group more perfectly embodied the Modernist notion
of remaking society through culture: ''Art Into Life'' was another of Tatlin's slogans.

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