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Le Corbusier’s “contemporary city” (1925) | The Charnel-House

▻https://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/06/03/le-corbusiers-contemporary-city-1925

https://i2.wp.com/thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ville-contemporaine-de-trois-millions-dhabitants-sans-lieu-1922-da.jpg?fit=589%2C589&ssl=1 https://i1.wp.com/thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ville-contemporaine-de-trois-millions-dhabitants-sans-lieu-1922.jpg?ssl=1

The use of technical analysis and architectural synthesis enabled me to draw up my scheme for a contemporary city of three million inhabitants. The result of my work was shown in November 1922 at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. It was greeted with a sort of stupor; the shock of surprise caused rage in some quarters and enthusiasm in others. The solution I put forward Was a rough one and completely uncompromising. There were no notes to accompany the plans, and, alas! not everybody can read a plan. I should have had to be constantly on the spot in order to reply to the fundamental questions which spring from the very depths of human feelings. Such questions are of profound interest and cannot remain unanswered. When at a later date it became necessary that this book should be written, a book in which I could formulate the new principles of Town Planning, I resolutely decided first of all to find answers to these fundamental questions. I have used two kinds of argument: first, those essentially human ones which start from the mind or the heart or the physiology of our sensations as a basis; secondly, historical and statistical arguments. Thus I could keep in touch with what is fundamental and at the same time be master of the environment in which all this takes place.

#architecture #paris #le_corbusier #projet_fasciste #aménagement_urbain #urban_planning #futurisme

Aleksandr #Rodchenko, Lenin workers’ club in Paris (1925) | The Charnel-House

▻https://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/05/29/aleksandr-rodchenko-lenin-workers-club-in-paris-1925

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For now, here are some photos and drawings of Rodchenko’s famous design along with some well-known passages written at the time of the exhibition. It appeared as part of the same show that saw the premier of architect Konstantin Mel’nikov’s outstanding Soviet Pavilion.

Here’s Petr Kogan, an historian of art and literature, who wrote the catalogue introducing the club’s design:

Our section [of the exposition] has no luxury furniture or precious fabrics. At the Grand Palace visitors won’t find furs or diamonds. But those who can feel the rising tide of the creative classes will be able to appreciate the studied simplicity and severe style of the workers’ club and rural reading room…We are convinced that our new constructors have had much to say to the world and that everything most vibrant in humanity will not delay us from knowing and seizing through art the true meaning of our struggle. With this conviction we resolutely enter the lists of the new artistic competition among nations.

And here’s a passage by Rodchenko himself that’s often cited in connection with “comradely objects.” The Soviet avant-garde understood itself to be fashioning a new world.

#design #art #aménagement_intérieur #communisme #urss #union_soviétique #architectur #modernisme #avant-garde_soviétique #camarades #travailleurs

Race and the Enlightenment | The Charnel-House

▻https://thecharnelhouse.org/2017/03/19/race-and-the-enlightenment

https://i1.wp.com/thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/portrait-of-jean-baptiste-belley-next-to-a-bust-of-raynal-1797.jpeg?fit=1134%2C1134&ssl=1

Pre-En­light­en­ment phase: Spain, Jews, and In­di­ans1
.

It is not of­ten re­cog­nized that, pri­or to the sev­en­teenth and eight­eenth cen­tur­ies, the peri­od which West­ern his­tory calls the En­light­en­ment, the concept of race did not ex­ist.

It is still less of­ten re­cog­nized that the ori­gin of the concept of race, in the last quarter of the sev­en­teenth cen­tury, in very spe­cif­ic so­cial cir­cum­stances, was pre­ceded by cen­tur­ies of a very dif­fer­ent vis­ion of Afric­ans2 and New World In­di­ans, which had to be erad­ic­ated be­fore the concept of race could be in­ven­ted, ex­press­ing a new so­cial prac­tice in new so­cial re­la­tions.

#racisme

Radical chic: #Avant-garde fashion design in the Soviet 1920s | The Charnel-House
▻https://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/07/05/radical-chic-avant-garde-fashion-design-in-the-soviet-1920s

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Ref­er­ence was made in passing to of­fi­cial “mes­sages” about waist-to-hip ra­tios passed down from the 1930s, but it seemed just leap out of the blue. Not en­tirely sure what she’s talk­ing about.

It would be in­ter­est­ing to know what she made of the really av­ant-garde fash­ion ex­per­i­ments of the 1920s, however, with Var­vara Stepan­ova’s col­or­ful tex­tile pat­terns, Li­ubov Pop­ova’s sportswear, Vladi­mir Tat­lin’s work out­fits, and Vera Mukh­ina’s gen­er­al ward­robe ad­vice.

These designs were ex­pli­citly in­ten­ded for mass pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion, cloth­ing the masses. It was part of the fu­sion of art with life, de­signed to make the world more beau­ti­ful. Pop­ova once re­por­ted:

No artist­ic suc­cess has giv­en me such sat­is­fac­tion as the sight of a peas­ant or a work­er buy­ing a length of ma­ter­i­al de­signed by me.

I’ve re­cently come across a num­ber of im­ages of av­ant-garde fash­ion design in the So­viet 1920s. Quite dif­fer­ent from the chic styles pre­ferred in bour­geois France at the time, out­side of per­haps the mod­ish cu­bism of Sophia Delaunay. So I’m post­ing them here. En­joy.

#Mode #design #textile #avant-garde_soviétique #urss #union_soviétique

Bauhaus : Evolution of an Idea | The Charnel-House

Magnifique contribution sur l’idée du #Bauhaus

▻https://thecharnelhouse.org/2019/09/11/bauhaus-evolution-of-an-idea

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I grew up with and at the Bauhaus. I was nine years old when my father was invited to join the founding staff in 1919, which necessitated our family’s removal from Berlin to Weimar. In my memory, the moving was attended by cheery circumstances. In the first spring since the cessation of hostilities a great upsurge of hope was evident everywhere.

I liked the town and surroundings of Weimar, and best of all was the Bauhaus atmosphere itself. A boy does not trouble his head about the origin and history of things, and I accepted the interesting people and their works, and the attention they paid to me and my works, as something which might have been there always, but which was certainly very agreeable and delightfully different from the musty disciplines of the Gymnasium. The Bauhaus population was fond of gaiety and given to playing and the celebrating of feasts; a paper lantern serenade under our windows on my father’s birthday remains an unforgettable experience.

A hundred years since the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht | The Charnel-House

▻https://thecharnelhouse.org/2019/01/15/a-hundred-years-since-the-murder-of-luxemburg-and-liebknecht

#Rosa_luxembourg for ever.

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On this day exactly a century ago Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered in cold blood by Freikorps troops under the command of the Social Democratic Party. It decapitated the leadership of the young German Communist Party which then oscillated between putschism and opportunism for the rest of its existence. The consequences were that the world revolution, which the revolutionaries in Russia had counted on, did not take place. This led the Russian Communists down the road, not to international socialism, but to the construction of a new form of capitalism which, however, was falsely baptized as “socialism.” Under Stalin this became one of the most horrific anti-working class regimes of the twentieth century. Today the criminals of Social Democrats who murdered Luxemburg and Liebknecht hypocritically pretend they had nothing to do with it whilst Stalinists and Trotskyists who defend the former USSR as somehow communist all reveal their anti-working class credentials. After almost a hundred years of counter-revolution a capitalist system, whose crisis increases every day, offers us nothing but more misery, war, and environmental degradation but a new generation is arising which is taking up the last challenge to the ruling class thrown down by Rosa Luxemburg a few days before her death:

Kandinsky | The Charnel-House

▻https://thecharnelhouse.org/2018/08/17/kandinsky

Avec cet opus, les amoureuses et amoureux de #Kandinsky (ici quelques peintures « inhabituelles » de ses premières périodes) vont s’évanouir de plaisir !

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Art as rhetoric, by Boris Groys: Particular Cases

In light of recent discussions about art as knowledge production and the ways art should or could be taught, it seems fitting to look back at the early days of modernism. Avant-garde art was not yet taken for granted then, having instead to be legitimized, interpreted, and taught. One influential example of such a strategy of legitimization is Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911). The book posits an equivalence between art production, art theory, and art teaching, in order to render art rational and scientific, with the aim of establishing it as an academic discipline. Over the course of his artistic career, Kandinsky made various attempts to give an institutional form to his ideas. Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) both the group and the almanac of the same name — can be seen as the first such attempt. Following his return to Russia from Munich at the outbreak of World War I, and especially throughout the postrevolution years, Kandinsky engaged in extensive institutional activity, teaching as a professor at Vkhutemas (Higher Art and Technical Studios, from 1918), as well as founding and directing the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture (InKhuK, 1920-1921) and GAKhN (State Academy for the Scientific Study of Art, 1921). During his time at the Bauhaus, from his appointment in 1922 until its closure in 1933, he pursued his analysis of art as a science and academic discipline, as reflected in Point and Line to Plane, a theoretical treatise published by the Bauhaus in 1926.

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▻https://i0.wp.com/thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Wassily-Kandinsky-Entru%CC%88ckt-July-1931.jpg?fit=440%2C847&ssl=1

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▻https://i2.wp.com/thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Wassily-Kandinsky-Hartna%CC%88ckiges-Braun-December-1925.jpg?fit=440%2C667&ss

▻https://i0.wp.com/thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Wassily-Kandinsky-Kallmu%CC%88nz-Vilsgasse-II-1903.jpg?fit=864%2C513
#art #peinture #bauhaus

Boris Korolev, Soviet sculptor | The Charnel-House

▻https://thecharnelhouse.org/2018/05/28/boris-korolev-soviet-sculptor

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Boris Korolev, Soviet sculptor

#soviétisme #art #urss #union_soviétique #Boris_Korolev

#El_Lissitzky exhibition in Moscow, November 2017-February 2018 | The Charnel-House

▻https://thecharnelhouse.org/2017/11/20/el-lissitzky-exhibition-in-moscow-november-2017-february-2018

El_Lissitzky était entre autre un grand copain d’Otto Neurath, avec qui il a développé la méthode Isotype à Moscou au début des années 1930.

Voilà qui mériterait largement un voyage à Moscou.

▻https://i1.wp.com/thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Эль-Лисицкий.-«Небоскреб-на-площади-у-Никитских-ворот.-Общий-вид-сверху».-c

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▻https://i2.wp.com/thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/%D0%AD%D0%BB%D1%8C-%D0%9B%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B8%CC%86.-%C

▻https://i1.wp.com/thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/%D0%A0%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%B8%D0%B5-%D1%81%D1%86%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%8B-192

El Lissitzky, renaissance man of the Soviet avant-garde, is the subject of a major career survey in Russia that opened last week. It is the first such show in the country for thirty years.

Ambitiously organized across two venues, the State Tretyakov Museum and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, the shows are being treated as a single exhibition. They draw on an archive of the artist’s work preserved against all odds by Sophie Küppers, his German wife, an art historian and collector. Roughly 400 works are on display.

Lissitzky spent a significant portion of the 1910s and 1920s in Germany, promoting revolutionary art. When he returned to the Soviet Union in 1925, he left dozens of his paintings, photographs, architectural and graphic designs behind.

#art #moscou #urss #ex-urss #otto_neurath #isotype

#VKhUTEMAS: The “Soviet #Bauhaus”

The Charnel-House | From Bauhaus to Beinhaus

▻https://thecharnelhouse.org/2017/12/27/vkhutemas-the-soviet-bauhaus

▻https://i0.wp.com/thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Photograph-of-a-drawings-and-paintings-possibly-by-Klutsis-students-and-still

▻https://i1.wp.com/thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Photograph-of-a-student-model-on-the-topic-22Finding-a-Voluminous-Form-of-Set

VKhUTEMAS was an art and technical school set up in 1920 in Moscow that saw itself as a realization of the new revolutionary government’s approach to art, and which was to become a vital part of building a new society. Often this ‘building’ was in the most literal sense: one of the chief skills taught there was architecture, next to industrial and technical design, textiles, painting and sculpture. This exhibition in Martin-Gropius-Bau focuses on the school’s architecture teaching, and on the highly interdisciplinary, experimental methods developed there by some of the greatest Russian architects of the 20th century, such as Nikolai Ladovsky, Moisei Ginsburg, and Konstantin Melnikov. They were able to produce such pioneering results by treating artistic education as part of a whole. Many of these architects were also fascinating painters. At the same time, few of VKhUTEMAS students’ boldest designs were built, and the school faced a political backlash as early as 1929.

#urss #photographie #architecture #soviétisme #union_soviétique