- 15
Varvara Fedorovna Stepanova
Estimate
2,000 - 3,000 GBP
bidding is closed
Description
- Varvara Fedorovna Stepanova
- Swatch of Original Fabric
- cotton
- 12 by 11.5cm, 4 3/4 by 4 1/2 in.
- Executed in 1924
Provenance
A gift from Alexander Lavrentiev to the present owner
Exhibited
Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Wilhelm-Hack Museum, Schwestern der Revolution: KünstlerInnen der russischen Avantgarde, 20 October 2012 - 17 February 2013, no.105
Literature
Exhibition catalogue Schwestern der Revolution: KünstlerInnen der russischen Avantgarde, Munich: Hirmer, 2012, p.189, no.105 illustrated
Catalogue Note
Like all production, the textile industry had been brought to its knees by the years of war and revolution and by the early 1920s it was an industry on the brink. Once Russia’s largest industrial employer, it would not regain its pre-war level of production until 1927. The situation was so dire in 1922 and 1923 that most of the textiles being manufactured in the Soviet Union were entirely plain. In a bid to call a halt to the production crisis an official appeal was published in Pravda in 1923 calling for artists and designers to come forward. Varvara Stepanova, Liubov Popova and Alexander Rodchenko were the first to respond.
This group of young artists not only created, they also taught at the state art and technical school, VKhUTEMAS, whose purpose was to create artists for industry (a task so important students and teachers were given priority over rations and students were able to defer military service). Before the Revolution, almost all textile designs were ordered via sample albums from Paris and the most popular motifs were flowers, wildlife and historical scenes. The Constructivists, whose art was ipso facto one of construction, not composition, replaced figurative motifs with abstract geometric forms. Notable for their stylistic economy, most of these designs rely on the use of just one colour with black and white. Their strikingly simple creations are free from class references and cultural baggage, in keeping with the internationalist aims of early Marxism-Leninism, but this simplicity was also born of necessity. The pitiful state of the industry, the lack of equipment and the inexperience of the newly arrived rural workers who manned the reopened factories was an undeniable influence on the designs of this first wave of Soviet textile designers.
The Constructivists had formally renounced painting in 1921 because it served no useful purpose beyond the decorative and was bound up with the bourgeois values of the capitalist past. The Productivist movement, to which Stepanova and Popova belonged, took this further, pushing art into industry. In his article ‘From Easel Painting to the Printed Fabric’ for the journal LEF, Osip Brik declared that ‘a cotton print is as much a product of artistic culture as painting’.
Unlike Vladimir Tatlin’s tower or many of the early Soviet architectural designs, textiles were among the few projects which it was possible to realise in the 1920s, given the paucity of raw materials. Even so, most of these designs remained academic rather than practical exercises. The producers encountered great difficulty in raising the enthusiasm of the populace for the new class-conscious printed cloth and rural consumers in particular were reluctant to abandon their bourgeois floral prints. Stepanova’s ‘battle against naturalistic design in favour of the geometrisisation of form’ was to be hard won.
This group of young artists not only created, they also taught at the state art and technical school, VKhUTEMAS, whose purpose was to create artists for industry (a task so important students and teachers were given priority over rations and students were able to defer military service). Before the Revolution, almost all textile designs were ordered via sample albums from Paris and the most popular motifs were flowers, wildlife and historical scenes. The Constructivists, whose art was ipso facto one of construction, not composition, replaced figurative motifs with abstract geometric forms. Notable for their stylistic economy, most of these designs rely on the use of just one colour with black and white. Their strikingly simple creations are free from class references and cultural baggage, in keeping with the internationalist aims of early Marxism-Leninism, but this simplicity was also born of necessity. The pitiful state of the industry, the lack of equipment and the inexperience of the newly arrived rural workers who manned the reopened factories was an undeniable influence on the designs of this first wave of Soviet textile designers.
The Constructivists had formally renounced painting in 1921 because it served no useful purpose beyond the decorative and was bound up with the bourgeois values of the capitalist past. The Productivist movement, to which Stepanova and Popova belonged, took this further, pushing art into industry. In his article ‘From Easel Painting to the Printed Fabric’ for the journal LEF, Osip Brik declared that ‘a cotton print is as much a product of artistic culture as painting’.
Unlike Vladimir Tatlin’s tower or many of the early Soviet architectural designs, textiles were among the few projects which it was possible to realise in the 1920s, given the paucity of raw materials. Even so, most of these designs remained academic rather than practical exercises. The producers encountered great difficulty in raising the enthusiasm of the populace for the new class-conscious printed cloth and rural consumers in particular were reluctant to abandon their bourgeois floral prints. Stepanova’s ‘battle against naturalistic design in favour of the geometrisisation of form’ was to be hard won.