"VKHUTEMAS 100. School of the avant-garde" Automatic translate

2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the creation of the Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops in Moscow - the country’s main creative institution, which determined the path of design education in Russia in the 20th century.

The Museum of Moscow has prepared a large-scale exposition "VKHUTEMAS 100. School of the Avant-garde", which will tell about this institute as the founder of modern art, design, architecture, textile, printing and art universities. This is the first exhibition project to show the production and art departments on this scale, reflecting the artistic experiments of the avant-garde era. The opening of the exhibition will take place within the framework of the annual All-Russian Action "Night of the Arts" - it will be held on November 3.

Anna Trapkova, General Director of the Museum of Moscow: “One of the most significant dates of 2020 is the centenary of VKHUTEMAS, the Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops, which the Museum of Moscow celebrates with a large-scale exhibition project. In the 20s of the last century, VKHUTEMAS became the school of the avant-garde, once and for all changing the artistic language. At the exhibition, we tell how VKHUTEMAS was organized, who the students and teachers were, how the learning process and student life were organized. An important part of the exposition is devoted to modern universities - the successors of VKHUTEMAS. Thus, we show the connection between the avant-garde education of a century ago and what is happening in art universities today. This is an amazing story about how one school laid down the principles of artistic thinking for several generations to come. "

Alexandra Selivanova, curator of the exhibition: “The difficulty of studying VKHUTEMAS is that it is too large; his German counterpart Bauhaus was several times smaller in terms of the number of students and teachers. It was not easy to get to this big topic, and we suddenly found ourselves in a pioneering role. It seems like everyone knows VKHUTEMAS, associates with it Rodchenko, Tatlin, Udaltsova, Labas, Mukhina, Shterenberg, Lissitzky, Favorsky, Popova and others, but in reality they have no idea what happened there. There were exhibitions dedicated to individual faculties, teachers, but they have not yet talked about VKHUTEMAS so widely and publicly. That is why I invited 10 co-curators to do this exhibition with me - art historians, historians of architecture and design. Of course, this is not an easy experiment, but we have a great team;we are all of the same generation, we speak the same language and we consider it important to tell about VKHUTEMAS as widely as possible - on the basis of the latest archival research, but in an accessible language, vividly, clearly and coherently. In the end, we talk about the institute, about the students, and therefore it is very important to show the living atmosphere of VKHUTEMAS, its everyday life, student stories and memories, creative processes, conflicts and discussions. "

Among the subjects of the exhibition are painting, graphics, sculpture, architectural projects, models, industrial and graphic design, porcelain, textiles, furniture created by students of VKHUTEMAS. The objects are taken from the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the State Historical Museum, the A. V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture and other institutions.

The first section is devoted to the prehistory of VKHUTEMAS and the reform of art education. The post-revolutionary years became the time of building a new state system, including the educational one. In 1918 the Academy of Arts was abolished. The First Free State Art Workshops, opened in the autumn of the same year in Moscow, became a new creative educational institution.

The second section tells about the Main direction and its disciplines: "Space", "Volume", "Graphics" and "Color". Teaching these subjects was compulsory for students in the first two years of all faculties. The programs of the Main Direction were the "axis" of VKHUTEMAS, the zone of the most significant teaching experiments and teaching methods. This part of the exhibition will feature architectural models, sculptures, graphic and painting works. Visitors will also learn about the teachers of the direction - the artist and photographer Alexander Rodchenko, physicist Nikolai Fedorov, artist Lyubov Popova and others.

Daria Sorokina - art historian, researcher, curator of the propaedeutic discipline "Color" of the Main Department at the exhibition "VKHUTEMAS 100: School of the Avant-garde": "The development of the propedeutic discipline" Color "took place within the main department of the Faculty of Painting during the first two years of the existence of VKHUTEMAS. And it was a very striking episode, not only within the framework of one discipline, but it was also important for the history of the formation of the school. Here, an experimental technique was introduced, developed by artists representing new trends (mainly from Diamonds) in the newly created Institute of Artistic Culture. The "objective method" consisted in the fact that the entire complexity of teaching modern painting trends was split into several disciplines, each of which closed the understanding of one and another artistic aspect,also, each of the disciplines was an author’s course of one or another artist, and the students had to go through this propaedeutics, moving from workshop to workshop, from discipline to discipline. There were eight disciplines-workshops, they were led by Alexander Vesnin and Lyubov Popova, Alexander Osmerkin, Alexandra Exter, Ivan Klyun, Alexander Rodchenko, Alexander Drevin, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Vladimir Baranov-Rossine. Not all students understood and accepted this system, because many, in parallel and after this training, ended up in rather conservative, academic workshops, therefore - when the general faculty main department was created in 1922, only Lyubov Popova and Alexander Vesnin began to teach the "Color" discipline. They developed the program based on both prior experience and the desire to create production art.But the conflict with the “old” professors not only did not subside, but intensified with the arrival of the new rector, Vladimir Favorsky, which led to Popova and Vesnin being removed from teaching at the end of 1923. From 1924 until it was closed in 1929, the "Color" discipline was radically changed, now it was divided into theoretical and practical parts. The painting practice was conducted by the artists Konstantin Istomin and Alexander Labas; the theory was led by scientists Nikolai Fedorov and Sergey Kravkov, assisted by Gustav Klutsis, who revealed himself in this hypostasis in the most interesting and multifaceted way. "From 1924 until it was closed in 1929, the "Color" discipline was radically changed, now it was divided into theoretical and practical parts. The painting practice was conducted by the artists Konstantin Istomin and Alexander Labas; the theory was led by scientists Nikolai Fedorov and Sergey Kravkov, assisted by Gustav Klutsis, who revealed himself in this hypostasis in the most interesting and versatile way.From 1924 until it was closed in 1929, the "Color" discipline was radically changed, now it was divided into theoretical and practical parts. The painting practice was conducted by the artists Konstantin Istomin and Alexander Labas; the theory was led by scientists Nikolai Fedorov and Sergey Kravkov, assisted by Gustav Klutsis, who revealed himself in this hypostasis in the most interesting and multifaceted way. "

A significant part of the exhibition is devoted to the production faculties, each has a separate hall: Printing, Textile, Ceramic, Woodworking and Metalworking. In this part of the exposition, visitors will learn about the development of VKHUTEMAS typefaces, about the Favorsky school and the search for a new image of the book, why fabric designers studied technical disciplines, and how ceramics became a means of propaganda. Visitors will also get acquainted with striking examples of furniture and lighting fixtures with transforming elements, original complex solutions for public and residential interiors and the history of the creation of Soviet furniture from bent metal tubes.

Rustam Gabbasov - publisher, researcher, curator of the printing department at the exhibition "VKHUTEMAS 100. School of the Avant-garde": "At the Polygraphic Department of VKHUTEMAS, by the mid-1920s, a unique school of lettering (drawn type) and typography (the art of arranging printed elements) was formed, supported by theory compositions and graphics by Vladimir Favorsky. The artist’s style differed sharply both from the conventional Chekhonin style, which was popular in those years, and from the international constructivism in the printing industry. For all that, both the Constructivists and "favorites" (as the ill-wishers of Favorsky’s students sometimes called) pursued similar goals: they were looking for new images in traditional genres (book, poster) and in ephemeral printing (letterheads, invitations, and so on). But everyone’s means were fundamentally different.

Exactly what means, the exhibition is intended to explain. Many viewers associate the printing industry of the era of the revolutionary onslaught with the catchy constructivism of the advertising works of Rodchenko and Mayakovsky. But the world of typography and type in the twenties was challenging and exciting. Progressive lithographs of Nikolai Kupreyanov’s students, verified book course projects of the book-printing and xylographic department under the leadership of Nikolai Piskarev, hooligan and assertive works of Alexander Rodchenko’s students - Anastasia Akhtyrko, the Chichagov sisters and other members of the informal student association “Magnificent Five” will help to understand it.

Alena Sokolnikova - teacher, specialist in the history of design, author of the Design in Details project, curator of the Faculty of Wood and Metal Processing (Dermet Faculty) at the exhibition VKHUTEMAS 100. School of the Avant-garde: “This section will demonstrate the influence of 4 prominent representatives of Russian avant-garde art on the formation of the school of Soviet industrial design - Alexander Rodchenko, Anton Lavinsky, El Lissitzky and Vladimir Tatlin, who taught at the faculties of wood and metal processing at VKHUTEMAS / VKHUTEIN. At the same time, the features of the project approach and teaching methods of each of the teachers will be revealed directly through the work of their students.

It is characteristic that most of the educational projects of the dermet faculty existed only in large-scale models and survived only in the form of sketches and photographs. Therefore, on the basis of the research carried out, a series of full-size historical reconstructions was created specially for the exhibition with the participation of the Fashion and Design Center of the All-Russian Museum of Decorative Arts; as well as large-scale models that reproduce educational work of VKHUTEMAS / VKHUTEIN, made by students of the basic course "Interior Design" of the British Higher School of Design.

Despite the small number of graduated students (50), it was the dermatological faculty that largely determined the avant-garde, innovative face of the entire VKHUTEMAS, solving one of the most difficult and fundamental tasks of the school - “training of highly qualified artists for industry”. Under the guidance of young experimental teachers who shared the ideas of industrial art and constructivism, students sought to reform the life of a Soviet person, filling it with modern, convenient and affordable things: from accessories and dishes to complex solutions for the interior and vehicle projects.

Visitors will learn about the history of the appearance in the USSR of furniture made of bent metal tubes; with the help of the presented scale models and 3D animation, they will be able to evaluate the original designs of transforming lamps and multifunctional furniture designed to save room space; will see individual student works that participated in the International Exhibition in Paris in 1925, as well as the first graduation projects of the faculty of 1927-1929, highly appreciated in the press of their time. Some of the graphic works and photographic documents from the personal archives of Alexander Rodchenko’s students - Abram Damsky and Zakhar Bykov - will be shown for the first time. "

Ksenia Guseva is a textile design historian, art critic, curator of the sections "Ceramic Faculty" and "Textile Faculty": those who believe in the inevitability of the transition of artists to "production" art. This is partly true, but is it necessary to agitate for industrial art in the production faculties, which were ceramic and textile? Both of them were founded and built by outstanding technologists who had solid experience in organizing new educational institutions, technical research laboratories. Both faculties have set themselves the task of quickly preparing their own specialists of a new formation,to bring the profession of an artist to the "engineering" level. And in both faculties, the "backbone" of the teaching staff consisted of specialists who worked in parallel in production and, unfortunately, remained in the shadow of their "star" colleagues. However, the fate of the two faculties was completely different, which I wanted to reflect in their expositions.

The textile faculty was like the art workshop of a factory, where teachers and students were like colleagues in the workshop for each other. That is why we decided to show the faculty through the main disciplines and recreate the learning process that led the students to the creation of the famous agittextile - a phenomenon that is largely associated with the graduates of VKHUTEMAS.

The Faculty of Ceramics, on the contrary, showed itself most vividly through specific projects of students, who were distinguished by an extraordinary variety of approaches, ideas and techniques. The exhibition will showcase unique drawings of rationalized tableware for mass production, show experiments in shaping, and attempts to bring ceramics into architecture, which was very difficult in the face of general interest in functional and international architecture. "

The halls opposite represent art faculties: Architecture, Sculpture and Painting. The guests of the exhibition will see how the opposition between the academic school and the avant-garde design methods at the Faculty of Architecture was expressed, they will learn about what materials the sculptors of VKHUTEMAS used and how the artists of the Workshops were looking for their new visual language, what art associations existed in VKHUTEMAS, and how graduates and students participated in the design of processions and campaign events.

Ilya Lapin - architect, researcher, curator of the Faculty of Architecture at the exhibition VKHUTEMAS 100. School of the Avant-garde: “The Faculty of Architecture was the most revolutionary in the entire VKHUTEMAS. Here, in the spring of 1920, students beat antique plaster sculptures with the slogan "Down with the classics", campaigning for a new architecture and calling for a new type of "collective" workshop. At the exhibition you will see how radically, in just a few years, teaching methods have changed: from copying Greek and Roman monuments to search models in clay. The school of architectural constructivism was also born here. During practical training, students studied the structure of film factories, bakeries, and workshops. The functional feasibility, logic and calculation inherent in industrial architecture formed the basis of a new trend that soon began to dominate the country.In the author’s descriptions of their projects, which will be on the stands in the exposition, the students of the archfaculty spoke about the construction of a new era, fast and pragmatic way of life.

Needless to say, the VKhUTEMAS archfaculty was ahead of his time? The center of the exposition will be the "Flying City" by student Georgy Krutikov, soaring in outer space. Visitors to the exhibition will also see the concept of a fully programmable city, dissolving in nature, a sanatorium, learn what students designed on the site of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and much more.

Maria Silina - art critic, curator of the sculpture department at the exhibition "VKHUTEMAS 100. School of the avant-garde": "The section of the Sculpture department contains the best works of the 1920s by students of VKHUTEMAS. Each piece has been selected to show a unique aspect of the 1920s setting in sculpture. What is its uniqueness? First, the sculpture was going through a global crisis: its ponderousness was associated with conservatism and officialdom. How the students of VKHUTEMAS responded to this: in the works of Alexei Zelensky and Meer Aisenstadt we see attempts to create dynamic and romantic, almost theatrical forms, to play around such themes as revolution or industrialization with the help of unusual compositions, where the narrative develops nonlinearly, and the voids in the composition make us not only for the development of the plot, but also for the play of light and shadows.

Secondly, I would like to note the peculiarity of the understanding of "novelty" at that time: such natural, but not academic materials as granite and wood (in fact, very ancient!), And such "non-artistic" were considered modern and "ultra-new" like metals, glass, manufacturing materials. Therefore, at the exhibition you will see a lot of wooden sculpture, which now seems to be something traditional, but then gave sculptors a new way to represent the image of their contemporaries and new symbols.

Thirdly, VKHUTEMAS members, again as a response to the crisis, sculpture as a cold and sedentary art, actively participated in the creation of decorations and decoration of mass holidays and political processions. Accordingly, the sculpture and volumetric compositions were matched: light, cheap, quickly assembled. The highlight of the sculpture department, and possibly the entire exhibition, will be the reconstruction of one such project for mass celebrations - "The Worker’s Head" by Vladimir Kudryashov, 1927. The “head” was created in a monumental cubic style, characteristic of VKHUTEMAS, where facial features are maximally geometrized and laconic to create a heroic image and a spectacular, memorable silhouette. "

The final section of the exposition will be devoted to the dissolution of the university and the further fate of its faculties, which became part of other educational institutions or organized as independent institutions - the Polygraphic Institute, the School of Industrial Art, the Moscow Architectural Institute, the Textile Institute and others.

“It is important to give the visitor the opportunity to try some techniques, for example, Rodchenko, Favorsky, Ladovsky, so the exhibition will include multimedia interactive elements and entire classrooms will be reconstructed,” says Alexandra Selivanova. - This, by the way, involves many contemporary artists, sculptors, design students. I am convinced that VKHUTEMAS’s propaedeutics is relevant to this day; the best contemporary art and architecture schools rely on these avant-garde teaching methods. And we will show the “heirs” too - in a separate room there will be presented programs and student works of 10 institutes and studios (Moscow Architectural Institute, Stroganovka, MARSH, Textile, University of Printing, British, RANEPA, Edas and others). "

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