Production Art

Origins and Theory

Production Art (Производственное искусство) emerged from a fundamental question posed by Soviet artists after the 1917 Revolution: what is the social function of art in a proletarian state? In a series of debates at the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) in Moscow in 1920, the Constructivists rejected Kandinsky's 'mysticism' and sought a utilitarian turn for art. By 1921 Osip Brik, Boris Arvatov, Aleksei Gan and others had formulated what would come to be called Productivism: the artist must no longer be a painter on canvas but an 'engineer-artist' directly participating in industrial production.

Arvatov's 1926 book Art and Production (Искусство и производство) is the movement's key text. He argued that art must become an instrument of 'life-building' (жизнестроение), reintegrating art and labour (separated under capitalism) within socialist society. Nikolai Tarabukin's From the Easel to the Machine (От мольберта к машине, 1923) declared the movement's direction in its very title.

Practice

The ideas of Production Art were institutionalised through the VKhUTEMAS (Higher Art and Technical Studios) curriculum. Leading Constructivists (Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Lyubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin) entered actual commodity production in the following fields:

• Furniture: Workers' furniture designs by Aleksei Gan, Rodchenko, and Tatlin
• Textiles and clothing: Popova's and Stepanova's geometric-pattern fabrics and functionalist workwear
• Print and graphic design: Photomontage and book design by El Lissitzky, Rodchenko, and Gustav Klutsis
• Stage design: Constructivist sets by Popova and Stepanova for Meyerhold's theatre

The journal LEF (Left Front of the Arts) served as the main organ of Production Art from 1923 to 1929, denouncing the 'bourgeois' character of easel painting and advancing factography, montage, and industrial design as the new paradigm of art.

Decline and Legacy

By the late 1920s, the defeat of Trotsky and the purging of the Left Opposition removed Constructivism's main political patrons. The 1932 Party Central Committee resolution 'On the Restructuring of Literary and Artistic Organizations' dissolved all independent artistic groups, and at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Socialist Realism was proclaimed the sole official artistic method. Yet Production Art's practical design methodology long outlasted it in Soviet industrial design, graphic design, and photography, and it influenced the Bauhaus and De Stijl, contributing to the international formation of 20th-century modernist design.