Constructing a new world

History has, of course, seen many manifestos come and go. But the social transformation needed to lift societies out of crisis do not simply appear spontaneously. It is vital to break free from received wisdoms and stereotypes and work out solutions to problems that until now have appeared insoluble.

So we are proud to announce that our draft Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions goes live online today. The manifesto points to the contradictions with the capitalist system of production as the real causes of the ecological, economic and political crises that overshadow our world while proposing far-reaching solutions.

Revolutionary changes in history have been inspired by manifestos and declarations of one kind or another. You only have to think of Protestant reformer Luther’s 95 Theses nailed to a church door in 1517, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in France in 1789, the Communist Manifesto of 1848 by Marx and Engels and the April Theses put forward by Lenin in 1917, to name but a few.

Thus, it is a happy coincidence that the life and work of a man who helped to instigate a cultural revolution in Europe is being celebrated in a major exhibition opening at Tate Modern this week. Theo Van Doesburg, who launched the magazine and the movement called De Stijl in 1917, was a Renaissance man. He was not only a painter, architect and designer, but also a writer and poet. Above all, he created an international network to change the course of art and life.

Van Doesburg, along with fellow painter Piet Mondrian, and other collaborators, worked for the possibility of a “deepened artistic culture” in which artists working in different fields would realise that they shared a common language. Tate Modern director Vicente Todolì and Edwin Jacobs, the curators, note that Van Doesburg “advocated collective enterprise rather than individualism”.

The Dutch artist sought to change not only the face of art, but the world itself. For him as for other avant-garde artists, what counted was how their art could promote new visions for life and society. Unlike Mondrian who has overshadowed him, Van Doesburg “saw art not on a singular course, but opening to multiple possibilities, as a bridge from the present to the future”.

Constructing a New World shows how the years between 1916 and the mid-1920s saw an unparalleled cultural flowering, spearheaded by a host of avant-garde magazines, sweep through Europe as designer-artists like Van Doesburg, El Lissitsky and Moholy Nagy travelled extensively, cross-fertilising each other’s countries and movements with innovations in all branches of the arts, including film, music and sculpture.

Modernism, just like the notion that revolutionary change is possible, has been much maligned and rejected over the past decades. The exhibition is a welcome chance to reassess it. Naturally, there was plenty of chaos, conflicts, falling outs and rows as different tendencies asserted themselves.

But the spirit of inquiry and collaboration, a multi-disciplinary approach towards human life and culture, the desire to use technology to provide a better life for the whole of society, a profound internationalism, the enthusiasm for scientific knowledge, the rejection of dogma and political censorship remain totally relevant.

It is in that same spirit that we ask you to participate and help widen the discussion about the Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions so that it becomes a real instrument to inspire political, social and cultural change.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

In praise of Russian revolutionary art

Tate Modern’s exhibition of art from the Russian Revolution has received ecstatic critical acclaim. And rightly so. The two artists in the spotlight, Alexander Rodchenko and Liubov Popova, made paintings and art works which retain their excitement nearly 100 years later.

By limiting the scope of the display to the years 1917-1929 and to the contribution of only two artists, we can appreciate their particular contribution – their freedom and breadth of vision. Initially inspired by Picasso and Braque’s Cubist revolution (in painting), Russian artists took up the baton of abstraction and ran with it. They were lifted up and borne by the triumph of the October socialist revolution of 1917

Rodchenko and Popova and their fellow artists saw even greater possibilities in something that had been confined to artistic creation, and made it part of a social political transformation. The scale of this movement was vast, encompassing all the arts. It became part of a cultural sea change which swept through the young Soviet Union.

A major difference between Paris and what was happening in Russia was the involvement of women artists at the highest level. In this show, Popova is revealed as temporarily greater than Rodchenko in her abilities, although he outlived her by 32 years. And, how unprecedented that of the five artists in the famous 5 x 5 = 25 exhibitions held in Moscow in 1921, three were women.

“The Bolshevik Revolution aimed to transform an entire civilisation, and artists were among the first to show their support,” says the Tate’s handy guide. Contrary to the often churned out prejudice that “revolutions suppress creativity”, here we can see the imagination take off. And from abstract art, Rodchenko and Popova and their colleagues Exter, Vesnin and Stepanova moved seamlessly to designs for textiles, theatre, posters and as well as making photographs and films as they sought to use their talents to transform every day life.

This was not some fantasy world but part of state-sponsored initiatives to lift the country out of back-breaking primitivism. Rodchenko’s design for the cover of Leon Trotsky’s Questions of Everyday Life is on view in Room 9. In this book, the co-leader of the Russian Revolution argued for the emancipation of women from domestic slavery and the introduction of socialised childcare.

The Bolshevik government under Lenin and Trotsky appointed Anatoly Lunacharsky as the first Soviet People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, Narkompros. The aim was to encourage artistic diversity and to avoid endorsing any single artistic current or style however “left” it might be. Talented artists such as Kandinsky, Chagall, Tatlin and El Lissitsky were appointed directors of art training in colleges around the country.

In the closing section of the show, the curators note Constructivism was “marginalised” as the Stalinist doctrine of Socialist Realism became the sole approved artistic style of the Soviet Union. One poignant vintage photograph shows Rodchenko together with the young composer Dmitri Shostakovich seated at his piano alongside theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

All four were to have grievous relations with Stalinism in times to come. Their subsequent fate and that of the revolution as a whole does not come within the scope of the exhibition’s timeframe. But those events, terrible as they were, do not detract from the brilliance and glory of that moment after the revolution that was to change the world artistically speaking, as well as socially. The need for contemporary creative and political revolutionary vision, in the spirit of Rodchenko and Popova, goes without saying.


Corinna Lotz
Secretary, A World to Win