How energetic and optimistic a movement Russian constructivism was.
Even at its most formal and austere, there is a verve and a dash about
it. Paintings come at you on the tilt, as if sailing before a high
wind. Typography barks and shouts. Every gesture is an exclamation, and
everyone is going geometric. This is a brave new world. Kiosks are all
jaunty angles and out-of-kilter balconies, though heaven knows what you
would buy in them. The architecture would make you too giddy to think.

Tate Modern's
exhibition Rodchenko and Popova: Defining C...

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How energetic and optimistic a movement Russian constructivism was.
Even at its most formal and austere, there is a verve and a dash about
it. Paintings come at you on the tilt, as if sailing before a high
wind. Typography barks and shouts. Every gesture is an exclamation, and
everyone is going geometric. This is a brave new world. Kiosks are all
jaunty angles and out-of-kilter balconies, though heaven knows what you
would buy in them. The architecture would make you too giddy to think.

Tate Modern's
exhibition Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism, which opens
on Thursday, captures the prevailing spirit. Liubov Popova and
Alexander Rodchenko were two of the key artists of the new Russia, as
well as colleagues and collaborators. Rodchenko went on to become known
as a photographer and film-maker; Popova was dead by 1924, at the age
of 35. Rodchenko lived until 1956. Both were immensely talented, at the
forefront of the same avant-garde circles even before the 1917
revolution.