French, 20th century, male.
Born 17 August 1932, in Poyanne (Landes).
Sculptor, draughtsman. Monuments, jewels.
Neo-Constructivism.
Vincent Batbedat settled in Paris in 1950 and studied at the École Spéciale d'Architecture and then at the École des Beaux-Arts while attending the Académie Julian. In this period he concentrated on sculpture. In ...
(b Winterthur, Dec 22, 1908; d Zurich, Dec 9, 1994).
Swiss architect, sculptor, painter, industrial designer, graphic designer and writer. He attended silversmithing classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich from 1924 to 1927. Then, inspired by the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925), Paris, by the works of Le Corbusier and by a competition entry (1927) for the Palace of the League of Nations, Geneva, by Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer (1894–1952), he decided to become an architect and enrolled in the Bauhaus, Dessau, in 1927. He studied there for two years as a pupil of Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky, mainly in the field of ‘free art’. In 1929 he returned to Zurich. After working on graphic designs for the few modern buildings being constructed, he built his first work, his own house and studio (1932–3) in Zurich-Höngg; although this adheres to the principles of the new architecture, it retains echoes of the traditional, for example in the gently sloping saddle roof....
Russian, 20th century, male.
Born 1889; died 1951.
Painter, draughtsman, graphic designer, architect.
Constructivism.
Iakov Georgievich Chernikov was the pupil of a brother of Alexandre Benois at the academy in St Petersburg. He became a promoter of the Russian avant-garde.
His work can be placed between Suprematism and Constructivism. Above all a graphic designer, he had a remarkable capacity to conceive and design dreamlike machines and architecture. He published two works in ...
Belgian, 20th century, male.
Painter.
The pupil of Marcel Baugniet, a Constructivist painter, Pierre Clarebout ordered his compositions in a much less severely architectural manner than his master, working equally well in pastel and gouache, oil and acrylic paint. His work, which is characterised by delicate chromaticism, is inspired by his interest in music and archaeology....
(b Utrecht, Aug 30, 1883; d Davos, Switzerland, March 7, 1931).
Dutch painter, architect, designer and writer. He was officially registered as the son of Wilhelm Küpper and Henrietta Catharina Margadant, but he was so convinced that his mother’s second husband, Theodorus Doesburg, was his father that he took his name. Little is known of his early life, but he began painting naturalistic subjects c. 1899. In 1903 he began his military service, and around the same time he met his first wife, Agnita Feis, a Theosophist and poet. Between about 1908 and 1910, much influenced by the work of Honoré Daumier, he produced caricatures, some of which were later published in his first book De maskers af! (1916). Also during this period he painted some Impressionist-inspired landscapes and portraits in the manner of George Hendrik Breitner. Between 1914 and 1915 the influence of Kandinsky became clear in such drawings as Streetmusic I and Streetmusic II (The Hague, Rijksdienst Beeld. Kst) and other abstract works....
Italian, 20th century, male.
Active in Todi.
Born 1927, in Rome.
Painter.
Neo-Constructivism, Op Art.
Forma 1 Group.
Although Piero Dorazio first studied architecture at the Università degli Studi in Rome, he soon turned to painting. In 1947 he participated in writing the manifesto Forma I...
Hungarian, 20th century, male.
Active in Germany from 1918, and in Sweden from 1938.
Born 1897; died 1972.
Draughtsman.
Constructivism.
Alfred Forbat was mainly an architect. A student at the technical college in Munich, he worked in Walter Gropius' workshop at the Bauhaus between 1920...
Belgian, 20th century, male.
Born 1933, in Achel.
Painter, potter.
Neo-Constructivism, Conceptual Art.
Research Group.
Jos Jans was educated at the provincial institute of architecture and the applied arts in Hasselt. He was a founder member of the
[Lisitsky, El’ ; Lisitsky, Lazar’ (Markovich )]
(b Pochinok, Smolensk province, Nov 23, 1890; d Moscow, Dec 30, 1941).
Russian draughtsman, architect, printmaker, painter, illustrator, designer, photographer, teacher, and theorist.
After attending school in Smolensk, he enrolled in 1909 at the Technische Hochschule, Darmstadt, to study architecture and engineering. He also travelled extensively in Europe, however, and he made a tour of Italy to study art and architecture. He frequently made drawings of the architectural monuments he encountered on his travels. These early graphic works were executed in a restrained, decorative style reminiscent of Russian Art Nouveau book illustration. His drawings of Vitebsk and Smolensk (1910; Eindhoven, Stedel. Van Abbemus.), for example, show a professional interest in recording specific architectural structures and motifs, but they are simultaneously decorative graphic works in their own right and highly suitable for publication. This innate awareness of the importance of controlling the design of the page was to remain a feature of Lissitzky’s work throughout radical stylistic transformations. He also recorded buildings in Ravenna, Venice, and elsewhere in Italy in ...
Russian, 20th century, male.
Born 1890 , in Polschinock, in the Smolensk region; died 1941 , in Schodnia, near Moscow.
Architect, painter, sculptor, draughtsman, graphic designer, typographer, poster artist, illustrator, lithographer, photomontage artist, photographer, writer, collage artist. Stage sets.
Constructivism, Suprematism.
Obshchestvo Khudoznikov 4 Iskusstva (Four Arts Society), Vkhutemas...
Hungarian, 20th century, male.
Active from 1933 active in England.
Born 13 June 1899, in Budapest; died 1967, in London.
Painter (mixed media), collage artist, sculptor. Architectural integration.
Constructivism.
MA Group, Artists' International Association.
Laszlo Peri was a mason in Budapest and studied architecture there. He spent time in Vienna and Paris in 1919, and Russia in 1920, before settling in 1921 in Berlin for 13 years. There he worked as an architect for the municipal council. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he moved to London, where he worked as a painter, graphic designer and architect, taking the name Peter Peri. From 1918 to 1920 he produced designs influenced by Central European Expressionism. From 1921 he was with his compatriot Moholy-Nagy in Berlin; he joined the Constructivist movement and was a co-signatory, with Erno Kallai, Moholy-Nagy and Kemeny, of a manifesto on Constructivism in the Berlin magazine ...
(b Minsk, Belorussia, Nov 21, 1893; d Łódź, Dec 26, 1952).
Polish painter, theoretician, typographer and draughtsman. On completion of his engineering studies at the Moscow Military Academy, he was drafted into the Tsarist army in 1914; seriously wounded, he subsequently began his artistic studies in the post-Revolutionary academies in Moscow, Vkhutemas and Inkhuk. In 1920–22 he was associated with Unovis, and during this period he was influenced by Suprematism, whose principles would in later years form the basis of his polemics. In 1921 he married the sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, and at the beginning of 1922 they both moved to Poland. He published his first articles on the Russian avant-garde in the Kraków periodical Zwrotnica in 1922. Strzemiński organized the Wystawa Nowej Sztuki (‘Exhibition of new art’) in Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1923, which acted as a manifesto of Polish Constructivism; he exhibited Suprematist architectural projects, Cubist paintings and Synthetic Compositions as well as Suprematist abstract works constructed from simple forms in contrasting colours. With Strzemiński’s help, in ...
Belgian, 20th century, male.
Born 1880, in Destelbergen; died 1961, in Duffel.
Painter. Figures, genre scenes, interiors with figures, rustic scenes, scenes with figures, architectural views, still-lifes.
Futurism, Constructivism.
Prosper de Troyer was a student at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Oostakker, and at the Académie in Mechelen....
Russian, 20th century, male.
Born 1883, in Jurevec; died 1959, in Moscow.
Painter, draughtsman, architect. Stage costumes and sets.
Constructivism.
Alexander Vesnin worked as an architect with his two brothers. Some of his achievements include the Drieproghes dam and projects for the Pravda buildings in Leningrad (now St Petersburg). He was also an important theoretician of 'non-objective design' and taught in the Vhutemas....
Dutch, 20th century, male.
Born 1925, in Andijk.
Sculptor, sculptor of assemblages, painter. Architectural integration.
Neo-Constructivism.
Volten worked as a painter and lived in the north of Amsterdam in the industrial district. It was among the workers that he learned to forge, rivet and weld metal after which he launched into sculpture in ...
(b Osnabrück, 1899; d Ulm, 1962).
Dutch painter of German birth. After serving a joinery apprenticeship he started to study interior design and architecture in 1919 at the Kunstgewerbeschule and Technische Hochschule in Hannover. From 1922 he assisted with architectural reliefs in the studio of his teacher Ludwig Vierthaler (b 1875), and in 1923–4 he produced radical picture-constructions, in which he included stereometric elements and the tools of the designer, as in Construction No. 8. He combined these applied parts of the picture with a flat-surfaced geometric painting. In his choice of colours he did not stick to any restrictive formula, and even his early works are rich in graduated colours.
Vordemberge-Gildewart quickly attracted critical attention, particularly after he took part in the first exhibition of the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover (1924). Through Schwitters he met Arp and also Theo van Doesburg, who accepted Vordemberge-Gildewart into the De Stijl group. Van Doesburg found him a ready ally in the development of a dynamic variant of Neo-plasticism, which they called ‘...
Dutch, 20th century, male.
Born 7 March 1900, in Amsterdam; died 1983, in Amsterdam.
Painter, engraver, draughtsman. Figures, scenes with figures, urban landscapes, architectural views.
Constructivism, Futurism, Symbolism, Magic Realism.
Carel Willink studied architecture at the royal institute of engineering in Delft between 1918 and 1920. He then went on to study under Hans Baluschek in Berlin, living there between 1920 and 1923 and mixing with members of ...
