Collection: Futurism, Constructivism & Bauhaus

Futurism, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus together constitute the principal machine age avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. The three movements emerged within a fifteen year window between 1909 and 1924, and they shared a willingness to issue manifestos, occupy public space, and treat the entire visual environment, from the canvas to the typeface to the worker's club, as territory for redesign.

Italian Futurism opened with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's manifesto, published in Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. The movement emphasised dynamism, speed, technology, youth, and the machine. The painters who joined Marinetti, principally Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla, with Gino Severini and Carlo Carrà, set out to put motion itself on the painted surface. Boccioni published the Manifesto of Futurist Painting in 1910, and his bronze Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, modelled in 1913, is the canonical Futurist sculpture. The First World War disrupted the movement, with Boccioni killed in 1916.

Russian Constructivism took shape after the 1917 revolution, using Suprematist geometry as the basis for a new public language of posters, books, theatre design, and architecture. El Lissitzky turned the page itself into constructed space, with diagonals, primary colours, and asymmetric typography that influenced graphic design through the rest of the century. Kazimir Malevich, the Suprematist whose work Lissitzky absorbed and transmitted westward, anchored the most uncompromising abstract wing of the Russian avant-garde.

The Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, integrated the lessons of both movements into a unified workshop pedagogy that ran for fourteen years across Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. Its faculty included Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, and Josef Albers. The principal sub-movements of the period include Futurism, Constructivism, Suprematism, De Stijl, and the Bauhaus.