Collection: Futurism & Constructivism

Futurism and Constructivism are the two great machine age vanguards of the early twentieth century, the first Italian and emphatic about speed, the second Russian and reorganising art around social construction. They emerged in the same five years, 1909 to 1914, 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 Marinetti's manifesto in Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. The painters who joined him, Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla the most original among them, set out to put motion itself on the painted surface. They borrowed Cubist faceting, then pushed it into vibrating lines of force and chronophotographic sequences that registered a body or a vehicle as multiple simultaneous positions. Vorticism in London and the British Grosvenor School linocut tradition, including Cyril Power, carried the Futurist idiom into a sharper graphic register.

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 into a constructed space, with diagonals, primary colours, and asymmetric typography that influenced graphic design for the rest of the century. Kazimir Malevich, the Suprematist whose work Lissitzky absorbed and transmitted westward, anchored the movement's most uncompromising abstract wing.

The prints here trace both branches across their European reception. The collection sits between the gallery's Cubism & Abstract Art selection, with which it shares a structural debt, and the Art Deco & American Modernism holdings, where the same machine age sensibility entered the commercial and decorative mainstream.