constructivism

At the beginning of the 1920’s Gan became a Constructivism theorist. Constructivism was a movement of avant-garde visual code for making art serve Soviet society’s needs. Key visual features of constructivism are radical typography experiments and montage. It closely parallels Bauhaus and is focused around topics we now associate with design.

Constructivism also called for different arts to help radicalize each other, and thus Gan worked as a filmmaker, poster designer, photographer, and inventor, participating in a wide array of different art groups. He wrote his manifesto, Constructivism, in 1922, remaining active as a theorist until the early 1930’s, when the constructivism movement was destroyed by Soviet authority, making way for socialist realism.

 

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[...] the same qualities of ephemerality and dependency that make gan's work resistant to art-historical analysis were also what made it representative of constructivism’s ambitions for a materialist approach to art. —kristin romberg, soviet art historian

 

Back cover of Engineering and Living magazine designed by Alexander Rodchenko and Aleksei Gan, 1925

Back cover of Engineering and Living magazine designed by Alexander Rodchenko and Aleksei Gan, 1925.

aleksei gan and esfir shub

In the 1920’s Gan began collaborating with Soviet documentary filmmaker Esfir Shub. The two lived together until 1933, co-creating a number of movies, including The Island of Young Pioneers. Their relations sparked many legends—one of which claims that one time, after Gan spent a week away from home recovering from a binge, he returned accompanied by symphony orchestra to gain pardon from Shub.

Cover of issue 1 of Kino-Fot magazine, 1922.

 

Cover of issue 1 of Kino-Fot (Cinema + Photo) magazine, 1922
A page from issue 1 of Kino-Fot magazine, 1922
A page from issue 1 of Kino-Fot magazine, 1922
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