Realistic Manifesto

The Realistic Manifesto is a key text of Constructivism. Written by Naum Gabo and cosigned by his brother, Antoine Pevsner, the Manifesto laid out their theories of artistic expression in the form of five "fundamental principles" of their constructivist practice. The Manifesto focused largely on divorcing art from such conventions as use of lines, color, volume, and mass. In the text, Gabo and Pevsner reject the successive stylistic innovations of modern art as mere illusionism (beginning with Impressionism, and including Cubism and Futurism), advocating instead an art grounded in the material reality of space and time: "The realization of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time is the only aim of our pictorial and plastic art."[1]

The text was first published on August 5, 1920 in poster form, on the occasion of an exhibition with Gustav Klucis in Moscow.[2] Extracts were reproduced in the first issue of G in 1923.[3]

References
  1. "The Realistic Manifesto." In Art in Theory, 1900-2000, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 299. Malden: Blackwell, 2003.
  2. Editors' introduction to "The Realistic Manifesto." In Art in Theory, 1900-2000, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 298. Malden: Blackwell, 2003.
  3. Mertins, Detlef; Jennings, Michael William (2010). G: An Avant-garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923-1926. Getty Publications. ISBN 9781606060391.


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