SUPREMATISM
— a movement in avant-garde art founded in 1915 by Kazimir Malevich. Suprematism was expressed in combinations of multi-coloured planes of the simplest geometric outlines (geometric shapes of a straight line, square, circle and rectangle). The combination of multi-coloured and multi-sized geometric forms created balanced asymmetric suprematist compositions permeated with internal movement.
ORGANIC MOVEMENT OF AVANT-GARDE
— the perception of the world as an organic whole, a world without chaos, with a dynamic selfdeveloping system of phenomena having certain laws, under which all the diversity of elements sum up into a unified whole. The key persons in this movement were the poet and painter Elena Guro and the musician, composer, painter, theorist and art researcher Mikhail Matyushin.
CUBISM
— Cubism is based on the painter’s desire to break up the depicted three-dimensional object into simple elements and reassemble it on canvas in a twodimensional image. Thus, the painter is able to depict the object simultaneously from different viewpoints and emphasize the properties that are invisible from one side of the classical image. Cubism does not necessarily involve simple geometric shapes. In painting, they are primarily used due to the artists’ desire to separate individual «patches» of the object from each other.
FUTURISM
— the futurists dedicated their paintings to trains, cars, airplanes. In a word, to all the achievements of civilization inspired by the technical progress. The main artistic principles are speed, movement, energy, which futurists tried to convey with fairly simple techniques. Energetic compositions are typical for paintings, objects are fragmented and intersected with sharp angles, where flickering forms, zigzags, spirals, beveled cones prevail; the movement is reproduced by superimposing successive phases on a single image — the so-called simultaneity principle.
LINEARISM
— in 1919, the term was invented by Alexander Rodchenko, thus designating one of the trends in nonobjective art. «I introduced and announced the line as an element of construction and as an independent form of painting,» he wrote in his Manifesto of Early Constructivism.
RAYONISM
— the founder and theorist of the movement was the painter Mikhail Larionov. He proclaimed ideas of using the visual effect based on the shift of light spectra and light transmission (different light rays of the chromatic spectrum); with the help of which it becomes possible to create a special pictorial space by the intersection of the various objects’ reflected rays. According to the theory of rayonism, in reality, people perceive not the object itself, but the sum of rays emitted by the light source and reflected from the object, which thus fall into our vision area.
CONSTRUCTIVISM
— is characterized by stringency, geometric patterns, laconic forms and solidity of external appearance. Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin were those who called themselves Constructivists. Constructivists sought to apply the functional pattern as the basis of spatial composition, searching for expressiveness in simple structures’ dynamics rather than setting, in vertical and horizontal lines of a building, and in the freedom of its design.
ABSTRACT ART
— Wassily Kandinsky is one of the founders of Russian abstract art. The essence of Kandinsky’s abstraction is the search for a universal synthesis of music and painting, considered as parallel with philosophy and science. He divided his abstract paintings into three categories: impressions, improvisations, and compositions. The first is direct impressions from contemplation, the second is the flow of the unconscious mind, and the third is, on the contrary, consciously constructed painting.
