The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946

A professor of design history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Margolin offers an augmented and intensified version of his 15-year-old doctoral dissertation, and the results are worth the wait: The vaunted Russian constructivist movement, led by Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and with contributions by the Hungarian Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, offers as much opportunity for analyzing politics as art. In a dense, compressed text that leaves no room for anecdote, Margolin's pricey but well-illustrated study examines the motivations of artists, and its strong documentation makes clear such complex subjects as Lissitzky's feelings about his own Jewishness. Rodchenko is also revealed as a humorless creator for the postrevolutionary new world, and his ""multifunctional furniture"" and other design objects, which seem so amusing today, were dead serious. A 1926 Soviet silent film, The Lady Journalist, was likewise meant not as a comedy, even when the heroine's desk turned into a vast number of Rodchenko gadgets, but rather an example of the new life to come. Rodchenko was grim even when designing a poster for Three-Way Mountain Beer with arrows that ""shatter the opposition."" The constructivist experiment was crushed by Stalin, and its art declined to gross propaganda, as in a 1940 Lissitzky magazine cover showing a Ukrainian peasant kissing on the lips a Red Army invading soldier who has ""liberated"" him. This sort of kitsch may be laughed at, but not when compared to the real integrity and aspirations of the constructivists only decades before. Margolin usefully presents what he calls the ""failed hope"" of this movement in this valuable effort. 107 halftones (June)