Vision deconstruction

Abstract

Hungarian Constructivism was primarily initiated and inspired by the Russian version, but considerable influence also came from De Stijl and Bauhaus. However, many Hungarians worked on Bauhaus and helped it achieve its profie and program. This is also true to a certain extent for De Stijl. Representative of the many Hungarian Bauhaus artists at the beginning of this section is a manifesto written in 1924 by Sándor Bortnyik, Marcel Breuer, Farkas Molnár, and Andor Weininger. Bortnyik also founded the Mühely (Budapester Bauhaus) upon his return to Hungary in 1928, where Molnár taught and Victor Vasarely studied; it lasted until 1938. The great four of Hungarian Constructivism — László Moholy-Nagy, György Kepes, Victor Vasarely, and Nicolas Schöffer — all world-class artists, came from this tradition. Austrian artists also worked at the Bauhaus; they moved, on the appeal of Johannes Itten, together with him in 1919 to Weimar: namely, Friedl Dicker, Franz Singer, and later also Herbert Bayer (among others). Constructivist two-dimensional picture language was transformed early on the Bauhaus into the three-dimensional language of stage and architecture. In that language, geometric bodies such as cubes, circles, spheres, and ellipses were preferred. In addition to sketches for buildings, drawings for theaters played a special role — it was with these that Austrian architect Friedrich Kiesler aroused interest. In the years following, the rational Constructivist picture language developed into a universal formal language in which the borders between picture, sculpture, design, and architecture became fluid. Hungarian as well as Austrian artists were, and still are, engaged with considerable success in all of these areas (such as Marcel Breuer, Joseph Urban, Paul Theodore Frankl, Karl Steiner, Friedrich Kiesler, and Hans Hollein). It is also important to bear in mind the amazingly early but repressed phase of geometric abstraction (“ the abstract ornament”) in Vienna around 1900, the primate of square and cube, as shown by Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann, and later Adolf Loos (see Chapter 1). Not only the surface was made geometrical by the square, but the vocabulary of abstract forms was carried over to a universal form-language form pictures to fabrics, vases, dishes, consumer goods, furniture, furnishings, and finally, the house itself. The ideas of Bauhaus were preformulated.