[...]Enter Christina Lodder's formidable Russian Constructivism of 1983, which radically altered this state of affairs--an achievement made all the more remarkable by the fact that her research was conducted before the advent of Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika. At last, one possessed an overall map by which to navigate all the odd acronyms from OBMOKhU and VKhUTEMAS to AKhRR and RAKhN. Lodder did more than any scholar before her to establish that Russian Constructivism was not of a piece, that its history was fraught with many tensions, that it was plural. She also dismissed once and for all the cold war cliche of the Constructivist as a naive fellow traveler of the Soviet regime who was soon disabused of his or her convictions and then emigrated or met an untimely end in the gulag. Finally, it became clear that the tale of an avant-garde modernist movement harshly repressed by the state was too simple (even if partially true), and that the informers, such as Naum Gabo, on whose testimony this tale had been built were far from the insiders they had professed to be. But although Lodder underlined the political engagement of the Constructivists, explaining their desire to leave the domain of "pure art" for that of production, and although she devoted ample space to the ideological views of the theoreticians who, alongside them, helped articulate their program (such as Alexei Gan, Nikolai Tarabukin, or Boris Arvatov), she nevertheless kept the ever-changing political context in which all these men and women worked, and to which they constantly had to adapt, strangely at bay. The result was a transformation of the Constructivists into some sort of "pioneers of modern design," and their furniture prototypes or textile patterns were compared to those of the German (and capitalist) Bauhaus. It is no surprise that this view became widely shared by Russian scholars when the advent of perestroika finally allowed them to work on historical material to which they had been denied either access or publication permission. Lodder's book was followed by a downpour of monographs written by Russian scholars on Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, and Vladimir Tatlin, among others, all filled to the brim with new documents, and all devoted to portraying (with a tint of nationalist pride) the Constructivist artist once again as a brilliant and overlooked forerunner of contemporary design.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_6_44/ai_n26767766/
