Cubo-Futurism
[2] Later in the same year the concept and style of "Cubo-Futurism" became synonymous with the works of artists within Ukrainian and Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde circles as they interrogated non-representational art through the fragmentation and displacement of traditional forms, lines, viewpoints, colours, and textures within their pieces.
Russian industrialisation, development, economic growth, and urbanisation fell far behind other Western nations, with the country experiencing high levels of illiteracy, poor health care, and struggling with the limitations of little mass communication outside larger cities.
[10][11] This ideological conception of utopic perfection through machinery significantly impacted the stylistic elements of the Cubo-Futurist movement, influencing artists to experiment with pure abstraction, geometric shapes, harsh lines and planes, and the deconstruction of organic forms into powerful structures infused with machine symbolism.
With considerable access to international art markets and dealers, they assembled significant number European masterpieces of the early 20th century for their own personal collections.
[13] Shchukin’s collection included a considerable number of Picassos, Matisses, Cezannes, Monets, and Gauguins, thus allowing artists in St. Petersburg and Moscow access to Cubist and Futurist artworks that would later influence the development of the Cubo-Futurist movement.
[15] Marinetti's work espoused the need for creatives (e.g. artists and writers) to abandon the past by moving towards the utilisation of the aesthetic language of machinery, industrialisation, urban living, and utilitarian design.
[17] Influenced by the Futurist Manifesto, the aesthetics of dislocation and fragmentation became the vocabulary of the Cubo-Futurists in their attempt to interrogate the tireless and repetitive dynamism of technology, and highlight their fantasies of a utopic mechanical modernity.
[20] This term was coined by Korney Chukovsky (1882–1969), a Russian art critic, in reference to the work of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aleksey Kruchonykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, Benedict Livshits, and Vasily Kamensky, members of the Hylaea group.
The earliest appearances of the Cubo-Futurist art style can be found in the works of Natalia Goncharova, who, as early as 1909, applied Cubist and Futurist means of expression in her paintings.
[4] For Cubo-Futurist artists, this movement represented a shift in stylistic values from a perception of painting as a reflection of their current reality into a portrayal of idealism through depictions of a perfect future defined by equality and an organised collective consciousness.
[32] The knife grinder himself is central to the composition, camouflaged within the dense abstracted geometric shapes that surround and encompass him, invoking the idea that the man has fused into the mechanical perfection of a giant organised system.
Influenced by the work of Italian futurist sculptor and painter Umberto Boccioni, and Pablo Picasso's cubist sculptures, Russian artists began experimenting with the combination of the two styles.
[36] Cubo-Futurist sculptors included Joseph Chaikov, Boris Korolev and Vera Mukhina, all of whom taught at the Soviet state art school in Moscow, Vkhutemas.
[37] Cubo-Futurist artists had a passion for the democratisation of poetry through the use of chaotic, common language (and concepts) that allowed for freedom of expression and interpretation by the average person.
[37] Like artists of the same movement, these poets were interested in creating "totally new words and a new way of combining them", transforming and recreating poetry into a literary form that depicted their ideas of a modernised future.
[44] Cubo-Futurism gave artists the freedom to engage with the limitations of representation and subjectivity, and experiment with use geometric shapes and fragmented forms in order to convey a movement and dynamism that reflected their attempts to reconstruct understandings of their world and their art.
