Soviet textile designs

In the rich and colorful history of textile designs there is one movement that is unique and instructive. Soviet textile designs that emerged after the Russian Revolution during the 1920s combined the ambitions of the young Soviet artists, state ideology, and the challenges of designing for fabrics. Intended for masses of Soviet workers and peasants, they found a warm welcome in the world of the bourgeois West, winning gold medal during “Exposition des arts Decoratifs” in Paris in 1925. Falling eventually into decline, today, eighty years later, the original designs of artists Stepanova, Popova, and Preobrazhenskaya provide a powerful visual legacy of this movement and invite closer evaluation of movement’s rise and fall.

Following the turmoil of WWI, two revolutions, and a Civil War, the centuries’ Old Russian Empire with the Romanov Tsar Dynasty at the head of the state collapsed. In its place in 1922 emerged the new state—the Soviet Union with the Communist Party in power. The country was devastated. Millions of people were dead, and millions escaped to other countries. The economy was in shambles; industry and the agricultural sector were expropriated and nationalized according to the new political vision. The economical structure of the Soviet Union was based not on the private ownership of capital goods and means of production, but on the utopian vision of their collective ownership by all the citizens under the guidance of benevolent and just government. The times were difficult: few industries worked, the unemployment rate was extremely high, agriculture was contracted, hunger was widespread, political and social structures were in their first stages of birth.

The textile industry, once employing thousands of workers, faced tremendous challenges getting production going. Textile mills in Moscow, Leningrad, and the town of Ivanovo faced the same difficulties: scarcity of raw materials, skilled labor, and fuel. In 1921, at the end of the Civil War, out of 398 mills in the country only 286 were in operation. The factories tried to stay afloat, run by the newly appointed commissars; textiles, produced in that period, were small in quantity. Under these conditions, the aesthetic side of production was the least of concerns. Designs, based on old patterns, were simple, requiring only elemental manufacturing processes. Yet the industry survived. In March 1923, the textile mills were able to participate in the Pan-Russian Artistic Products Exhibit and the Pan-Russian Agricultural Exhibit where they caught the attention of the country’s leading artists. The newspaper Pravda urged young artists to help the industry deal with designing problems.

The Russian art scene of that time flourished. The period from 1890 to 1930 could be described as the golden age of Russian avant-garde. The art movements, symbolism, neo-primitivism, suprematism, constructivism, and futurism, changed traditional Russian art. Most of the artists embraced the Revolution and the vision of the communist future which belonged to the workers. They thought that the radical changes in art were compatible with the radical changes in the country. The artwork reflected their ideas about the dynamic and prospous life which would be built on the ruins of the old order. The unleashed creative energy is reflected in the works and projects of that time.

Malevich, Tatlin, Rodchenko, and Lissitzky represented the modern styles. Kazimir Malevich, pioneer of geometric abstract art, found Suprematism focusing on fundamental forms such as squares and circles. He looked, like a mystic-mathematician Peter Uspensky wrote, for “a fourth dimension beyond the three to which our ordinary senses have access”(Wikipedia). In his book The Non-Objective World, Malevich described the inspiration for the powerful image of the black square on a white ground: “I felt only night within me and it was then that I conceived the new art, which I called Suprematism” (Wikipedia). The Black Square from 1913 manifested the arrival of this new movement. Similarly, in 1918 Vladimir Tatlin formed Constructivism, which dismissed "pure" art in favour of art used as an instrument for social purposes, namely, the construction of the socialist system. Most of the designs were a fusion of art and political commitment, and reflected the revolutionary times. In the beginning, influenced by industrial design, Constructivism split and gave birth to another new movement: Productivism. Its main representative was Aleksander Rodchenko—an artist, designer and photographer who later concentrated on graphic design for posters, books, and films and influenced generations of graphic designers. El Lissitzky, “an agent for change”, as he called himself proceeded to develop his own variant of suprematist style called Proun, which contained spatial elements, shifting axes and multiple perspectives. Later he too moved into production art, design and typography, becoming famous for his photocollage.

Russian avant-garde artists were bursting with energy. They looked around and saw endless posibilities for the new Soviet art, art which could be part of people’s daily life and deal with social and economical problems. Production art was the logical conclusion for many young artists who traveled from Cubo-Futurism to Suprematism and Constructivism. Production art manifested that art should have a practical, socially useful role in the country’s industrial production. As the art critic Osip Brik wrote: “Easel painting is not only useless for our contemporary artistic culture, it is the greatest brake on its development. Only those artists who have understood once and for all that work associated with production is not just one art-form among others but the only possible art-form, only they are in a position to find a solution to the problems of contemporary art” (in Noever 25). Productivists moved to design furniture, clothing, ceramics, typography, advertising and propaganda, as well as theater set design. In contrast with applied art, which was concerned with decoration of the object, the theoretical goal of Production art was a creation of the artistic object whose form was dictated by its purpose.

The textile industry needed the new artists and designers to overcome the production crisis. The young artists and designers discovered textile and fashion as the fields where their creativity could be useful to other people. The first artists to respond to the appeal of the newpaper Pravda were Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, Aleksander Rodchenko and Aleksandra Ekster. In 1923, the art critic J. Tugencholyed wrote: “In the textile field, instead of the previous old imitations of foreign models, we have new fabric designs … in which for the first time the research of artists on the Left has been applied to the industry; they reflect all the intense dynamic of life” (qtd. in Yasinskaya 11). Later the art historian F. Roginskaya described these designs as “the first Soviet fashion” (qtd. in Yasinskaya 11, 12). The artists had an ambitious vision to turn fashion and pattern designs into one harmonious unit, relating textile designs to the principles of clothing designs and those to “practical needs of the consumer” (Dabrowski 26). Aleksandra Ekster thought that fashion will be “functional and beautiful in its simplicity” (qtd. in Yasinskaya 9) and Varvara Stepanova developed a theory that “pattern will be standardized and will eventually be expressed in the processing of the fabric’s structure” (qtd. in Lavrentiev 82).

The Soviet textile designs of the 1920s could be divided into two groups: Constructivist-Productivist and Ornamental. Productivist designs, as the name indicates, were created by Soviet avant-garde artists reflecting their own ideas. Ornamental designs with names like “Industry”, “Building Construction”, and “Tractor” recalled the surrounding world. Even if the designs were different, both faced the same problems which eventually lead the movement into decline.

Liubov Popova, who in 1916 joined Malevich’s Suprematist movement, fully embraced the need for the artist to create a new physical world. In 1921, she, together with Stepanova and Rodchenko was the first one to sign the declaration of transition to “real” utilitarian work. Her involvement with the textile industry was short yet remarkable. A year before her untimely death in 1924, Popova was appointed head of the Design Studio at the First State Textile Print Factory in Moscow (formerly Emil Tsindel Factory). Her approach to textile designs was the same as her approach to art as a painter. The designs were based on bold geometrical forms in bright colours grouped into rythmical compositions, the repetition of which created striking patterns. As the author of the book about Popova Magdalena Dabrowski stated: “Of least importance were the aesthetic considerations, completely subordinated to the function aspect of design” (26). Popova’s two designs—Design with Red Triangle within a Circle and Design with Truncated Triangeles are samples of her vision. Energetic and colorful, created for mass production, they offer a good study of artist’s ideas. As her drawings and paintings of the same time period her designs combine circular and straight linear elements. As in her art, there is a powerful presence of Space-Force Constructions. Popova’s primary materials in art and design were form, light, colour and space. Design with Red Triangle within a Circle explores the interplay of vertically placed straight stripes in black and white on top of the busy red-and-blue background and yellow circles with red triangles giving the impression of deep space and three-dimensionality. The different thickness of the lines and their varying colours highlight the dynamic effect. The illusion of space increases the longer one contemplates the work. Popova’s theoretical work of that time is concerned with composition as “’the regular and tasteful arrangement of materials,’ and construction as ‘purpose and necessity,’ that is, a purposeful combination of such pictorial fundaments as volume and material, texture, color, and space” (Dabrowski 23). Her textile designs are the transformation of her artistic ideas from flat canvas to utilitarian fabrics. Her other designs related to the Space-Force Constructions have similar elements and mostly display the colours of red, yellow, black and white, as in many of her paintings. They are based on the principal of creating depth by depicting a circular element on top of a linear background.

Another series of Popova’s designs are slightly different. They are more concerned not with the creation of space, but with the tight composition of repeated elements. They probably can be traced to her former period of Painterly Architectonics which combined three-dimensional shallow relief-like space and two-dimensional flatness of the painting’s surface. The tightly intertwined elements create sometimes busy, sometimes chunky interlocking patterns. One unit of her Design with Truncated Triangles looks like a construction from one of her paintings. The optical illusion, created by interlocking black and white forms pushing green triangles forward, reminds one of the optical effect of Renaissance reliefs which Popova admired during her early visit to Italy.

Popova’s preoccupation with the artistic theory of the importance of line is clearly seen also in her textile designs. In 1919, contemplating her artistic vision she wrote, “Line as color and a vestige of transverse plane participates in and determines the force of ‘consruction’” (qtd. in Dabrowski 22). Form and colour are reduced to their common symbol—a colored line, since the edge of the form is defined by line. In her design work as in her art, Popova is a Constructivist at heart. In the same way as Rodchenko in his Oval Hanging Construction Number 12 (1920), Tatlin in his famous architectural Corner Counterreliefs, and the artists of the Society of Young Artists—Obmokhu, Popova too tried to make space an active component of the form. During her brief venture into the world of textiles, she, working on the flat surface, designed shapes that can be seen as two-dimensional pictorial interpretations of three-dimensional material constructions created by Constructivists artists.

As Liubov Popova, so Varvara Stepanova contributed to a revival of the textile industry. During the time when Popova was head of the Design Studio at the First State Textile Print Factory in Moscow, Stepanova delivered more than one hundred fifty designs, of which about twenty went into production. After Popova’s death, Stepanova, from the beginning passionately dedicated to Productivism and textiles, was considered one of the experts and leaders in pattern design, fashion and textile production. Contemplating her textile designs, one can understand why Russian poet Vladimir Maiakovsky described Stepanova as a “frenzied artist.” As painter, poet, and theoretical writer, as one of the first Constructivists, wife and creative partner of Aleksander Rodchenko, Stepanova produced striking and vibrant designs when she dedicated her energy to textile industry. In contrast to Popova, she did not try to transfer her art onto fabrics. She studied fibre and weaving and came to the conclusion that “the artist’s attention should be focused on the processing of the fabric, on developing new types of fabric, and dyeing it …. Just like every other aspect of production, the pattern will be standardized and will eventually be expressed in the processing of the fabric’s structure.” (qtd. in Lavrentiev 82). In almost all of her designs, Stepanova used three basic shapes: circle, triangle and rectangle. Her primary tools were compass and ruler. Her patterns created a kaleidoscopic effect on the fabric surface. Using mostly one or two colours, superimposing semitransparent forms on each other, and leaving the points of intersection white, Stepanova creates an optical illusion of a second plane and an “impression of dynamism, rotation, and undulating movement” (Lavrentiev 86). Her optical illusions predate Victor Vasareli’s paintings by a decade. Though, her designs are not as complex repetitions as Popova’s, they reflect more the ideas of standardisation, production and mechanisation, bringing art and artistic process closer to the world of technology and mass production. Stepanova’s grandchild, Lavrentiev, wrote that her geometrical structures created “not only new decorative surfaces but also fabrics with new physical qualities” (82). Looking at Stepanova’s previous art work, one can not see connections as strong as those between Popova’s art and designs. Most of Stepanova’s paintings depicted figures, which, through time, became more abstract, skeleton-like, yet enormously dynamic. Only when seeing Stepanova’s designs for stage costumes and some of her sports costumes, which she did before her designs for the textile industry, does one begins to detect the connecting link. The costumes for the productions of The Magnanimous Cuckold and The Death of Tarelkin, as seen in photos and sketches, consist of geometrical forms and basic colours. They are the transformation of two-dimensional abstract paintings onto three-dimensional objects. The strategically placed stripes perform parts of skeleton-like structures from Stepanova’s paintings. The different parts of the clothing fill the space. True to Constructivism she constructed clothing as an object in space around the human body. After designing clothing which mimicked the structure of the body, giving it an outer shell, Stepanova went on developing her own patterns for fabrics. From that experience grew the artist’s view of the field of textile designs. Stepanova summoned it in her later writing From Clothing to Pattern and Fabric:

The only correct approach would be for the artist to participate, at first, in clothing design. Out of this would develop his participation in the manufacture and dyeing of the fabric (qtd. in Lavrentiev 180).

Stepanova’s husband, artist Aleksandr Rodchenko, famous for his Prouns, and later for his progressive designs, layouts, and photos from unusual perspectives, also undertook a short venture into the world of textile designs and fashion. He too tried to transfer his Constructivist ideas onto the new medium. One of the designs from 1924 depicts circles within circles and spirals around them. Drawn with amazing facility and elegance, they mimic the mathematically precise construction of Rodchenko art pieces and already include elements of his later layouts. The same spiral element is seen on Rodchenko’s cover for the magazine Radioslushatel’ N1 from 1929. His often reproduced work-suit from 1922 and the lesser known costume design for the cafeteria waitress from the play Inga (1929) follow the same principles as his modernist paintings. They consist of geometrical shapes. They too as his art, as he wrote in the article The Dynamism of the Plane from 1918, are “compositions of the shiftings of painted and projected planes” (qtd. in Noever 119).

If Constructivists made the headlines in the beginning of the 1920s, so in the second half of it there emerged predominantly another textile design movement. Produced fabrics depicted the objects of the surrounding world, which in artistic vision represented Soviet reality. The titles of those Ornamentalist designs reflected their themes: “Collectivization”, “The Factory”, or “Transport”. Unlike the works of Constructivists these designs were produced by the artists closely working with the mills. Also unlike Constructivist designs, which were called “abstract” or “geometric”, these designs were “thematic” or “propaganda” patterns. They were created by artists D. Preobrazhenskaya, S. Burylin, V. Maslov, and other graduates of VCKhUTEIN ( Textile Faculty of the Institute of Arts and Industrial Design), many taught by Varvara Stepanova. The designs varied from truly innovative to those which incorporated old, popular pre-revolutionary patterns with new Soviet elements. Produced in greater numbers by large factories such as Sosnev Amalgamated Millis, Ivanovo-Voznesensk Mills, and Trekhgornaya Manufaktura Millis they were sold all over the Soviet Union bringing political propaganda and agitation to its citizens.

In the first group of Ornamentalist designs, one can identify small-print cottons. These patterns, consisting of no more than three elements and three colours, were produced in almost all mills for a very broad public. Repeat elements of Soviet symbols, such as electric bulbs by E. Lapsina, motifs of the hammer, sickle and wheat by S. Burylin, or young pioneers by O. Gruin represent this group. Even in their simplicity these designs show every attention to detail. The Young Pioneers by O. Gruin shows clear human shapes on a black background. Tight rows upon rows of tiny figures convey the feeling of unity; white legs and red waving flags create the illusion of marching masses. The design transferred onto fabric the images seen in the pages of the Soviet newspapers reporting about mass parades. Another interesting design is Electric Bulbs by E. Lapshina. It shows black and red electric bulbs, surrounded by the zigzag lines of the same colours. The rays of light coming from the bulbs were popular with the designers of the time, trying to show something shining. The designer took her inspiration from the process of the electrification of the country, which was the top priority of the Soviet Communist Party at that time. Industry by R. Matveyeva is a repeat pattern of a small cubical factory with two long chimneys emerging from the composition of anvil and hammer, encircled in a gearwheel. Juxtaposition of these tiny elements send a clear message about the country’s image as an emerging industrial power.

In another group there are more complex repeat patterns, in which artists explored the same ideas on a bigger scale, such as for example Mechanization of the Red Army by L. Raitser. On the burgundy fabric, one unit of that pattern contains a multitude of elements: a tank with the raised front ready to smash any obstacle, a bi-plane in a daring descending manoeuvre, and small trucks transporting soldiers. On the background of this composition there is an element of the powerful cylinder block which could be read as a white-hot sun rising over the mighty Red Army. The theme, designed in 1933 was very current since the Soviet army indeed underwent rapid mechanization. In graphic depictions of individual elements, the artists made references to the propaganda posters of that time such as Master the defence industry of the USSR! (1932) by Yang or Fighters & Commanders of the Red Army bring to life the slogan of Comrade Stalin! (1932) by Aleksei Kokorekin.

Far more complex were designs which combined Soviet narrative with traditional floral elements as in famous French pictorial silks. One of the leading designers in that style was V. Maslov at the Ivanovo Mills. The richness of ornaments and colours falls into the tradition of pre-revolutionary textiles produced at those factories. Sateen Tractor is one of his most ambitious designs which required complicated printing procedures. The design is executed not in the chunky graphic elements, but in an intricate painterly manner of an amazing quality. The garlands of intertwined apples, berries, and wine leafs form frames for the pictures of agricultural activities. Under the summer sky one lonely peasant harvests his corn with horses, in other frames a group of farmers work on one big field with the help of a shiny new red tractor. The viewer can even recognize the individual details of peasants’ faces on these prints and the play of light and shade in the folds of their clothing. Other Maslov designs are based on the same narrative style, though not in the same quality as Tractor. They often show idealized country life, as French silks showed idealized shepherds. The Collectivization shows the peasants on the tractors and promotes the positive side of the collective work. In his The Village Consumers’ Cooperative Society textile print there are five scenes. The narrative begins with peasants on tractors and peasants bringing in the rich harvests and then, progresses to benefit of the work—a village store under a shiny red roof with the shield “Cooperative Society” and many goods inside, from fabrics to samovars. Another, one of the most complex designs made by an unknown artist is in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg today. It is a decorative cotton print that combines industrial and agricultural work, schoolrooms, and marching youth, factories, and railways. To blend these various scenes together the artist used a number of interesting abstract devices resembling avant-garde art forms.

Similar to Maslov, the other famous Ornamentalist designer is S. Burylin, who created an individual style using white weft yarns, dividing pattern units into stripes. Using clear, simplified shapes of tractors, people, locomotives, factory buildings and two colours, one of which is usually white, his designs radiate strong rhythm and energy. The geometrical abstractions of his elements also reveal links to the Soviet avant-garde.

Because textiles were sold all over the country, artists often referred to the symbols of the Soviet Union, such as stars, hammer, sickle and wheat, using bright red backgrounds as in popular “madder” prints. Other Soviet textiles, made for customers in Asian Republics, combined political messages with oriental flair. The Turkestan-Siberia Railroad by an unknown artist, Electric Bulbs by S. Strusevich or Daily Life of the Peoples of the East by an unknown designer united propaganda symbols with local motifs such as camels or cotton plants. Others attempted to incorporate the effect of the ikat dying technique into prints pleasing the taste of the local population.

Overall the Soviet textile industry of the 1920s had undergone great changes reflecting those of the country as whole. The beginning of the decade still saw a raging civil war, hunger, and a deteriorating industrial base. At the end of the decade the Soviet Union was an internationally recognized country with established political structures. After Lenin’s death in 1924, his successor, Stalin, began to implement his own economic ideas, leaning toward heavy industry and relentless mass collectivization of peasants into state owned farms. The first so-called Five-Year Plan for economic development was accepted in 1928. The textile industry was on its way to steady growth. Enthusiastic artists, mostly constructivists, and later designers of ornamental prints with soviet motifs, who dedicated their energy to the revival of production, undoubtedly helped textile mills. The artists and designers also contributed to the establishment of the Soviet fashion industry, which slowly emerged overcoming years of scarcity. Yet, despite all the rational and theoretical thinking on the part of the artists and commitment of the designers, their prints did not survive into the next decade. This movement was unique and unrepeatable.

There are a number of reasons for its decline. The most important one is that despite their enthusiasm and dedication, the avant-garde artist did not really understand the medium of textile with its time-approved rules and the logic of the textile industry. They saw it just as another aspect of life, which together with fashion could be changed and reinvented. Thanks to the vigorous desire of avant-garde artists to theorise and commit their ideas to paper, there exists a number of works, many written by Varvara Stepanova, from which one can see the direction in which those artists intended to go. During the year of their work at the First State Textile Print Factory in Moscow, Luibov Popova and Varvara Stepanova issued an ambitious memo regarding dynamics of the textile industry. They urged their fellow-workers:

1. To participate in the work of the production organs, to work closely with or to direct the artistic side of things, with the right to vote on production plans and models, design acquisition, and recruiting colleagues for artistic work.
2. To participate in the chemistry laboratory as observers of the coloration process…
3. To produce designs for block-printed fabrics, at our request or suggestion.
4. To establish contact with the sewing workshops, fashion ateliers and journals.
5. To undertake agitational work for the factory through the press and magazine advertisements. At the same time we may also contribute designs for store windows (qtd. in Lavrentiev 81).

These five points were too broad to be applied to any concrete area of production. They could possibly have been applied to the workings of a small company with a limited number of employees and limited production, but for the factories of the size of the First State Textile Print Factory or Ivanovo Mills, which relied on the intensive division of skilled labour, they were utopian at most. Looking at the textile designs of both artists from the same time period, one can, despite all their good intentions, clearly see the transformation of their art and artistic ideals onto fabric. The fabric surface became their canvas. Yet fabric, in contrast to canvas has its own qualities: it is not stiff, but flexible and in the end it must be cut, sewn and draped. Contemplating Stepanova’s and Popova’s designs, one cannot not admire their abstract aesthetics, forms and shapes, colours and structures. Yet it is also easy to see that these patterns remain appealing only as long as they stay flat. When they are folded and draped, the creative intent of their creators is lost. If flat planes of artistic drawings can effectively absorb juxtaposition of geometrical lines, spheres and circles, these effects disappear applied to the medium of textile. Almost every textile design can be applied to flat surfaces, yet not every design can be applied to fabric. The plans to create new aesthetics in textiles failed in the long run for the same reason as the communist idea to create new individuals failed: they were elite ambitions and the desire of a few.

In the same way as constructivist designs suffered problems, ornamental prints declined. The narrative depictions of the scenes gives one the impression of work done on an easel, the one from which Ossip Brik urged the artists to move away. The complexity of the artist’s vision to capture the zeitgeist in their designs was too difficult to implement. Too often they were forced to use the same symbols and elements as seen on posters and typographical publications. Effective in yardage designs, they were completely lost if folded and reshaped into three-dimensional objects, especially garments. Most importantly, although they radiated the excitement of their creators, they did not excite the public. Workers, responsible for the productions, having previous experience in dealing with public taste saw not much potential in mass production of those prints. That is also a reason why many of the designs were not manufactured at all.

Besides the challenges of the textile industry, another significant factor contributed to the general decline of the avant-garde movement. The Communist Party finally gained tight grip over the country and began to crush everything that was not compatible with the Party line. Art was one of many areas. Avant-garde was under attack. Only a decade before that, artists rejecting the mentality of the so-called “petit bourgeois” embraced the new socialistic order, in some romantic ways envisioning their future. They did not realize that the milieu that they rejected was the same milieu that gave them birth and support in the past. The promises of the bright future were shattered by hard reality. The Communist Party did not want to see any free avant-garde expression. Social Realism became the Party’s and country’s official art style. Malevich died, Lissitzky was forced to work on propaganda, and Rodchenko moved to representational painting and photography. The last warrior—Varvara Stepanova—was teaching at the Textile Department of VKhUTEMAS, still planning for the future. In 1929, in her article From Clothing to Pattern and Fabric she still dreamed that.

“In a planned Socialist economy fashion will depend, not on competition in the market, but on the improvement and rationalization of the garment and textile industries. The textile artist will occupy an independent, responsible position both in the factory and in the trade and sales apparatus” (qtd. in Lavrentiev 180).

Soon she too moved to book design, photomontage, and representational painting.

Spectacularly arising from the sheer artistic enthusiasm and excitement, and slowly fading in the face of real life challenges, the Soviet textile designs of the 1920s represent a curious experiment in the history of art, design, and textile industry. Intended for masses of Soviet workers and peasants, they found a warm welcome in the world of the bourgeois West. Exhibited during “Exposition des arts Decoratifs” in Paris in 1925, posters and textiles of constructivists influenced western design. During the same exposition, Burylin’s fabrics with elaborate designs of ears of wheat, stars, hammers and sickles won the gold medal. Eventually falling out of favour in the Soviet Union and descending from the highs of the ambitious plan to change the world and human nature, both constructivist and ornamental art and designs left a powerful visual legacy of the time when utopian dreams seemed to be within easy reach.