A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing.

Oscar Wilde, 1891

Utopia

Modernist artists and designers were frequently driven by a Utopian belief in the power of their creations. They believed artists and designers could apply new technology, combined with a single, all-embracing methodology, to every part of the manufactured environment—including buildings, furnishings, products, interiors, signage, posters, and clothing—to significantly improve people’s physical and psychological conditions. This passion, together with political transformations taking place throughout the world, gave the Modernists powerful motivation. They believed in a “total art”; the idea that all art should work in unison to transform the environment. How their work looked was just one of their concerns; what it meant and how it was used were equally important.

Utopian movements and schools flourished internationally. These included Suprematism and Constructivism in Russia, De Stijl in the Netherlands, and Purism in France. Suprematists such as Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky refined their art to pure abstraction. Geometric shapes, lines, and colors were placed against flat backgrounds that seemed to reference a transcendent new beginning.

In 1917, the Russian Revolution established the first worker-controlled state in modern Europe, symbolizing for many the transformation of society. Russian avant-garde artists prominently promoted their new vision of a Communist Utopia. Termed Constructivism, the work of Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, and Naum Gabo declared an end to “pure art” in favor of a social aesthetic that could be used to help “construct” a better world by integrating art into everyday life. Tatlin’s Model for a Monument to the Third International(1920), with its spiral structure, open-frame construction, and rotating glass shapes, was progressive in both form and function, symbolically projecting the spirit of the revolution skyward.

Artists in the Netherlands also worked to coordinate all the arts around a nonrepresentational agenda known as De Stijl. Piet Mondrian’s spare abstractions, based on ideas of spiritual harmony, inspired others such as Theo van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld, and J.J.P. Oud to explore geometry and pure color in painting and architecture as a foundation for social and spiritual understanding. Purism, the Modernist movement centered in France around the work of architect Le Corbusier and painters Amédée Ozenfant and Fernand Léger, was premised on the integration of form and function. Le Corbusier believed that a building’s form, inside and out, must convey its purpose. His structures favored simple geometry and industrial materials including concrete, steel, and glass, as well as open plan designs that integrated different functions of a building.