Aleksandr Rodchenko
Design for an advertisement for the Mossel’ prom (Moscow agricultural industry) cafeteria 1923

This movement saw art as a practice and believed in art representing society and serving a purpose to convey a message and inspire social change in an emerging communist nation. Developed around World War 1, in Russia, and influenced art and architecture, as well as graphic design in the form of packaging, logos, posters, book covers and advertisements. Constructivism pioneered new styles for mass production to turn the former Soviet Union into an Industrial society, as well as influencing the rest of the western world. One of the leading artists of this movement was Aleksander Rodchenko, whose work was somewhere between modern art and political upheaval. He was driven by the futurists (those who believed in an influential Italian avant-garde the celebration of speed, movement, machinery and violence) and his belief in the Russian Revolution to use his skills in industry designing book covers and advertisements. He was inspired by Art Nouveau artists and lead constructivism to focus on material elements of art and encouraged it to be experimental. Rodchenko later admired the more functional approach to art to work, with a poet, towards a series of advertising campaigns introducing modern ways of designing into Russian, and later western, culture. The ideas were to use design to unite art, politics and consumerism.