How the modernist avant-gardes from Dada to constructivism reconceived their roles, working as propagandists, advertisers, publishers, graphic designers, curators and more, to create new visual languages for a radically changed world
We regarded ourselves as engineers, we maintained that we were building things ... we put our works together like fitters. So declared the artist Hannah H ch, describing a radically new approach to artmaking in the 1920s and 30s. Such wholesale reinvention of the role of the artist and the functions of art took place in lockstep with that eras shifts in industry, technology, and labor, and amid the profound impact of momentous events: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of fascism. Highlighting figures such as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, John Heartfield and Fr Cohen, and European avant-gardes of the interwar years--Dada, the Bauhaus, futurism, constructivism and de Stijl--Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented demonstrates the ways in which artists reimagined their roles to create a dynamic art for a new world.