Actuality of Art Education at the Beginning of XX Century in East Europe. Graphic Constructions Through Gestaltung and Formenlehre in Figurative Creativities Teaching Pathways

The great innovations in the field of the elaboration of forms and figures in the last century have often sometimes accompanied the amazement and optimism of the discovery, a methodological uncertainty shared with other fields of Knowledge. It is undeniable that the advent of information technology and representation—together with the socio-economic changes that have taken place—has laid the foundations for an irreversible ontological leap in the process of form processing, and yet very often there are references historians that can somehow inspire current theories and practices. In this sense, some interpretations considered to be classical, from Valéry to Benjamin, from Arnheim to Waburg, provide not a few substantial points for understanding contemporaneity. In this regard, the well-known pedagogical sketches by Paul Klee (1925), like the whole compendium of the notes that the Swiss artist wrote and cataloged from the first day of teaching at the Bauhaus (1921–31), contain ideas and practices that can be declined in the world of graphic informatics, parametric modeling software, but also in areas where the goal is not the control of the form as such, to the advantage of the control of the creative process. And a renewed interest in the work of Klee pedagogue is also due to the open source accessibility guaranteed by the Zentrum Paul Klee of Bremen, which allows a direct study of the sources. Another extraordinarily interesting idea is El Lisintskij’s cross-media production, which with his Proun anticipates—or inspires—the work of some of the greatest architects of the late twentieth century. El Lisintskij’s work is also characterized by the free overflow of visual arts—graphics, painting, sculpture and architecture—of compositional methods, production of stylistic elements and figurative innovations, laying the foundations for a vision of art that we could define as “total”. Other authors of the first two decades of the twentieth century have explored the potential of the renewed figurative arts: from the lucky “Point, line, surface”. Kandinsky’s Theory of form and composition of Itten, the pedagogy of the arts of the Bauhaus is, evidently, still valid as a cultural substratum for research in the architectural field, but perhaps more generally, in the figurative arts. But if the pedagogical structure of the Bauhaus and the developments of Russian constructivism are well traceable in literature, just from the exchange with these two great avant-garde experiences, all a graphic-artistic-performative production in the East-European area seems to have developed and hybridize compositional themes permuted by Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism.