Ukrainian Theatrical Drawings and Sketches of the Avant-Garde Era

Abstract

The study of time, space and movement as constituent art elements was a focus of attention of avant-garde artists. The theatre where events unfold both in space and time became a place of consolidation of Ukrainian artists, with the synergistic association of representatives in various art branches and movements. A scenographic sketch, that is, a two-dimensional realisation of idea of a future four-dimensional work, is a unique phenomenon to study the evolution of the avant-garde’s concept of the space-time continuum. Through the example of works of both distinguished and less known Ukrainian theatre artists we have studied features of the realisation of time and space categories according to the key stylistic directions of the Ukrainian avant-garde: cubism, futurism, cubo-futurism, constructivism, suprematism. A theoretical basis for the study has been provided by works of Western thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, Oswald Spengler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Meyer Schapiro, along with the Ukrainian art theorists Kasimir Malevich, Aleksandr Bogomasov, and Les Kurbas, as well as works of modern researchers such as Linda Henderson and Igor Duchan. We have drawn a parallel between the development of art concepts in the Ukrainian avant-garde and scientific achievements, and the sense of time and space categories in the philosophical thought of that epoch.