Het technicisme

This hitherto unpublished text by Constant probably dates from 1956. Thematically it has a strong affinity with ‘Tomorrow Life Will Reside in Poetry’ from the same year. Constant outlines the gap between the visual arts on the one hand and architecture and design on the other. He goes on to argue for a new kind of aesthetics – ‘technicism’. This must be founded on the structural qualities of the materials that technological progress has produced and which were already being used extensively in industry and construction at the time. He proclaims technicism to be a new principle of plastic creation in the visual arts.

‘Le Technicisme’, unpublished text by Constant, July 1956, included in manuscript in the Constant archive at the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD).