constructivism
Americannoun
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Fine Arts. a nonrepresentational style of art developed by a group of Russian artists principally in the early 20th century, characterized chiefly by a severely formal organization of mass, volume, and space, and by the employment of modern industrial materials.
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Theater. a style of scenic design characterized by abstraction, simplification, and stylization rather than realistic imitation.
noun
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a movement in abstract art evolved in Russia after World War I, primarily by Naum Gabo, which explored the use of movement and machine-age materials in sculpture and had considerable influence on modern art and architecture
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philosophy the theory that mathematical entities do not exist independently of our construction of them Compare intuitionism finitism
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Etymology
Origin of constructivism
First recorded in 1920–25; constructive + -ism
Vocabulary lists containing constructivism
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Mingling Cubism, Dada, abstraction, Constructivism and Surrealism, he occupied his own avant-garde stronghold.
From The Wall Street Journal • Dec. 27, 2025
Then, there’s the uncategorizable salad of his sculptural styles, harvested from Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus, American vernacular architecture, and sheer fantasy.
From The New Yorker • Feb. 25, 2019
For every building that clearly falls within canonical parameters, there’s another that provoked me to yell a stream of “-isms” at the page: “That’s not Brutalism; it’s Constructivism, Late Modernism, Metabolism …”
From Los Angeles Times • Jan. 9, 2019
In this system synthetic shifts and tics combine into things we call movements like Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Art Nouveau, Color Field, etc.
From Slate • Sep. 13, 2016
The Sackner material, grounded in the early 20th-century European avant-garde, brings together examples of modernist movements like Italian Futurism, Dada, Russian Constructivism and Surrealism.
From New York Times • Sep. 8, 2016
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
