RECTORATE
Efim Ravdel
The first rector of VKHUTEMAS. 1920-1923
Yefim Ravdel was born into a bourgeois family. In 1914 he was a free-listener of the sculptural department of Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, from 1915 – on military service. In 1918 – artist-decorator of the Penza Theater of the Council of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants’ Deputies “Prosveshchenie” (Enlightenment), designed ten performances: “Kashirskaya side”, “Without a Dowry”, etc. In April 1918, he became head of the Arts Department of Penza City Council, in this position he began to work actively…
Vladimir Favorsky
The second rector of VKHUTEMAS. 1923-1926
Many researchers of VKHUTEMAS have the opinion that its heyday began with the arrival of Favorsky as rector. Of all three VKHUTEMAS rectors Favorsky stands out as a creative figure: a brilliant artist, an outstanding art theorist and a talented teacher, he enjoyed great authority among professors and students. Favorsky was born in Moscow in 1886, in the family of a lawyer…
Pavel Novicky
The third rector of VKHUTHEMAS. 1926
At the beginning of May 1926 a new rector Pavel Ivanovich Novitsky appeared in VKHUTEMAS. He was an energetic man, critic and sociologist. Unlike V. Favorsky, he was free from narrow-shell preferences and had no clearly defined artistic concepts of form creation. He appeared in Moscow shortly before his appointment as rector of VKHUTEMAS: after the end of the civil war, he was head of the Narobraz department in the Council of People’s Commissars for Education of the Crimean ASSR…