Elapsing over the period of Italian Futurism and French Cubism, constructivism appeared in the Soviet Union, circa 1913, with Vladimir Tatlin at the front of a movement that, through art, celebrated the machine, technology and utilitarianism, and sought to “construct” art. Equally radical, Malevich proposed a “world of non-representation” and opened the way for the death of the figure. In 1927, he exhibited seventy of his works in Berlin and his essay “suprematism or the world without object” was published by Bauhaus. Tatlin was also appreciated by German students and, in 1920, Grosz and Heartfield were photographed holding a sign that reads “Art is Dead – Long Live the Tatlin Machine”. This is the Germany of Walther Ruttmann, student of architecture, painting and design, subjects to which a forerunner of Bauhaus would apply modernist principles. Ruttmann’s progressive abandonment of abstraction in his series “Lichtspiel Opus” in order to work from the reality of an urban landscape in “Berlin: Symphony of a great city” demonstrates how, independently of any underlying ideology, dictatorship extends to the manipulation of art and culture for propaganda purposes. Clearly, the rise of fascist regimes in Germany and Italy and of communism in the Soviet Union, meant the repression of the avant-garde and the exaltation of the principle of realism which does not seek the subjective interpretation of the artistic work by the spectator, but the immediate understanding of the masses. In its “inconvenient” abstraction, “Lichtspiel Opus III” follows on from Ruttmann’s previous study in the series, the relationship between shapes, colours, figures and geometry. (SDM)