Vkhutemas
Soviet design school
Vkhutemas (Russian: Вхутемас, IPA: [fxʊtʲɪˈmas], acronym for Высшие художественно-технические мастерские Vysshiye Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskiye Masterskiye "Higher Art and Technical Studios") was the Russian state art and technical school founded in 1920 in Moscow, replacing the Moscow Svomas.
The workshops were established by a decree from Vladimir Lenin with the intentions, in the words of the Soviet government, "to prepare master artists of the highest qualifications for industry, and builders and managers for professional-technical education". The school had 100 faculty members and an enrollment of 2,500 students. Vkhutemas was formed by a merger of two previous schools: the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and the Stroganov School of Applied Arts. The workshops had artistic and industrial faculties; the art faculty taught courses in graphics, sculpture and architecture while the industrial faculty taught courses in printing, textiles, ceramics, woodworking, and metalworking.
Vkhutemas was a center for three major movements in avant garde art and architecture: constructivism, rationalism, and suprematism. In the workshops, the faculty and students transformed attitudes to art and reality with the use of precise geometry with an emphasis on space, in one of the great revolutions in the history of art. In 1926, the school was reorganized under a new rector and its name was changed from "Studios" to "Institute" (Вхутеин, Высший художественно-технический институт, Vkhutein, Vysshiy Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskii Institut), or Vkhutein.
The school was dissolved in 1930 following political and internal pressures throughout its ten-year existence. Its faculty, students, and legacy were dispersed into as many as six other schools.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Vkhutemas” as soviet design school. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1635293. VIAF identifies the subject as 135005292. The Library of Congress control number is n91040072. Authority coordinates are 55.765, 37.636. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 1926 and 1930.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vkhutemas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.