Although Russian Constructivism has already been explored in many facets, there are still some blind spots left. In her new book, Kristin Romberg is closing a gap, at least for English publications, by devoting her new book to Aleksei Gan's understanding of constructivism. In three chapters, Romberg offers three different ways of approaching constructivism by looking at Gan's biography on the one hand, and by thermalizing parallel processes of founding and discussing constructivist ideas on the other, as well as the production of these ideas on an objective level. Aleksei Gan was a major figure in the cultural life of the 1920s and his biography, which is heroic and tragic at the same time, serves as a central thread for this publication. Gan, who never was an artist per se but more a political organizer, declared a war on art and wanted to shape the public with constructivist theories and means, which he first offered in a manifesto-like publication, Constructivism, in 1922. It emerged out of informal discussions among Gan, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Varvara Stepanova in 1920, and Romberg makes clear that Gan was the origin of the three main concepts of constructivism: tectonics, factura, and construction. At this time, the former anarchist was elaborating mass actions as an artistic strategy and political idea. In her analysis of Gan's impacts in the cultural life of the Soviet Union, Romberg develops her term of embeddedness, which is not meant as a direct opposite of autonomy in art, but differs from the usually-used term of engagement. It means the dependency of an object or a subject in a larger totality. In Rombergs own words: “According to this logic, of course, every aesthetics is embedded. What makes constructivism important is that it was structured not around the denial of that fact but around its recognition and, further, its embrace. Gan accepted and self-consciously participated in the construction of the system in which he was situated” (8).

In the first chapter Romberg gives a detailed overview, the “Prehistory of Russian Constructivism,” the discussions and actions of which led to the formation of constructivist concepts. Whereas the second chapter, called “Gan's Constructivism,” deals with theoretical aspects of his personal impacts on art and architecture, here the first constructivist concept of tectonics plays a great role in shaping a modernist aesthetics, especially but not solely in the field of architecture. For Gan, autonomous art was an abstract fetishism and many of his contemporaries saw his rejection of art as too one-sided. That is why he was dismissed by many artist colleagues but still kept an unquestionable authority. His highly productive period was 1922–28, when he published the magazines Kino-Fot (1922) and Contemporary Architecture (1926–1928). These publications lead to the main focus of the third chapter, titled “Gan's Productivism,” in which Romberg examines Gan's main productive ideas.

Over his lifetime, Gan received numerous insults from colleagues and the press, which were accompanied by nervous breakdowns and alcoholism until he ended up as a kind of mascot for constructivists. Although other progressive colleagues, similarly to Gan, ceased working on all but small scale projects or disappearing in oblivion in the late 1920s and 1930s, many of their works were rediscovered by art history in the postwar period. But not Aleksei Gan. One of the reasons that Romberg mentions this is that he did not produce art objects as such but was more an agitator. In this publication his legacy is recovered through great detail from the archives and is elegantly interweaved with an aesthetic theory. Romberg argues that aesthetics, corresponding to this world, “replaced art's autonomy with an art formed under pressure, within the sum total of forces acting on it in the social, economic, political, intellectual, and technological reality of the moment” (5). This is what Romberg calls the aesthetics of embeddedness. Although the structure of the chapters is clear, the main thread is hard to catch. Romberg gives many outstanding and new insights in the development of constructivist concepts and circles, but I would not go as far as she does in the introduction to proclaim a new understanding of Russian Constructivism. She sheds light on the often forgotten leader of constructivist ideas and offers an interesting aesthetic survey of Gan's legacy, contextualized by the development of constructivism in art, architecture and cinema.