1. Artistic movement originating in post-revolutionary Russia, at the start of the 1920s. Active until the mid 1930s, when it was replaced by socialist realism, constructivism was typified by its rejection of the romantic idea of art for art’s sake, and instead insisted that art should serve a social and political purpose. Confined largely to the visual arts, (composer Dmitri Shostakouich was briefly a constructionist, though this is not how he is generally regarded) constructivism’s best remembered works tend to be posters produced in support of the revolution. Its influence was felt most keenly in Weimar Germany, where similar revolutionary sentiments were prevalent until the Nazis took power. The principal constructivist artists were El Lissitzky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Tatlin, and film-maker Dziga Vertov. 2. In philosophy, the position that reality is independent of human perception and any knowledge that we have of it is necessarily a construction. This is not the same thing as relativism, however, because it does not question the existence of reality or our ability to know that reality actually exists.