From the series “Glass and Light”
Print from glass-negative, 9 х 12 сm
11,3 х 8,5”
Rodchenko, Alexander Mikhailovich (November 23, 1891, Petersburg — December 3, 1956, Moscow), a Soviet painter, graphic artist, sculptor, photographer, stage designer and film artist; member of the Left Front of the Arts (LEF) association; founder of Constructivism and the Soviet design and advertising school.
Rodchenko studied under N.I.Feshin at the Kazan Art School (1911-1914) and then enrolled at the Stroganov School in Moscow. At that time he became closely associated with Russian avant-garde artists, such as Vladimir Tatlin, Kasimir Malevich and Liubov Popova. In 1916 Rodchenko and the fellow artist Varvara Stepanova started living together. In 1917 he was among the organizers of a professional union of painters, the “young federation,” which elected him secretary. Together with Georgy Yakulov, Tatlin and others, Rodchenko designed the Pittoresque Café in Moscow (1917). From 1918 to 1921he worked at the arts department of the People’s Commissariat for Education (IZO Narkompros), headed the Museum Bureau and sat on the arts council.
In late 1919 he joined the Commission for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture Synthesis (Zhivskulptarch society) and in 1920 was among the organizers of Rabis. Between 1920 and 1930 he taught at the VKhUTEMAS-VKhUTEIN wood- and metal-working faculties (united into Dermetfak in 1928), in 1921-1924 worked at the Institute of Artistic Culture (InKhuk) where he replaced Wassily Kandinsky as chairman in 1921, and in 1930 was among the founders of the Oktyabr (October) photography group.
Rodchenko focused on painting and graphic works during the first stage of his career (1913-1918). In 1918-1921 he did a series of 3D structures and presented a series of free-hanging spatial structures at the second exhibition of Obmokhu (Society of Young Artists, 1921). The early post-revolutionary period also saw the appearance of a series of paintings and drawings in which Rodchenko developed his analytical ideas about the relationship between color, line and structure (cycles of “Compositions of Projected and Painted Plane Movement”, Lines, Linism, a cycle of Composition and Structure drawings, and also Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color and Pure Blue Color from the Plain Boards series, which Rodchenko exhibited at the “5 x 5” group show in 1921 and with which he put an end to his easel painting and ventured into Constructivism). The ultimate aim of his experiments in graphic art and painting was to shift to the design of real things: producing new objects became his primary mission in art.
In the early 1920s he concentrated on industrial and agitprop art issues. He ventured into printing and, together with Stepanova, laid down a new style of Constructivist book, magazine and newspaper printing design. He produced type and illustration samples for a number of publishers, as well as for the Kino-fot, Ogonyok, Smena, Kniga i Revolutsia, Pioner, Sovremennaya Arkhitektura and other magazines, from 1923 on he designed the LEF and in 1927-1928 the Novy LEF magazine, and, jointly with Stepanova, designed the SSSR na Stroike magazine from 1933 to 1941.
Photomontage became the key artistic method of Rodchenko’s Constructivist printing, culminating in his masterpiece design of Mayakovsky’s Pro eto poem (1923). It was at that time that Rodchenko and Mayakovsky began to cooperate in Soviet advertising (designing posters, signboards, packaging, badges, postage stamps and so on). Rodchenko’s style of Constructivist design left an imprint on the entire life environment of the 1920s. Photography was soon to dominate in his work after he made a number of portraits of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nikolai Aseev, Alexander Dovzhenko, his mother and some others in 1924. A master of photo portraiture, reportage and genre photography, Rodchenko made an innovative use of light-and-shade contrast and with his compositional frame arrangement gave birth to the “Rodchenko perspective” and “Rodchenko false perspective” terms.
In 1925 Rodchenko contributed to four sections of the Paris International Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts – book design, street design, stage and furniture design (Workers Club design), winning silver medals in every one of them.
He first tried his hand at scenography in 1920, making stage designs for A.M.Gan’s My (We, remained unproduced); in 1928-1932 he designed sets and costumes for Moscow theaters, including for the production of Mayakovsky’s Klop (Bedbug) at the Meyerhold Theater in 1929.
After Socialist Realism was declared the sole national style and method in the 1930s, Rodchenko began to come under arbitrary criticism more and more often and was finally expelled from the Soviet Artists Union in 1951 (reinstated in 1954). In the mid-1930s he resumed painting, making a series of pictures about the circus and circus actors, and in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s did decorative abstractions. From 1934 on, jointly with Stepanova, he designed books and photo albums published for anniversaries and commemorative occasions (Ten Years of Uzbekistan, 1934; The First Cavalry Army, 1935-1937; The Red Army, 1938; Soviet Aviation, 1939, etc.).
In 1941 Rodchenko and his family were evacuated to Ocher and then Perm; he returned to Moscow in 1942 and engaged in exhibition design. In 1943-1945 he served as the chief artist of Moscow’s House of Technology. In the late 1940s he designed a series of Mayakovsky monographic posters and in 1955-1956, jointly with Stepanova, did sketches of book design for Mayakovsky’s Khorosho poem.