Stroganov Moscow State University of Arts and Industry
Kazan School of Art
Stroganov Moscow State University of Arts and Industry
designer painter Photographer sculptor
Alexander Rodchenko was born on December 5, 1891 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, to a working class family. His father, Mikhail Rodchenko, was a theater props manager and his mother, Olga, a washerwoman. The family's social status did not provide much opportunity for the artistic education of talented Alexander. The family moved to the city of Kazan in 1905. Two years later, Mikhail passed away, but they were able to allocate some of the family's scarce funds for Alexander's education.
Rodchenko enrolled in the Kazan School of Art, where he studied from 1910 to 1914 under Nikolai Feshin and Georgii Medvedev. The young artist quickly absorbed the basic principles of the academic training, earning high praise from his instructors. Then he went to Moscow to continue on at the Imperial Central Stroganov School of Industrial Art (now the Stroganov Moscow State University of Arts and Industry).
In Moscow, Rodchenko was influenced by the key figures of the Russian avant-garde movement, namely Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich. He executed his first abstract drawing, reminiscent of Malevich's Suprematist compositions, in 1915. But it was not only the avant-garde artistic milieu that influenced him. Through his acquaintances with liberal thinkers such as the Futurists David Burliuk and Wassily Kamensky, Rodchenko found himself in the heart of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
Rodchenko's involvement with the Bolshevik cause was both ideological and aesthetic. As a working class young man, he witnessed firsthand the social injustice of Tsarist Russia. Rodchenko deeply believed in the power of art as a driving force of social transformation, as is detailed in many of his letters and diaries, which were only recently translated into English. Rodchenko embraced the emerging aesthetics of Russian Constructivism, becoming a leading member of the group.
Rodchenko's early years demonstrated his artistic talent and quest for innovation. From 1917 to 1918, he was mainly experimenting with flat geometric compositions. Then, in 1919, he created an entirely abstract series of "Black on Black" paintings, which might be read as a response to the spiritualism of Malevich's "Black Square" (1915). While Malevich's work seemed to herald the end of painting, it also touted a spiritualism that Rodchenko rejected. The "Black on Black" paintings, similarly reductive, though not as extreme as the Black Square, emphasized instead the material qualities of picture-making.
In the early years of the Soviet Republic, Rodchenko, alongside his friend and colleague Wassily Kandinsky, was actively engaged in the government reform of art collections and education. In 1917, he became secretary of the Professional Union of Artist-Painters, joining the Izo (Otdel Izobrazitel'nykh Iskusstv or the Section of Visual Arts), as one of the presiding officials the following year.
In 1920, he was appointed the Director of the Museum Bureau and Purchasing Fund, a newly created agency in charge of the immense art collections transferred by the Bolsheviks from the palaces of the rich into the public domain. During his tenure, Rodchenko acquired 1,926 works of modern and contemporary art by 415 artists and established 30 public museums in Russian provinces.
While organizing the provincial museums, Rodchenko trained artists to serve the Communist state at the Higher Technical Artistic Studios. He taught the same principles that shaped his own artistic discourse; he rejected illusory representation as an outdated form hindered by the capitalist visual agenda, denounced painting as a domineering visual genre, preferring design, which challenged the notion of a work of art as a unique commodity, and, even more radically, promoted the idea of an artist as an engineer, a key creative force at the service of the masses.
In 1921, Rodchenko joined the Productivist movement, a group of artists devoted to the idea of incorporating artistic forms into the daily lives of common people. As a member of the group, Rodchenko designed notable utilitarian objects, including furniture, various household items, and textile patterns. More importantly, he became involved in bringing Constructivist forms into the mass visual propaganda of the Bolsheviks. His posters, such as "Books" (1923), became an icon of the early Soviet state and its artistic fervor.
The ideas of Wassily Kandinsky may have been an important influence on Rodchenko in the early Soviet years, since the two were closely associated. But while Kandinsky was interested in the expressive possibilities of art, Rodchenko was increasingly interested in its potential as a laboratory for design and construction. However, his final statements in painting returned to the issue of color; in 1921, he exhibited the groundbreaking triptych "Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color" (1921) comprised of purely monochrome panels of those colors.
In 1921, Rodchenko took a decisive, although temporary, break from painting. Instead, he concentrated on creating three-dimensional models of design objects, architectural sketches, and photography. He also created sets for film and theatre and designed furniture and clothes. From 1923 to 1925, he collaborated with the great avant-garde poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, illustrating some of his books and magazines for progressive Soviet writers.
It was through photography that Rodchenko enjoyed the most success in the 1920s. Employed as a correspondent for a number of Soviet newspapers and magazines, his photographs were exhibited all over the world. He was universally praised for his avant-garde compositions and experimental approach to focus and contrast in his photographs.
By the middle of the 1930s, Rodchenko fell out of favor with the Communist Party. The regime's visual ideology was completely transformed when Joseph Stalin came to power. The free-spirited avant-garde aesthetic was now actively suppressed by the state. Rodchenko and his wife were lucky not to perish in Stalin's Great Purges that swept through the Soviet Union and exterminated many individuals who came to prominence at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. With Social Realism becoming the official art of the U.S.S.R., Rodchenko's paintings and designs were openly condemned by the authorities for so-called "formalism."
As such, Rodchenko turned to photojournalism. His photographic images epitomized the era of High Stalinism by depicting lavish parades, immense industrial undertakings, and the decisive transformation of agriculture. Naturally, Rodchenko was explicitly forbidden to capture the horrendous human toll of this sweeping modernization. In the 1940s, he returned to painting, executing a number of powerful abstract expressionist compositions. These works, however, were never to be seen by his contemporaries, for they openly contradicted the officially sanctioned aesthetics. He continued his work as a photographer throughout the Stalin years, until his death in 1956.
As a key figure of the Russian modernist movement, the art of Alexander Rodchenko helped redefine three key visual genres of modernism: painting, photography, and graphic design. His series of purely abstract proto-monochrome paintings were influential to artists such as Ad Reinhardt and the Minimalists of the 1960s. In the field of photography, he established unprecedented compositional paradigms, which in many ways still define the entire notion of modern photographic art. Rodchenko's involvement with the Bolshevik cause further propelled the appreciation of his art in the leftist circles of the American avant-garde.
Construction
Painter Alexander Shevchenko
Pioneer with a horn
Bug
Suprematism
Radio listener
Rubbers of Rezinotrest
About That
Promotional poster for Mosselprom
Syphilis
Objectless composition № 65 (Still life)
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Construction
The disc and lid
Rechevik
not detected
Battleship Potemkin
Rubbers of Rezinotrest
Non-objective composition
Girl with a Leica
Watches
not detected
White circle
Books propaganda poster
Construction
Mandolin player
A Pageant of Youth
Composition
Books
Dobroliot (Fly well)
Osip Brik
Construction
Construction
Dance, an objectless composition
Rubbers of Rezinotrest
Construction
Mayakovsky smiles, laughs, mocks
Stairway
Quadriga of Apollo on the front of the Bolshoi Theatre
Assembling for a Demonstration
not detected
Rubbers of Rezinotrest
There and back
Construction
Abstraction (Rupture)
not detected
Arvatov about Mayakovsky
Nonsense
Dancer of the East
Promotional poster for Rezinotrest
And this is standing for centuries
Construction
not detected
Parade of the Dynamo Sports Club, 1928
Construction
Dobroliot stamps
Construction
Rubbers of Rezinotrest
Battleship Potemkin
Red and Yellow
not detected
Monument to Pushkin
Objectless composition
Fly. Avia-poems.
Battleship Potemkin
The Fire's Man
For Sergey Esenin
Realistic abstraction
Construction
Clerk
Cover of book "About That"
not detected
Dobroliot (Fly well)
Dobroliot (Fly well)
Construction
Dobroliot (Fly well)
Lilya Brik
Journalist
Objectless composition № 65
Composition (Winning Red)
Rubbers of Rezinotrest
Lenin is on the verge of two epochs of human development
Death Ray
Construction
Aleksander Rodchenko was attacked by Stalinists and was accused of supporting Trotsky and his ideas. Rodchenko was officially charged with "bourgeois formalism" and his photography was censored and banned from public shows. Alexander Rodchenko was in opposition to Socialist realism. From the late 1930's to the end of his life he was forced to quit photography amidst the paranoia of Stalinist censorship.
Marginalized as far as the official Soviet art — Socialist Realism — was concerned, Rodchenko centred all his innovation and creativity on photography and shaping with his distinct style the photographic record of Soviet industrialization and photographic propaganda. He created distinct images that featured unusual — often oblique — angles and showed the geometric influence of his Constructivist background.
Quotations: "One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again."
Rodchenko embraced the emerging aesthetics of Russian Constructivism, becoming a leading member of the group. In 1921, Rodchenko joined the Productivist movement, a group of artists devoted to the idea of incorporating artistic forms into the daily lives of common people.
In 1914, Aleksander Rodchenko met Varvara Stepanova, a fellow student. They became life-long partners and artistic collaborators.
