Alexander rodchenko biography photography quotes

Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko (5 December 1891 – 3 December, 1956 was a Russian artist, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of Constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova.

Quotes

• I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation.
  • Quote in: 'The Death of Painting'; from the MoMA-website: Interactives: texts
  • Rodchenko is looking back: in 1921 he executed what were arguably some of the first true monochromes (artworks of one color; source, Wikipedia:Rodchenko)

• [my goal is] to photograph not a factory but the work itself from the most effective point of view.. ..in order to show the grandness of a machine, one should photograph not all of it but give a series of snapshots.
  • Quote, 1930: from Rodchenko lecture at the October group's meeting; as quoted by Margarita Tupitsyn in Chapter 'Fragmentation versus Totality: The Politics of (De)framing', in The great Utopia - The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992, p. 486
  • the issue was not to take 'photo pictures' of the entire object but to make 'photo stills' of characteristic parts of an object

• 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.
  • Quoted on Wikipedia:Rodchenko

Quotes about Aleksander Rodchenko

• ..one should not depict an isolated building or a tree which may be very beautiful but which will be.. ..painting, will be aesthetics.
  • Osip Brik, in his essay, 1928; as quoted by Margarita Tupitsyn in Chapter 'Fragmentation versus Totality: The Politics of (De)framing', in The great Utopia - The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932; Gu

A
major exhibition of the photographic work of Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) is
currently on at the Hayward Gallery in London. It is sponsored by Roman Abramovich, the
billionaire owner of Chelsea Football Club and a supporter of the Moscow House
of Photography Museum whose director, Olga Sviblova, curated the show. This important Russian
artist is
considered one of the most versatile avant-garde artists to have emerged after the Russian
Revolution. He was a part of the working group called the ‘constructivists’
whose general slogan was ‘Art into Life’, and their goal was "to unite
purely artistic forms with utilitarian intentions."(1) Originally
Rodchenko worked
as a painter and sculptor, before moving into graphic design and then
photography, using ground-breaking photographic techniques such as photomontage
and unusual camera angles, which this exhibition highlights.

Approximately
120 original prints and photomontages are featured with accompanying text,
quotes and video, to give the viewer a sense of history and context. The Hayward exhibition
is good by virtue of the art works themselves but unfortunately I feel that the
curation leaves a lot to be desired. Although the sub-heading for the show is ‘Revolution in Photography‘, the
Revolution part is conspicuously missing.

The
development of Rodchenko’s photography is traced over a period of two decades
and a fair amount of detail is used in describing his life and work in terms of style and form,
but unfortunately the political content of his work is just skimmed over.

If
you happen not to know much about this period in history – as most people don’t
– and follow the logic of the show’s emphasis, you would probably go away
thinking Rodchenko’s pioneering work was a product of his innate
‘avant-guardeness’ and that his motiva

Summary of Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko is perhaps the most important avant-garde artist to have put his art in the service of political revolution. In this regard, his career is a model of the clash between modern art and radical politics. He emerged as a fairly conventional painter, but his encounters with Russian Futurists propelled him to become an influential founder of the Constructivist movement. And his commitment to the Russian Revolution subsequently encouraged him to abandon first painting and then fine art in its entirety, and to instead put his skills in the service of industry and the state, designing everything from advertisements to book covers. His life's work was a ceaseless experiment with an extraordinary array of media, from painting and sculpture to graphic design and photography. Later in his career, however, the increasingly repressive policies targeted against modern artists in Russia led him to return to painting.

Accomplishments

• Rodchenko's art and thought moved extremely rapidly in the 1910s. He began as an aesthete, inspired by Art Nouveau artists such as Aubrey Beardsley. He later became a Futurist. He digested the work of Vladimir Tatlin, and the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich. By the decade's end he was pioneering Constructivism. This experimental inquiry into the elements of pictorial and sculptural art produced purely abstract artworks that separate out the components of each image - line, form, space, color, surface, texture, and the work's physical support. Constructivism encouraged a new focus on the tangible and material aspects of art, and its experimental spirit was encouraged by a belief that art had to match the revolutionary transformations then taking place in Russian politics and society.
• Rodchenko's commitment to the values of the Revolution encouraged him to abandon painting in 1921. He embraced a more functional view of art and of the artist, and he began collaborating with the poet Vladimir Mayak

Rodchenko’s story, like that of many others at the time, embodies the Greek sense of tragedy of being doomed to misfortune despite one’s will to do good. Fervently embracing beliefs in the ultimate goodness of the Soviet cause, Rodchenko must have felt profound frustration after the mid-1930s, when he was denied participation in the public sphere. Virtually destitute and nearly forgotten in his later years, Rodchenko resorted to painting, often portraying clowns and other circus performers . These images, which can be read metaphorically as ironic self-portraits, delivered a final coda in the life of a renowned Constructivist who had been forced to become a clown, a laughing stock fooling or fooled by others.

In terms of the macro-history of artistic connections and the larger frame of this investigation into the “climate of opinions”, Rodchenko’s references to Mendelsohn’s book in an article published the same year that vituperative attacks on “bourgeois formalism” began escalating in the Soviet press, seem to have been a dubious defense tactic. Rodchenko described Mendelsohn as a “leftist architect,” thereby attempting to render this characterization ideologically legitimate to the Soviet reader. We thus come full circle to the suspicious notion of “artistic influence” and the reversal of active/passive relations. In this case it was not Mendelsohn who “influenced” Rodchenko but the latter who acted upon Mendelsohn’s work, tinged it in certain ideological hues that it might not have originally possessed, and pushed it to the front line of a leftist, that is, “progressive” discourse of the time.

Was Mendelsohn as enthusiastic about the new vision of modernity, its connection to urbanism, and the new ways to portray it, as Rodchenko was? Mendelsohn’s diaries and letters to his wife reveal quite the opposite. The discrepancy between the Mendelsohn’s presumed “progressive” photographic vision and hi