Alexander Rodchenko

Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko ( _ru. Александр Михайлович Родченко, OldStyleDate|5 December|1891|23 November – December 3, 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.

Rodchenko was one of the most versatile Constructivist and Productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or below—to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: "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."

Life and career

Rodchenko was born in St. Petersburg to a working class family. His family moved to Kazan in 1902 and he studied at the Kazan School of Art under Nikolai Feshin and Georgii Medvedev, and at the Stroganov Institute in Moscow. He made his first abstract drawings, influenced by the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich, in 1915. The following year, he participated in "The Store" exhibition organized by Vladimir Tatlin, who was another formative influence in his development as an artist.

Rodchenko was appointed Director of the Museum Bureau and Purchasing Fund by the Bolshevik Government in 1920. He was responsible for the reorganization of art schools and museums. He taught from 1920 to 1930 at the Higher Technical-Artistic Studios (VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN).

In 1921 he became a member of the Productivist group, which advocated the incorporation of art into everyday life. He gave up painting in order to concentrate on graphic design for posters, books, and films. He was deeply influenced by the ideas and practice of the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, with whom he worked intensively in 1922.

Impressed by the photomontage of the German Dadaists, Rodchenko began his own experiments in the medium, first employing found images in 1923, and from 1924 on shooting his own photographs as well. His first published photomontage illustrated Mayakovsky's poem, "About This," in 1923.

From 1923 to 1928 Rodchenko collaborated closely with Mayakovsky (of whom he took several striking portraits) on the design and layout of LEF and "Novy LEF", the publications of Constructivist artists. Many of his photographs appeared in or were used as covers for these journals. His images eliminated unnecessary detail, emphasized dynamic diagonal composition, and were concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space.

Throughout the 1920s Rodchenko's work was abstract often to the point of being non-figurative. In the 1930s, with the changing Party guidelines governing artistic practice, he concentrated on sports photography and images of parades and other choreographed movements.

Rodchenko joined the October circle of artists in 1928 but was expelled three years later being charged with "formalism." He returned to painting in the late 1930s, stopped photographing in 1942, and produced abstract expressionist works in the 1940s. He continued to organize photography exhibitions for the government during these years. He died in Moscow in 1956.

Influence

Much of 20th century graphic design stems from the work of Alexsander Rodchenko. His influence on modern graphic design is so pervasive that to pick out particular designers he has influenced would largely be a pointless endeavour.

His 1924 portrait of Lilya Brik has inspired a number of subsequent works, including the cover art for a number of music albums. Among them are influential Dutch punk band The Ex, which published a series of 7" vinyl albums, each with a variation on the Lilya Brik portrait theme, and the cover of the Franz Ferdinand album, "You Could Have It So Much Better". The poster for "One-Sixth Part of the World" was the basis for the cover of "Take Me Out", also by Franz Ferdinand.

The end of painting

In 1921, Russian avant-garde artist Alexander Rodchenko executed what were arguably the first true monochromes (artworks of one color), and proclaimed "I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: this is the end of painting." For artists of the Russian Revolution, Rodchenko's radical action was full of utopian possibility. It marked the end of easel painting – perhaps even the end of art – along with the end of bourgeois norms and practices. It cleared the way for the beginning of a new Russian life, a new mode of production, a new culture.

It is through the repetition by contemporary artists of Rodchenko's gesture that the monochrome's extreme nature can be fully analyzed and made meaningful. Whether represented by paintings, drawings, prints, or sculpture, the contemporary artists in the exhibition stop short of making pure monochromes, thereby flirting with its concepts. They creatively repeat, vary, differentiate, and hold in productive tension its contradictory poles: both the death of art and its resuscitation. [cite web | title=Henry Art exhibition of his works, information | url=http://www.henryart.org/pastex/pastex2003.htm | accessdate=2008-07-18]

Gallery of selected works

See also

* Russian avant-garde

External links

* [http://www.museum.ru/gmii/rod_1.htm The Rodchenko and Stepanova collection] at The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts
* [http://www.danyanovikov.narod.ru/rofo/rodlogos.html Photos of Rodchenko on danyanovikov.narod.ru]
* [http://www.wsws.org/arts/1998/aug1998/rod-a29.shtml Rodchenko's art and fate: the experiment continues] review of 1998-99 exhibition touring the US, Germany and Sweden reviewed on the World Socialist Web Site
*BMI Voyager - [http://www.bmivoyager.com/2008/01/22/rodchenko/ Rodchenko's works come to London]
* [http://www.gyro.co.nz/pages/rodcko.html Peter Schjeldahl on Alexander Rodchenko]
* [http://www.henryart.org/pastex/pastex2003.htm Henry Art exhibition information]
* [http://www.youtube.com/user/AlexanderRodchenko YouTube user with tens of thousands of videos in the spirit of Rodchenko]

References