Rodchenko, Alexander (1891-1956) - 1930c. Portrait with Flacon
Born in 1891, Rodchenko came into artistic maturity with the Revolution. From 1918 to 1921, while rising to prominence in the new cultural bureaucracy, he pursued a highly innovative program of abstract painting and sculpture. With other artists--including his lifelong companion, Varvara Stepanova--he founded the Constructivist movement. Associating the avant-garde goal of artistic progress with the political goal of social progress, the Constructivists regarded their systematic investigations of the material and formal logic of art as essential to the creation of a Communist society.
In 1921, the driving logic of Rodchenko's theories and his ideal of social agency led him to declare the end of painting and to take up alternative mediums in the service of society. This bold stroke led him to a broad exploration of many fields of design, as well as photocollage and photography. In the 1920s, optimism and wit leavened Rodchenko's earnest fantasy of an ideal world put into order by the artist-engineer, but this fruitful paradox could not long survive in the political and cultural climate of Stalinism. Despite Rodchenko's efforts to adapt, he soon found himself at the margins of Soviet culture, and he spent much of the last two decades of his life in frustrated isolation. He died in 1956, the year that Nikita Krushchev denounced Stalin's crimes.
In the fall of 1925, using a camera he had bought in Paris, Rodchenko embarked on his first extended series of outdoor photographs--oblique views, from above and below, of his own apartment building on Miasnitskaya Street in Moscow, across the courtyard from VKhUTEMAS. Although he did not make further pictures in this vein until 1927, the series laid the cornerstone of his mature photographic aesthetic.
Rodchenko's Lef colleague Viktor Shklovsky had defined the principal aim of art as recovering the immediacy of experience by making the familiar seem unfamiliar. Many of Rodchenko's photographs achieve this simply by departing from the habit of looking--and photographing--straight ahead. He intended to encourage people to see things from fresh points of view by doing just that in his photographs. His style of oblique angles extended into photography the dynamic diagonal compositions of his early paintings. And it helped to shape a vibrant, experimental aesthetic of mobile perspectives, which flourished throughout Europe in the second half of the 1920s. Rodchenko regarded photography as mechanical and objective and therefore socially progressive, but much of his best work of this period was made independently, not on assignment, and it had no use as propaganda.
www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1998/rodchenko/intr...
Rodchenko, Alexander (1891-1956) - 1930c. Portrait with Flacon
Born in 1891, Rodchenko came into artistic maturity with the Revolution. From 1918 to 1921, while rising to prominence in the new cultural bureaucracy, he pursued a highly innovative program of abstract painting and sculpture. With other artists--including his lifelong companion, Varvara Stepanova--he founded the Constructivist movement. Associating the avant-garde goal of artistic progress with the political goal of social progress, the Constructivists regarded their systematic investigations of the material and formal logic of art as essential to the creation of a Communist society.
In 1921, the driving logic of Rodchenko's theories and his ideal of social agency led him to declare the end of painting and to take up alternative mediums in the service of society. This bold stroke led him to a broad exploration of many fields of design, as well as photocollage and photography. In the 1920s, optimism and wit leavened Rodchenko's earnest fantasy of an ideal world put into order by the artist-engineer, but this fruitful paradox could not long survive in the political and cultural climate of Stalinism. Despite Rodchenko's efforts to adapt, he soon found himself at the margins of Soviet culture, and he spent much of the last two decades of his life in frustrated isolation. He died in 1956, the year that Nikita Krushchev denounced Stalin's crimes.
In the fall of 1925, using a camera he had bought in Paris, Rodchenko embarked on his first extended series of outdoor photographs--oblique views, from above and below, of his own apartment building on Miasnitskaya Street in Moscow, across the courtyard from VKhUTEMAS. Although he did not make further pictures in this vein until 1927, the series laid the cornerstone of his mature photographic aesthetic.
Rodchenko's Lef colleague Viktor Shklovsky had defined the principal aim of art as recovering the immediacy of experience by making the familiar seem unfamiliar. Many of Rodchenko's photographs achieve this simply by departing from the habit of looking--and photographing--straight ahead. He intended to encourage people to see things from fresh points of view by doing just that in his photographs. His style of oblique angles extended into photography the dynamic diagonal compositions of his early paintings. And it helped to shape a vibrant, experimental aesthetic of mobile perspectives, which flourished throughout Europe in the second half of the 1920s. Rodchenko regarded photography as mechanical and objective and therefore socially progressive, but much of his best work of this period was made independently, not on assignment, and it had no use as propaganda.
www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1998/rodchenko/intr...