Alexander Rodchenko
1891-1956
The founder of Constructivism – Russian design – and the first revolutionary photographer was born in St Petersburg to a working-class family, who moved to Kazan after the death of his father in 1909. In 1910, Rodchenko began studies under Nicolai Fechin and Georgii Medvedev at the Kazan Art School, where he met Varvara Stepanova, herself a leading avant garde artist, whom he later married.
After 1914, he continued his artistic training at the Stroganov Institute in Moscow, where he created his first abstract drawings, influenced by the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich. The following year, he participated in ‘The Store’ exhibition organized by Vladimir Tatlin.
Rodchenko’s work was heavily influenced by Cubism and Futurism, as well as by Malevich’s Suprematist compositions, which featured geometric forms deployed against a white background. Rodchenko used a compass and ruler in creating his paintings, with the goal of eliminating expressive brushwork.
He was appointed Director of the Museum Bureau and Purchasing Fund by the Bolshevik Government in 1920, responsible for the reorganisation of art schools and museums. He became secretary of the Moscow Artists’ Union, set up the Fine Arts Division of the People’s Commissariat for Education, and helped found the Institute for Artistic Culture. Between 1920 to 1930 he also taught at the Higher Technical-Artistic Studios (VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN), a type of Bauhaus organization that was disbanded in 1930.
In 1921, Rodchenko executed the first monochrome paintings at the ‘5 x 5=25’ exhibition in Moscow. Rodchenko’s radical action 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. Rodchenko later proclaimed; ‘I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: it’s all over.’
Impressed by the photomontage of the German Dadaists, Rodchenko began his own experiments in the medium, shooting his own photographs from 1924, the year of his most famous image (for the Lengiz Publishing House), which featured a young woman with a cupped hand shouting. His photography became increasingly revolutionary, using twisted or changed perspective, and his influence widespread.
Rodchenko joined the October Group of artists in 1928 but was expelled three years later, charged with ‘formalism’. With changing Party guidelines in the 1930s governing artistic practice in favour of Socialist realism, he concentrated on sports photography and images of parades and other choreographed movements, only returning to painting in the latter part of the decade.
