Russia, Today and Yesterday

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO was a well-known Moscow painter when, at the age of 33 in 1924, he took up photography. Within a year his dramatic manipulations of perspective were attracting international notice. By 1928 Alfred H. Barr, soon to become director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was paying him a visit.

Rodchenko’s techniques were so strikingly original they became synonymous with his name. Extreme foreshortening, shooting on the diagonal, straight down from a considerable height or straight up from the ground—all these are known to this day as “Rodchenko angles”.

His influence on generations of photographers began almost at once, as can be seen in the work of Andre Kertesz, who was then living in Paris, and, not long after, in that of Margaret Bourke-White, in New York. Today one measure of Rodchenko’s stature is the price his work fetches. An unusually large original print of the 1924 portrait of his friend, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Russian poet, comes up for auction in May with an estimate of £100,000-150,000 ($197,000-295,500).

Now, a major exhibition of Rodchenko’s work has opened 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, is the curator of this show.

The 120 works on display date from between 1922 and 1940, when Rodchenko got his last big commission, and are arranged thematically. The exhibition begins with the bold, playful photomontages which were his bridge from painting to photography. Many were advertisements commissioned by state-owned enterprises like the GUM department store. They combined cut-outs of already published images and typography with photographs, initially taken by others, that had often been specially staged. In one, the face of his friend, Osip Brik, a literary critic, has the word LEF (“left”) filling the right lens of his glasses. This was also an acronym for the “Leftist Front for Artists”, the Constructivist magazine for which Rodchenko, a founding member of the Constructivist group, made every cover.

In 1922 the Constructivists issued a manifesto calling for the defeat of art, which they regarded as the enemy of technology. Their aim was to use media and materials in new ways in order to improve everything from buildings and transport to dishes and galoshes. They believed this would produce a better life for all, a goal they shared with much of the international avant-garde and, they thought, with the Soviet government.

A photograph of Rodchenko, taken in the year the manifesto came out, shows a vigorous, handsome man in full combat dress. His “production suit”, a sturdy yet stylish all-in-one with numerous pockets for tools, was designed by his wife andfellow Constructivist, Varvara Stepanova. …more>>