RODCHENKO, ALEXANDER (1891-1956)
Rodchenko was born in 1891 where he came into "artistic maturity with the Revolution".
Between 1918-1921, he wanted to rise in prominence and enter the new cultural bureaucracy. Rodchenko started a highly innovative program of abstract painting and sculpture, with other artists including his lifelong companion, Varvara Stepanovahe where they founded the Constructivist art movement. The Constructivists associated with the avant-garde goal of artistic progress and 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 brave act led him to broaden his exploration in many areas of design, photocollage and photography.
In the 1920s, his 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". Rodchenko tried to adapt but "soon found himself at the margins of Soviet culture, and he spent much of the last two decades of his life in frustrated isolation".
In 1925, he used a camera bought in Paris and 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 died in 1956, which was the "the year that Nikita Krushchev denounced Stalin's crimes"
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Rodchenko's colleague, Viktor Shklovsky "defined the principal aim of art as recovering the immediacy of experience by making the familiar seem unfamiliar". I like this quote because for me it means that as you have so much interest in a particular area (experience) that you make what you know into something completely different.
A lot of Rodchenko's photographs "achieve this simply by the habit of looking and photographing--straight ahead". He wanted "to encourage people to see things from fresh points of view by doing just that in his photographs".
Rodchenko's style of looking at oblique angles "extended into photography the dynamic diagonal compositions of his early paintings". This original style of experimentation "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".
Rodchenko's artwork and photography