Rodchenko photographs. Laconic USSR Rodchenko (many photos). Advertising posters and photographs

05.03.2020

Soviet master of photography Alexander Rodchenko is known as one of the founders of constructivism and the creation of a completely new direction - design. For many years he worked with his wife, the artist Varvara Stepanova, simultaneously practicing photography, painting, graphics, book design, sculpture and advertising design.

In photography, Rodchenko put documentary quality and realism in the images he created in the first place. He is responsible for innovation in the field of experiments with the angular composition of the frame and photographic points.

Alexander Mikhailovich Rodchenko was born in 1891, his father worked as a theater props maker. At first he studied to become a dental technician, but his passion for painting ultimately overpowered him, and Rodchenko entered the Kazan art school. It was there that he met his future wife Varvara Stepanova, with whom he subsequently made many joint artistic projects.

Rodchenko was actively interested in painting and worked on creating abstract compositions. For some time he devoted himself to the so-called production art, which involved the creation of utilitarian objects without any artistic content.

After the revolution of 1917, Rodchenko became one of the secretaries of the trade union of painters in Moscow, organizing the necessary conditions for the creativity of young artists. During this period, he tried his hand at decorating the Pittoresk cafe in Moscow and at the same time headed the Museum Bureau. His life in art is a constant experiment involving the creation of completely new graphic, pictorial and spatial projects.

In painting, Rodchenko introduced lines and dots as independent pictorial forms; in the field of creating spatial forms, folding and collapsing structures from flat cardboard elements. In the early 20s he was engaged teaching activities, teaching his students the basics of creating multifunctional items for Everyday life and public buildings.

Creative experiments gradually led Rodchenko to photography, which he considered an absolutely necessary means of expression for any contemporary artist. His portrait and reportage photographs, as well as interesting collages using both his own photographs and magazine clippings, immediately attracted attention to him.

Rodchenko’s photographs began to be published in such publications as “Evening Moscow”, “ Soviet photo", "Give", "Pioneer" and "Ogonyok". With a reputation as an innovator in photography, Alexander Rodchenko soon received an offer from Vladimir Mayakovsky to illustrate his books. Rodchenko made several photomontages for the design of the publication of Mayakovsky’s poem “About This” in 1923, which even served as the beginning of the emergence of a new direction contemporary art– illustrations of books and design.

Two years later on International exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, Rodchenko's advertising posters were awarded a silver medal. At the same time, he turned to classical portraiture in photography - portraits of Mayakovsky, Aseev, Tretyakov, Melnikov and other representatives of art. In 1926, the magazine “Soviet Cinema” also published his first perspective photographs of buildings, including the series of photographs “House on Myasnitskaya” and “House of Mosselprom”.

What distinguished Alexander Rodchenko from other photographers of the 20s? The fact is that photography of that time was characterized by the creation of images with a horizontal composition and a rectilinear perspective. The photographs were dominated mainly by static sculptural compositions, which did not evoke great emotions in the viewer.

Rodchenko was the first Soviet photography called for abandoning such dogmas in favor of images that describe life as realistically as possible. That is why he constantly experimented with angles and shooting points in order to catch this or that object in those moments that would constitute its essence, movement.

In photography, Rodchenko sought to reveal the content of an object or an entire phenomenon. To do this, he skillfully “played” with photographic angles, used contrasting chiaroscuro and worked on the original compositional structure of the frame.

Alexander Rodchenko went down in the history of Russian and world photography as the author of unique photographs taken from a variety of angles, in an unusual and unusual way. human eye perspective. He believed that every photographer should “remove the veil from the eyes, called the navel... and shoot from all points except the navel until all points are recognized.”

In the 30s, Alexander Rodchenko worked as a photojournalist for the Izogiz publishing house and as a graphic designer for the magazine “USSR in Construction,” which allowed him to take part in a trip to the White Sea-Baltic Canal, where he took a series of reportage photographs. After a series of state propaganda projects inspired by the spirit of the times and revolutionary romanticism, Rodchenko became interested in sports filming and photography unusual world circus

IN post-war years from photography he returned to painting and decoration. However, his original work soon came into conflict with the position of the official authorities and in 1951 Rodchenko was expelled from the Union of Artists.

Alexander Rodchenko died in December 1956 in Moscow and was buried at Donskoy Cemetery. In photography, he is often compared to Edward Weston and Tina Modotti. In many ways, the school of Soviet photography created with his participation discovered many new outstanding names - Arkady Shaikhet, Max Alpert, and others.

In 1998, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted a large-scale exhibition of works by Alexander Rodchenko, incorporating all of his best projects in the field of painting, graphics and photography.

He experienced radical changes in home country and ended up initiating sweeping changes in his chosen art form. “We are obliged to experiment,” proclaimed Rodchenko, who abandoned “contemplative” photography.

Alexander Mikhailovich Rodchenko was born in St. Petersburg in 1891, saw the end of the Tsarist Empire, met the arrival of Lenin, and witnessed Stalin's repressions. As the son of a turbulent generation, he himself was turbulent. Although his first artwork, which emerged during the 1910s and 1920s, were part of the burgeoning Russian avant-garde, Rodchenko became one of many artists whose creative instincts were curbed by the strict principles of artistic expression in force under Soviet rule. From the 1930s until his death in 1956, his work focused on sporting events, parades and other traditional propaganda themes.

From 7 March to 28 June 2015, Villa Manin, commune of Codroipo in northern Italy, hosts an exhibition featuring one hundred works by the artist. His works demonstrate themes technique and Rodchenko's ingenuity. The collection includes works for magazines, cinema and advertising, as well as beautiful compositions created together with his wife and colleague Varvara Stepanova.

Rodchenko's early works reveal a gifted and courageous artist, pouring into seemingly mundane paintings new life. This exhibition is devoid of the dictates of socialist realism in order to show the bright, thoughtful and memorable images for which Alexander Rodchenko is known.

Portrait of Lilia Brik on the poster “Books”, 1924

Poster sketch for documentary film Dzigi Vertov's "Kino-Eye", 1924

Morning exercises on the roof student dormitory in Lefortovo, 1932

Pioneer trumpeter, 1930

Shukhov Tower, 1929

Portrait of a mother, 1924

Varvara Stepanova, 1928

Radio listener, 1929

Staircase, 1930

Mosselprom building, 1926

Laying asphalt, Leningradskoe highway, 1929

Boats, 1926

Bus, 1932

Lunch in a mechanized canteen, 1932

Alexander Rodchenko - Life and photography

Pioneer trumpeter 1930

Alexander Rodchenko was born in 1891 into the family of a theater prop maker. His father did not at all want his son to follow in his footsteps, and tried with all his might to give the boy a “real” profession. In his autobiographical notes, Rodchenko recalled: “In Kazan, when I was 14 years old, I climbed onto the roof in the summer and wrote a diary in small books, full of sadness and melancholy from my uncertain situation, I wanted to learn to draw, but I was taught to become a dental technician...” Future photographer The avant-garde artist even managed to work for two years in the technical prosthetic laboratory of the Kazan dental school of Dr. O.N. Nathanson, but at the age of 20 he left his medical studies and entered the Kazan Art School, and then the Moscow Stroganov School, which opened the way for him to independent creative life. Rodchenko did not immediately turn to photography.

Self-portrait
In the mid-1990s, he was actively involved in painting, and his abstract compositions took part in many exhibitions. A little later, he showed his talent in a new field, taking part in the design of the Pittoresk cafe in Moscow, and for some time he even abandoned painting, turning to “industrial art” - a movement that in its extreme form denied art and addressed purely to the creation of utilitarian objects.

Summer day 1929

In addition, in the late tenths and early twenties, the young artist participated a lot in public life: he became one of the organizers of the trade union of painters, served in the fine arts department of the People's Commissariat for Education, and headed the Museum Bureau. Rodchenko’s first steps in the field of photography date back to the early 20s, when he, at that time a theater artist and designer, was faced with the need to capture his work on film. Having discovered a new art for himself, Rodchenko was completely fascinated by it - however, in photography, as in painting, at that time he was more interested in “pure composition”, exploring how objects located on a plane influence each other.

Shukhov Tower.1929

It is worth noting that Rodchenko was luckier as a photographer than as an artist - the former was recognized faster. Soon enough, the young photographer created a reputation for himself as an innovator, producing a series of collages and montages using his own photographs and magazine clippings. Rodchenko’s works were published in the magazines “Soviet Photo” and “New LEF”, and Mayakovsky invited him to illustrate his books. Rodchenko’s photomontages, used in the design of the edition of Mayakovsky’s poem “About This” (1923), literally became the beginning of a new genre.

Portrait of a Mother 1924

Since 1924, Rodchenko increasingly turned to classical areas photography - portrait and reportage - however, here too the restless innovator did not allow established traditions to dictate his terms. The photographer created his own canons, which ensured his work a place of honor in any modern photography textbook. As an example, we can cite a series of portraits of Mayakovsky, in which Rodchenko discarded all the traditions of pavilion photography, or “Portrait of a Mother” (1924), which became a classic of close-up photography.

Vladimir Mayakovsky 1924

The photographer also made a great contribution to the development of the photo reportage genre - it was Alexander Rodchenko who was the first to use multiple photographs of a person in action, which allows one to obtain a collective documentary-figurative idea of the model. Rodchenko’s photo reports were published in a number of central publications: the newspaper “Evening Moscow”, magazines “30 days”, “Daesh”, “Pioneer”, “Ogonyok” and “Radio Listener”. However, the real business card“For Rodchenko, angle photographs began - the artist went down in history with photographs taken at an unusual angle, from an unusual and often unique point, in a perspective that distorts and “revitalizes” ordinary objects. For example, the photographs taken by Rodchenko from the roofs (top angle) are so dynamic that it seems as if the figures of people are about to begin to move, and the camera will float over the city, revealing a breathtaking panorama - it is not surprising that the first angle photographs of buildings (the series “House on Myasnitskaya”, 1925 and “House of Mosselprom”, 1926) were published in the magazine “Soviet Cinema”.

Mosselprom House 1932

Around the same time, Rodchenko’s debut as a photography theorist dates back to: from 1927, in the magazine “New LEF”, of which he was a member of the editorial board, the artist began publishing not only photographs, but also articles (“On the photo in this issue”, “ Paths modern photography", etc.) However, for the beginning of the 30s, some of his experiments seemed too bold: in 1932, the opinion was expressed that Rodchenko’s famous “Pioneer Trumpeter”, shot from the lowest point, looked like a “well-fed bourgeois”, and the artist himself did not want restructure in accordance with the tasks of proletarian photography. Filming the construction of the White Sea Canal in 1933 really forced Rodchenko to rethink in many ways the relationship between art and reality, which seemed less and less inspiring to the artist. It was at this time that in Rodchenko’s photographs, the unprecedented construction sites of socialism and the new Soviet reality began to give way to the special world of sports and the magical reality of the circus. Rodchenko dedicated to the latter whole line unique series - the pictures were to be included in a special issue of the magazine “USSR at Construction”. Unfortunately, the issue was signed for publication five days before the start of the Great Patriotic War and never saw the light of day. In the post-war years, Rodchenko worked a lot as a designer and returned to painting, although he still often turned to his favorite genre of photo reporting. His “non-standard” creativity still raised certain doubts in official circles - the disagreements between the artist and the authorities ended in 1951 with the exclusion of Rodchenko from the Union of Artists. However, just three years later, in 1954, the artist was reinstated in this organization. On December 3, 1956, Alexander Rodchenko died in Moscow from a stroke and was buried at the Donskoye Cemetery.