Stories of great photographers. Alexander Rodchenko

December 5, 1891 in beautiful St. Petersburg. His mother was an ordinary laundress, and his father was a theater worker who worked as a prop maker. When the boy was 11 years old, the family moved to live in the beautiful city of Kazan, where Alexander graduated from primary school at the church parish after 3 years.

In 1911, the young man entered the art school named after. N.I. Feshina, in which 3 years later he meets a beautiful girl named Varvara Stepanova. At the age of 23, the lovers begin a happy life together by moving to Moscow. At this age he was drafted into the army, in which he served for another 3 years. The future photographer was in charge of the management of one Sanitary train under the Moscow zemstvo.

After the army, Rodchenko begins to work in the trade union of painters in Moscow, where he mainly organizes normal working conditions for all young and beginners. Simultaneously with this work, Alexander, together with his colleagues, is working on the design of a local cafe called “Pittoresk”.

A year later, Alexander begins to develop a series of his own graphic, spatial, pictorial, abstract and geometric works. He was also interested in the direction of minimalism. After some time, Rodchenko began to participate in permanent exhibitions of the Russian avant-garde and in competitions dedicated to architectural topics.

In his small texts entitled “Everything is Experience” and “Line”, he recorded his personally accumulated creativity over many years. His attitude towards art was simply phenomenal; Rodchenko characterized the texts as something new in his life, which should not be overlooked.

For him, all this was a huge opportunity for self-expression and self-improvement, since every artistic particle invested in his work was a microelement of his big and kind soul.

In 1918, Alexander Rodchenko painted two impressive paintings, “White Circle” and “Black on Black,” the latter made entirely of oil paints.

The following year, the artist worked on creating a work of art consisting of three parts, which was made of monochrome flowers.

He constantly experimented and discovered something new for himself. Everything he did in the field of art and painting led him to designing real objects. He was faced with the most difficult and interesting task: to create a new unique thing from his own ideas and thoughts.

In 1919, Alexander worked on works made from flat elements of cardboard - this composition was called “Folding and Collapsing”. In 1920, he was interested in hanging mobiles that were cut out of plywood in simple geometric shapes - he called these works "Planes reflecting light."

And already in 1921, he invented spatial structures from ordinary wooden slats, from which a very interesting design “According to the principle of identical forms” emerged. In the same year, the painter drew a line in this direction and decided to switch to production art.

Further career and personal development

After some time, Rodchenko began to lecture at the woodworking and metalworking departments of the Moscow educational institution Vkhutemas-Vkhutein. For ten whole years, he has been working as a professor and teaching young people to design and create multifunctional objects that are useful to people both in everyday life and for large-scale purposes.

He showed how to give any manufactured object its unique and original expressive form, just as he could give an ordinary thing a transformable function. Throughout his teaching career, Alexander Rodchenko worked at the Institute of Artistic Culture as chairman of the commission.

In the period from 1923 to 1930, Alexander was a member of the groups “Lef” and “Ref”, and also worked as an artist for two popular magazines: the eponymous “Lef” and a certain “New Lef”.

He actively participated in the Association of Modern Architects, and in 1925 he was sent on a business trip to Paris to professionally design the Soviet section of the International Exhibition of Contemporary Decorative and Industrial Arts. It was there that the photographer carried out his first interior project, “Workers’ Club”.

In the same year, Alexander received a silver medal at the Paris exhibition for the best advertising posters; he was the author of the famous panels on the same Mosselprom House in Kalashny Lane in Moscow.

Since 1924, Alexander Rodchenko began to professionally study photography; his most famous works of that time are “Portrait of a Mother” and portraits of his colleagues from LEF, as well as images of famous artists and architects.

After 2 years, he published his first angle shots of various buildings in the magazine “Soviet Cinema”. He demonstrated his work from photo sessions in such a way that they became real propaganda for a completely new documentary view of our world. And Alexander always defended the position on the need to study and apply absolutely all points of view in photography.

In 1928, Rodchenko participated in an exhibition entitled “Soviet Photography for 10 Years.” His wide popularity and worldwide fame arose due to his constant experiments with angles during the next photo shoot. A year later, he staged a play based on A. G. Glebov’s play “Inga” at the famous Moscow Theater of the Revolution.

In the early thirties, Alexander Rodchenko worked as a photojournalist for a newspaper called “Evening Moscow”, and also did not ignore the popular magazines of the Soviet era: “Radio Listener”, “Ogonyok” and many others. He was actively interested in and developed in the film industry, reportage photography, and was also a talented inventor of original furniture, unusual costumes and original scenery.

In 1930, when Rodchenko was almost 40 years old, he became one of the founders of a photo group called "October", which included talented and professional photographers who shared the principles of innovative photography. A year later, at the House of Press, Alexander published several controversial photographs under the titles “Pioneer” and “Pioneer Trumpeter.”

And in 1931, here he demonstrated his best dynamic photographs “Vakhtan Sawmill”, which caused a storm of criticism and accusations of formalism that had not subsided for a long time, since the photographs did not correspond to the tasks of proletarian ethics.

After working in his own photo group for about two years, the photographer decided to leave this place and begin to develop himself as a photojournalist by getting a job at the popular publishing house Izogiz. A year later, he began working as one of the main graphic designers for a magazine called “USSR at Construction.”

Together with his charming wife Varvara, he worked on photo albums “10 years of Uzbekistan”, “Soviet aviation” and many others.

Recent works and retirement

Alexander Rodchenko continued his favorite activity as a painter, thanks to which he soon became a member of the jury and artist of numerous exhibitions, and was on the presidium of the photo section of the professional union of film workers.

This brilliant man is today known not only in the circles of the former countries that were part of the USSR, but also in the West. Towards the end of his twenties, he often sent his best work from photo shoots to France, Spain, the USA, Great Britain and Czechoslovakia.

After socialist realism was legitimized in the mid-thirties as the only correct style and method of presenting modern art, all of Alexander Rodchenko’s work began to be harshly criticized from all sides.

All this persecution lasted until 1951, until he was removed from the Union of Soviet Artists. And when all these disagreements subsided and the opinions of critics came to naught, he was reinstated as a member in 1954.

At the same time, the gifted master decided to return to painting and over the course of several years painted a whole selection of paintings dedicated to the circus and its workers. Throughout the forties, the author created many different decorative and non-objective works.

When the notorious Second World War began, he and his family were evacuated to the city of Ocher, and then they moved to live in Perm. In 1942, he returned to Moscow, where he again began working as a designer for various contemporary art exhibitions.

A year later he became the main pictorial artist of the capital's House of Technology. Then Rodchenko again worked with V. Mayakovsky, they created a whole selection of monographic posters, and a year before his death, the photographer, together with his beloved wife Varvara Fedorovna, wrote sketches for the design of the famous poem by the great Russian writer called “Good!”

Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko passed away on December 3, 1956 at the age of 64 in Moscow; this outstanding photographer was buried at the New Donskoye Cemetery.

What do you think about his life? Please write in the comments.

With absolute sincerity, Maxim Izmailov.

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, artist Varvara Stepanova, simultaneously practicing photography, painting, graphics, book design, sculpture and advertising design.

In photography, Rodchenko put documentary quality and realism of the images he created in the first place. He is responsible for innovation in the field of experiments with 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 eventually prevailed, 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 in teaching, teaching his students the basics of creating multifunctional objects for everyday life and public buildings.

Creative experiments gradually led Rodchenko to photography, which he considered an absolutely necessary means of expression for any modern 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”, “Dash”, “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 in modern art - book illustration and design.

Two years later, at the International Exhibition of Contemporary 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 the magazine “Soviet Cinema” in 1926, his first perspective photographs of buildings were also published, including the series of photographs “House on Myasnitskaya” and “Mosselprom House”.

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 in Soviet photography to call 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, from an unusual and unusual angle for the human eye. 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 government propaganda projects inspired by the spirit of the times and revolutionary romanticism, Rodchenko became interested in sports photography and photography of the unusual world of the circus.

In the post-war years, he returned from photography 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 the Donskoye 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, which included all his best projects in the field of painting, graphics and photography.

He experienced radical changes in his 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 artistic works, appearing 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 effect 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, a commune of Codroipo in northern Italy, hosts an exhibition featuring one hundred works by the artist. His works demonstrate Rodchenko's themes, techniques and 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, infusing seemingly mundane paintings with 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

Sketch of a poster for Dziga Vertov’s documentary film “Kinoglaz”, 1924

Morning exercises on the roof of a 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

From the life of the first Russian designer and master of photography

the site is starting a large project “50 most important photographers of our time”. We will talk about photographers who had a great influence on the development of photographic art. About the authors who, with their works, shaped the concept of “modern photography”. About the great masters of their craft, whose names and works are simply necessary to know.

It’s strange, but most commercial photographers do not think about the roots of their profession, focusing their work only on colleagues or a couple of casually familiar names. But in this sense, our profession differs little from the profession of, say, an artist. Ask a master painter if he knows any famous artists - most likely, in response you will hear a short lecture about painting, in which the interlocutor will talk about his favorite artistic styles, schools, and most likely accompany the story with a lot of dates, names and links to works . Yes, most artists have special education (at least at the art school level), where they learn about all this. But to a greater extent, this is, of course, self-education. Artists need to know the global context, because it is impossible to create works in isolation from the work of great masters, without knowing the basics. So why do photographers think differently?

The first professional on our list is the great Russian artist and photographer Alexander Rodchenko.

Even if you try to describe the activities of Alexander Rodchenko exclusively in #tags, you will end up with several pages of text. The most important participant in the Russian avant-garde, artist, sculptor, graphic artist, photographer... And much more.

Rodchenko was born in St. Petersburg, studied at the Kazan Art School named after. Feshin, where he met his future wife, the talented artist Varvara Stepanova. Subsequently, he held a number of important positions, including the post of chairman of the Institute of Artistic Culture (in this post he replaced another great artist - Wassily Kandinsky)

“Work for life, not for palaces, temples, cemeteries and museums”

This was his motto, which fully reflected the sentiments of the avant-garde artists of that time. Rejecting “decoration” and going against the aesthetic criteria of art, they endowed their works - from paintings to architectural forms - with many details, each of which had an important, constructive function. Hence the name of one of the main directions of their work - constructivism. “The art of the future,” Rodchenko said, “will not be a cozy decoration for family apartments. It will be equal in necessity to 48-story skyscrapers, grandiose bridges, wireless telegraphy, aeronautics, submarines, etc.”

Rodchenko began his work at a time of great change: outside the window was what would later be called the Leninist Soviet project. Hopes for a bright communist future were inspiring.

Rodchenko and photomontage

Among other things, Rodchenko is famous for his experiments in the field of photomontage - he was actually a pioneer of this art in Russia. A sort of master of Photoshop, but in Soviet times. You need to understand that Rodchenko, as a true communist and supporter of Soviet power, tried to direct his abilities to strengthening new orders of life, so he was happy to engage in propaganda activities. Thus, the most interesting and memorable propaganda posters of that time were designed using the photomontage technique. Masterfully combining text boxes, black and white photographs and color images, Rodchenko was engaged in what would now be called poster design - by the way, he is often called the founder of design and advertising in Russia. It was Rodchenko who Mayakovsky entrusted with the design of his book “About This”.

Rodchenko and photography

Rodchenko, like all Russian avant-garde artists, experimented with forms and technology. So he took up photography, and reportage photography at that. Using unexpected angles (the term "Rodchenko's angle" is often found in art history literature), forcing the viewer to spin prints before his eyes (or his head in front of the prints) and creating images that seem to be about to move, he has established himself as one of the most progressive and pioneering photographers of the time. Although then there were, frankly speaking, fewer of them (photographers) than there are now. Rodchenko plays with the visual means of photography, honing them to the limit. Rhythmic patterns, compositionally ideal interweaving of lines - he manages all this masterfully. He was one of the first to use multiple shooting of an object in action - storyboarding. Rodchenko was not afraid to violate the recently established photographic canons - he made portraits from the bottom up or deliberately “filled up the horizon.” With his photographic “eye,” he seemed to be trying to cover the entire Soviet Union. Perhaps that is why he took many photographs (especially reportage shots from demonstrations) while standing on stairs, roofs, or being in other non-obvious points.

Rodchenko continued his experiments even after the “death” of the avant-garde project - but under socialist realism and Stalin this was no longer encouraged. In 1951 he was even expelled from the Union of Artists and was rehabilitated only in 1954 - 2 years before his death.

Today, the most important educational institution in the field of visual arts, the Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia, bears the name of Alexander Rodchenko.

Mayakovsky's associate in advertising
December 5 marked the 125th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko “Pioneer”, 1930

In 1916, Rodchenko moved to Moscow, met his wife and colleague Varvara Stepanova and actively began to participate in avant-garde exhibitions together with Wassily Kandinsky, Vladimir Tatlin, and El Lissitzky. At first, his activity as a non-objective artist was limited to easel painting with compasses and rulers, largely derived from the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich.

Alexander Rodchenko

2. Alexander Rodchenko “Red. Yellow. Blue", 1921

3. Artist, photographer Alexander Rodchenko, director Vsevolod Meyerhold, poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, composer Dmitry Shostakovich (from left to right)

4. Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Mayakovsky “There have never been better nipples,” 1923

5. Alexander Rodchenko “Kinoglaz”, 1924

Nevertheless, in 1921, at the exhibition “5 × 5 = 25”, he showed the triptych “Smooth Color” of three monochrome canvases (yellow, red, blue) and, thus, broke with non-objective painting, divorced from reality, in order to move on to “industrial art”, which was supposed to organically merge into the collective life of the new society.

9. Alexander Rodchenko “Workers’ Club”, 1925

The “Constructivist Group” arose in February 1921 on the initiative of the artist and art theorist Alexei Gan, as well as Rodchenko and Stepanova. A year earlier, Rodchenko began giving lectures at VKHUTEMAS (Higher State Art and Technical Workshops) and supervising student projects - among them, for example, a bus station and universal exhibition equipment.

10. Alexander Rodchenko. By the phone. 1928

11. Alexander Rodchenko. Vladimir Mayakovsky. 1924

12. Alexander Rodchenko. Pedestrians. 1928

13. Alexander Rodchenko “He is not a citizen of the USSR who is not a shareholder of Dobrolyota”, 1923

One of Rodchenko’s first works on the topic of the day, which were called upon to “restructure” the consciousness of Soviet people, was a poster: “He is not a citizen of the USSR who is not a shareholder of Dobrolyota.” Since 1923, in tandem with Vladimir Mayakovsky, he has signed advertising posters: “Advertising designer Mayakovsky - Rodchenko.” Among their joint works is the Mosselprom emblem, advertising for the Molodaya Gvardiya magazine, GUM and Rubber Trust.

14. Alexander Rodchenko. Portrait of a mother. 1924

15. Alexander Rodchenko. "Wildflowers". 1937

16. Alexander Rodchenko. Sukharevsky Boulevard. 1928

17. Alexander Rodchenko “Composition”. 1917

18. Alexander Rodchenko “Dance”. 1915

19. Alexander Rodchenko “Pioneer”, 1930

Today, Rodchenko’s photographs are associated with laconic forms, clear lines and clear images. They are sold at auctions and exhibited in museums. However, Rodchenko took his first photographs in 1924 to collect material for photomontages.

20. Alexander Rodchenko “White Circle”. 1918

21. Alexander Rodchenko

On the 125th anniversary of his birthAlexandra Rodchenko(1891-1956) - constructivist, photographer and one of the first designers in the USSR, whose experiences have now taken shape as cultural archetypes, Gazeta.Ru recalls the main milestones of the artist’s work.