As a working class young man, he witnessed firsthand the social injustice of Tsarist Russia. Rodchenko's involvement with the Bolshevik cause was both ideological and aesthetic. Through his acquaintances with liberal thinkers such as the Futurists David Burliuk and Vasily Kamensky, Rodchenko found himself in the heart of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. But it was not only the avant-garde artistic milieu that influenced him. He executed his first abstract drawing, reminiscent of Malevich's Suprematist compositions, in 1915. In Moscow, Rodchenko was influenced by the key figures of the Russian avant-garde movement, namely Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich. Rodchenko attended the Stroganov Institute, where he studied drawing, painting, and art history. He and Stepanova journeyed to Moscow in 1915 to acquire more meaningful exposure to the nascent Russian modernism, permanently settling there in 1916. Kazan proved to be too small and stifling for Rodchenko's emerging vision. They became life-long partners and artistic collaborators. In 1914, he met Varvara Stepanova, a fellow student. The young artist quickly absorbed the basic principles of the academic training, earning high praise from his instructors. Rodchenko enrolled in the Kazan School of Art, where he studied from 1910 to 1914 under Nikolai Feshin and Georgii Medvedev. Oil on canvas - The Pushkin Museum, Moscow This development may have been influenced by Wassily Kandinsky's ideas, since the two artists were closely associated, though while Kandinsky stressed the expressive possibilities of line, Rodchenko emphasized its possibilities as a tool of construction. Rodchenko arrived at compositions such as these by progressively stripping away all that he considered unnecessary in the field of painting after reducing color to black and emphasizing surface texture, he seized on line as the most important and elemental component of the medium. This balanced and precise geometric composition underlines Rodchenko's preoccupation with engineering and design that he maintained throughout his career. The white circles on black canvas form a powerful juxtaposition liberating the line from any recognizable connotations. In this composition, two perfectly drawn circles intersect. His work in both photomontage and photography ultimately made an important contribution to European photography in the 1920s.īy 1920, Rodchenko no longer felt obliged to imbue his basic geometric figures with distinguishable layers of color. He first viewed it as a source of preexisting imagery, using it in montages of pictures and text, but later he began to take pictures himself and evolved an aesthetic of unconventional angles, abruptly cropped compositions, and stark contrasts of light and shadow. Photography was important to Rodchenko in the 1920s in his attempt to find new media more appropriate to his goal of serving the revolution.This particular union of modern design, politics, and commerce has occasionally inspired advertisers in the West since the fall of the Berlin Wall. ![]() Their work not only introduced modern design into Russian advertising, but it attempted to sell the values of the Revolution along with the products being promoted. He embraced a more functional view of art and of the artist, and he began collaborating with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky on a series of advertising campaigns. Rodchenko's commitment to the values of the Revolution encouraged him to abandon painting in 1921.Constructivism encouraged a new focus on the tangible and material aspects of art, and its experimental spirit was encouraged by a belief that art had to match the revolutionary transformations then taking place in Russian politics and society. This experimental inquiry into the elements of pictorial and sculptural art produced purely abstract artworks that separate out the components of each image - line, form, space, color, surface, texture, and the work's physical support. By the decade's end he was pioneering Constructivism. He digested the work of Vladimir Tatlin, and the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich. He began as an aesthete, inspired by Art Nouveau artists such as Aubrey Beardsley. Rodchenko's art and thought moved extremely rapidly in the 1910s.
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