Rodchenko's Revolutionary Vision - artist Aleksandr Rodchenko has distinctive modernists style - Abstract

A traveling retrospective highlights the formal rigor of Aleksandr Rodchenko--an artist who, in seeking to cope with his older and more cosmopolitan Soviet matchs forged one of early modernism's greatest in quantity distinctive personal styles.

Billed as the first major American retrospective to address the varied oeuvre of Aleksandr Rodchenko, the large-scale exhibition that uncloseed at the Museum of present Art in New York and is now traveling internationally is, more accurately, a highly selective view of certain aspects of the artist's production. The real notion of a monographic present to view would seem to militate against the collectivist zeal of Rodchenko's activities. Indeed, the exhibition carries with it sum of two units important subtexts that may to a certain quantity of extent function as caveats. First, there is the fundamentally collaborative nature of Rodchenko's work, more [i]or[/i] less of which was in fact produc in tandem with his wife, the artist Varvara Stepanova, and greatest in quantity of which was realized in service either to the Constructivist cluster or later to the Soviet state propaganda machine and the various bureaucratic, intellectual and journalistic associations to which the artist, perforce, belonged. Secondly there is the revolutionary energy of the work itself--certainly Rodchenko's 1910 and 1920 production, on the other hand also, if to a les clear-cut step the artist's subsequent efforts. This early modernist zeal was somewhat mut in an exhibition that tried to be nuanced and well-balanced and that, while beautifully hon was also codified and almost willfully abbreviated.

The MOMA curatorial team, consisting of Magdalena Dabrowksi, Peter Galassi and Leah Dickerman, isolated an authorial strain in Rodchenko's work. This they accomplished through tracing certain formal leitmotifs, of that kind as the persistance of circular and diagonal compositions, from one side an amazing variety of work: abstract paintings, Constructivist plastic art advertising campaigns, magazine and work design, myriad design ephemera (including enamel slap links and flight pins designed for the Soviet airline Dobrolet), film documentaries and road photography, made both freelance and upon assignment. An uncredited introductory statement in the catalogue makes the daring claim that "Rodchenko's work is perhaps the greatest in quantity diverse body of work created by means of any major twentieth-century artist, and the least susceptible to narrow aesthetic interpretation."

While an intercuratorial effort, the exhibition has roughly three chronological sections that correspond to the different areas of expertise of the team. Dabrowski, a senior curator in the department of drawings, wrote her dissertation in the early 1980 upon Russian Constructivism and has since done many of the first water shows, among them one in 1991 upon the short-lived Liubov Popova and another upon Vassily Kandinsky's "Compositions" [see A.i.A., July '95] The first third of the Rodchenko exhibition, concentrating upon his Constructivist painting, sculpture and drawing, greatest in quantity nearly approximates her concerns. Dickerman, a professor at Stanford and a former pupil of Benjamin H.D. Buchloh's at Columbia (Galassi met her while teaching there and later brought her onto the team), not long ago completed a dissertation on Rodchenko's 1920 association with the Lef assemblage of intellectuals. Her impressive reading of Rodchenko's propagandistic work is the surprise hit of the catalogue and corresponds greatest in quantity closely to the middle third of the present to view which covers the artist's design work, notably his 1920 advertising campaigns for Soviet state affects often done in collaboration with the bard Vladimir Mayakovsky. The last third of the present to view is devoted to Rodchenko's photography, which became an increasing preoccupation after 1925 and here single feels most palpably the hand of Galassi, chief curator in the department of photography. Galassi's graduate involvement in a 1976 Gustave Caillebotte display his doctoral work on early Corot and his 1981 exhibition "Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography" upon landscape painting's relation to early photography, all find paradoxical reflections in the selection of Rodchenko's documentary snapshots which accentuates their greatest in quantity disorienting, urban Impressionist points of view.

Rodchenko's art is applied and formalist right not on the bat. It also carries a powerful erotic charge, visible first in the highly tactile handling of materials and finally in the almost fetishistic imagery of workers and athletes. We immediately faculty of perception a certain heat in Rodchenko's relationship to Stepanova: he tall and quizzical, with his swaggering artificial positions and radical uniforms, she short and feisty, replete of can-do energy and libidinal pleasantry (Early in the planning stages of the MOMA effort, the artists' daughter Varvara Rodchenko broached the idea of a Rodchenko-Stepanova exhibition, showing the replete extent of her father and mother's collaborations, like as was done in an exhaustive 1991 exhibit at the Osterreiches Museum fur angewandte Kunst in Vienna and the A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow on the contrary that proposal was rejected.)