RODTSCHENKO, ALEXANDER

Aleksander Rodchenko

Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodtschenko (5 December 1891 Petersburg, Russia – December 1956 Moscow, Russia) was a painter, graphic artist, photographer and architect.

He and Kandinsky are founder of the Museum of Painterly Culture.
He is also co-founder of the group October.

Alexander Rodchenko was trained as a dental technician from 1908-09.

Rodchenko then studied at the Kasan Art School, devoting himself to painting between 1910 and 1912.
His paintings from this period are rich in warm tones, red, yellow and ocher, he also experimented with the contrasting colors blue-red and green-red. After 1912 his interest in black grew.
In this period, Rodchenko’s art was strongly influenced by Jugendstil and by drawings by Aubrey Beardsley.
Besides studying, he gave drawing lessons and painted decorations for clubs.

In 1914, Rodchenko graduated from the Kazan School of Art and moved to Moscow, where he studied sculpture and architecture at the Stroganow School for three years, and increasingly turned to abstract painting.

In 1916 he began to show his works at Moscow exhibitions and established himself as an artist of the Russian avant-garde.

From September 1919 to October 1920 Rodchenko lived with his wife Vavvara Stepanova in the house of Wassily Kandinsky.

In the 1920s he worked as a painter and graphic artist and mainly created commissioned works. Then he gave up the experiments and experiments in the field of pure art and turned to productivist art.

The ideology of productivism rejected the traditional function of art exhibited in museums or used as decoration. Rodchenko dealt with work in the field of graphics, design and craftsmanship.
According to Rodchenko, art should leave the museum and become an element of social being in the form of objects. From this moment, the art of Rodchenko assumed a social character.

From 1920 to 1930, Rodchenko was a professor at the art schools in Moscow and Leningrad. From 1922 he was dean at the Faculty of Metalworking.

In the years 1921-22 he tried simultaneously in the area of the theater, the film and the polygraphy.

Having been influenced by Dadaism, Rodchenko came to photography through the photomontage, soon becoming an important representative of the Russian Constructivists. He was particularly well-known for his unusual perspectives, but also through the strong abstract-graphic effect of his recordings.

 

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