ALEXANDER RODCHENKO: THE SIMPLE AND THE COMMONPLACE
GIVEN THAT THE REAL POLYMATHS are few, it is surprising that Alexander Rodchenko has not posthumously reaped the harvest of fame—or even chic, since so many of his concerns are now in vogue. He was something of a modern Leonardo: if that seems too grand an elevation, his interests and achievements certainly raise him to the level of Ruskin or William Morris in the last century. Indeed, although Rodchenko was not principally known as a polemicist, the stance from which he articulated his socio-artistic theories gave him a position in the political setting of his day not dissimilar to that of Morris. Rodchenko was the radical par excellence. He committed himself to the left-wing avant-garde after the October Revolution, became secretary of the Moscow Artists’ Union, set up the handicrafts section of the Fine Arts Division of the People’s Commissariat for Education and participated in the foundation of the Institute for Artistic Culture. He occupied a significant place in education-al affairs, being a founder of, and professor at, Vkhutemas, the Higher State Art-Technical Institute, a Bauhausian organization with a checkered career which was disbanded in 1930.
Rodchenko was a prolific graphic designer, theatre and film designer, photographer and illustrator. Until eclipsed by orthodoxies of Socialist Realism, over which he refused to compromise, he occupied for many years a distinct place in the sun. During the most important period of his career he moved into a position whereby painting became for him a redundant activity, although later he returned to it to a limited extent. On the admittedly slim evidence of a large gouache painting Expressive Rhythm, 1943–44, shown recently in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, the products of this reawakening antedate early New York forays into Abstract Expressionism.
His disdain for painting as an activity, which he regarded as at best dilettantish and at worst otiose, led Rodchenko to adopt a view that emphasized the social role of art at the expense of any mystical or metaphysical element. By his elevation of an utter artistic objectivity, he effectively denied art’s possibilities as a speculative and philosophical activity—to the very extent that he repudiated illusionism and the use of art as a device for escaping contemporary realities (what he characterized as bourgeois romanticism). Initially, this relentless pursuit of objectivity took the form of reducing his painting, and later his constructions, to self-contained entities in which the various elements—color, line, form, etc.—became self-sufficient, referring to nothing other than the properties special to themselves and without anecdote or external associations. Despite this reductivism, resultant works are dramatic and energetic. Rodchenko’s systematic drive toward fundamental nonobjective art brought him to the inevitable impasse when, in 1921, he made what was necessarily his “final” statement: three monochrome canvases, in red, yellow and blue. The artist had decided that he was finished with Beaux-Arts tradition, and that he should make art “not out of inner compulsion but out of a feeling of responsibility to his fellow citizens; he should serve the community in the same way as a doctor or dentist.” New forms epitomizing the new post-revolutionary ethos, and an industrialized, democratic one at that, were deemed necessary. “Nonobjective painting has left museums; nonobjective painting is the street itself, the squares, the towns and the whole world. The art of the future will not be the cozy decoration of family homes. It will be just as indispensable as 48-story skyscrapers, mighty bridges, wireless, astronauts and submarines which will be transformed into art” (Rodchenko’s statement, XIX State Exhibition, Moscow, 1920).
For Rodchenko and his group the answer was Production Art, although eventually the charge of formalism was laid against even this laudable, if self-conscious, attempt to become artist-technologists. This is particularly ironic, for the motivation of the group was in part an attempt to escape what they saw as the hermetic formalism of artists like Gabo, Kandinsky, Malevich or Pevsner, who, to their minds, were too much removed from everyman in their rarified, highly spiritual attempts to order the world in terms of Gabo’s view of the independent social function of art. But the Productivists were in their turn condemned by the “pure” Constructivists, who repudiated their excessive utilitarianism, and evinced a metaphysical disgust for those who “descended to the level of craftsmen.” Later they were also rejected by the political establishment, who favored the more intelligible and accessible Socialist Realist mode as an adaptable form of propaganda.
Hence a schism existed in the Russian avant-garde. Pevsner and Gabo’s “Realistic Manifesto” (1920) claimed that artists provided the inspiration for developments in design, and that art annihilated itself by being useful. Also, Malevich clearly saw industrial design as an activity secondary to, and dependent upon, abstract creation. But in their response Rodchenko and Vavara Stepanova, his wife, issued their own “Productivist” manifesto a few months later, insisting that the artist needed to become a technician, to serve new social needs and to place his services at the disposal of the proletariat. Their aim was the fusion of life, work and art. The art they were committed to developing was to be concerned with housing, clothes and goods that were useful to the ordinary worker. They rejected the design and production of what “superior” sensibilities felt ought to be found useful by the masses as the manifest prejudices of an artistic elite dictating a diluted form of ruling taste to factory workers from the sanctuary of their studios. The “Productivists” were as chary of that as they were of the preciousness of the applied-art/ handicraftsman esthetic, thought to have shown its excesses in the English Arts and Crafts movement.
In 1921, with Vavara Stepanova, Alexandra Exter, Alexander Vestin and Lubov Popova, Rodchenko organized the exhibition “5 x 5 = 25,” in which they all demonstrated their commitment to Productivist utilitarianism and their repudiation of the “esthetic” orientation of Constructivism. Rodchenko had taken early steps toward this position in 1917, when, with Tatlin and Yakulov, he worked on the interior of the Café Pittoresque in Moscow. The Café was a bohemian restaurant/theatre in which Dadaistic performances scandalized appreciative bourgeois audiences. The design of the three artists “destroyed” the room’s space by creating areas of structural ambiguity and spatial distortion, achieved by using dynamic constructions in wood, metal, cardboard, and by special lighting effects, in what seems like a precursor of ’60s polysensorial environments. Tatlin’s example reenforced, even if it did not motivate, Rodchenko’s desire to develop an esthetic that combined the modes of artist and engineer—that art condemned by Malevich as a perversion and subjugation of art—the construction of useful and practical “things.”
There is remarkable similarity between the intentions of the Productivist group’s 1920 program and that of Gropius’ Bauhaus Manifesto of a year earlier. The ideas in both are parallel, but Gropius’ has a 19th-century air in comparison with the Productivists’ credo, which, if it now seems dated, is still firmly couched in the language of the modern era. The Bauhaus ideal of the Kunstkathedrale (“art-cathedral”)—that unity of the visual arts in an architectonic whole—is not far from Rodchenko’s vision of the structure of an ideal industrial communist society where the arts are “useful,” that is, harnessed to serve real needs of the masses in an industrial age, and express its spirit.
The strong similarities between the art of the West and contemporary developments in Russia are not purely fortuitous, although direct influences are difficult to detect. There was at least some cross-fertilization, though even this is contrary to common supposition. Vladimir Mayakovsky was probably the most vigorous catalyst in this regard. Mayakovsky was an artist, poet and playwright who, as a Futurist, was coauthor of the manifesto “The Insult to Universal Taste” (1912). Later he was a leading figure in the Rosta Windows revolutionary poster workshop project, and collaborated with Rodchenko in a design partnership. He published at various times comic books, radical pamphlets and a satirical magazine. Mayakovsky was very influenced by the products of Berlin Dada, the free typography of its journals and its photomontages in particular (which is clearly reflected in the work of Eisenstein, Lissitsky and Rodchenko). Mayakovsky visited Berlin in 1922, and came into contact with Georg Grosz, Raoul Hausmann and John Heart-field. When he returned to Russia it was with a huge collection of journals, catalogues, photographs, postcards and artwork, which helped enforce the sense that the Russian avant-garde was not isolated but part of an international drive toward social change.
Rodchenko described how Mayakovsky used to share out the imported material according to the interests of his friends. Evidently he was an efficient disseminator of Western cultural information for Rodchenko (to whom he gave “many monographs on Grosz, Larionov, Goncharov a, Delaunay, Rousseau’s “Negroes,” Picabia, A. Loethe, V. Grigoriev, Picasso. Once he brought from Paris photographic paper, a gift to me from the famous Man Ray . . .”), who imitated Hausmann’s work, using the photomontage technique to illustrate Mayakovsky’s attempt to reconcile his needs as an individual with the demands of society. The prime broker in the Russian attempt at the marriage of art and technology was Rodchenko. He and Mayakovsky are the best-known activists in the production of the latter’s magazine Lef. They were concerned with exploiting information on Western technological innovations of the “Second Machine Age” on behalf of Soviet revolutionary Constructivism. Among the planks in the platform of this group was the reconciliation of the artists’ ideological commitment and its formal expression in art; this was essentially a repudiation of traditional hermetic modes of artistic expression in favor of utilitarian application. In order to achieve this, the artists aimed at an esthetic shift in which the design and fabrication of industrial elements were valid preoccupations for the artist in a communist culture. Obviously, a complete rupture was necessary with “high art,” and in particular with traditional easel painting (which was viewed as merely decorative and otiose), with an emphasis, instead,in favor of the constructive-creative objects of Production Art. The Kunstkathedrale of the Productivists involved a fusion of the constructive imagination of the artist/creator into an art which was at once scientific and materialistic and given to spiritual uplift in the service of the social revolution.
The slogans:
(1) Down with Art. Long live technic.
(2) Religion is a lie.
Art is a lie.
(3) Kill human thinking’s last remains by tying it to Art.
(4) Down with guarding the traditions of Art
Long live the Constructivist technician.
(5) Down with art that only camouflages humanity’s impotence.
(6) The collective art of the present is constructive life.
Such rhetoric is not unfamiliar in the polemics of 20th-century art, but the clarion cries of the Productivists of the Lef group were particularly fervent and radical. They recognized the dangers of residual bourgeois estheticization and feared that Constructivist formalism, by providing a cloak of modernity (Constructivism simply being composition in new trappings), would disguise the fact that revolutionary radicalism had flagged. In one essay (in Lef, no. 1), Osip Brik distinguished Rodchenko from those who became Constructivist/Productivists in name only:
Rodchenko is no such artist. Rodchenko sees that the problem of the artist is not the abstract apprehension of color and form, but the practical ability to resolve any task of shaping a concrete object . . . Many . . . will say “Where’s the Constructivism in this? Where’s he any different from applied art?” To them I say: The applied artist embellishes the object; Rodchenko shapes it. The applied artist looks at the object, as a place for applying his own ornamental composition, while Rodchenko sees in the material that underlies the design. The applied artist had nothing to do if he cannot embellish an object; for Rodchenko a complete lack of embellishment is a necessary condition for the proper construction of the object. It is not esthetic considerations, but the purpose of the object that defines the organization of its color and form.
Rodchenko’s disdain for art for its own sake, and as a purely philosophical/speculative activity, equaled his disdain for its acceptance of a purely cosmetic social role; thus formalist Constructivist attempts in this direction were eschewed in favor of an art that was directly useful socially. The potential for frustration was clearly great: those Constructivists with a drive to become artist-technologists were hampered by the low level of technical development and expertise in post-revolutionary Russia, the result of the previous quasi-medieval, labor-intensive economy.
Happily, two-dimensional design provided an area where they might exercise their skills, for graphics and typography had the potential for reproducing modern imagery with a reasonable degree of sophistication. And it was possible, without the dreariness of a uniformity occasioned by advanced mass-production, to reach a comparatively wide audience with fresh vigorous images.
To some extent Rodchenko has been a lost soul within a lost generation, without the good fortune of the equally polymathematical Tatlin, whose totem image of the Monument to the Third International brought fame to him. The avant-garde of the 1920s fell from favor at the beginning of the 1930s, with the advent of Socialist Realism under Stalin. The period of absolute ostracism lasted some five years. The process of Rodchenko’s rehabilitation was gradual, but finally resulted in the publication of his photographs in magazines and newspapers. This great period, however, was the ’20s, and he never regained his former position, or the official recognition that was his due.
David Elliott’s catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, as witty a Rodchenko pastiche as it is a model of scholarship, is assured of immediate importance. This is the first retrospective of the whole spectrum of Rodchenko’s work, and it has been done with the enthusiastic cooperation of Varvara, Rodchenko’s photographer/designer daughter, who contributes a memoir of her father to the catalogue, and Alexander Larionov, her son, also a designer, who now works in the Institute of Industrial Design in Moscow. He introduces his grandfather’s work in the catalogue. Apart from private lenders, and the ironic inclusion of a number of loans from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which has the largest institutional collection of Rodchenko’s work in the West, there are 43 works from the Rodchenko archive. Rodchenko’s house, in Kirov Street, Moscow, which is in the care of his family and which demonstrates his working methods, is characterized, in the words of Szymon Bojko, by “economic purposefulness,” and an optimization of activities, combined with a forethought of results.
Of particular interest in this show is the reconstruction of the workers’ club furniture designed by Rodchenko for the 1925 “Exposition internationale des art decoratifs,” in Paris. Like his chessboard and chairs for the same club, the furniture, reproduced by John Milner of the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is as elegant in appearance as it is uncomfortable to sit in. For the most part we are presented with Rodchenko’s designs for ephemeral things: cartons, matchboxes, cigarette packets, small magazines and posters, all having a pleasant patina of age that appeals to the current fad for collectable nostalgic bijouterie.
It is pleasant to see the shock of observers confronted for the first time with Rodchenko’s actual objects, rather than reproductions—and the fact that there is no glossy, hard-edged, high-tech sheen, but often a folksy roughness. And not just the graphics: small-scale nonobjective paintings, with which we are, for the most part, familiar only in reproduction, also lose their uncompromising geometricity in favor of a lyric softness, conspiring to suggest that the guts have gone out of the work.
One aim of the exhibition is admitted to be an attempt to convey a period feeling, and it is its triumph to do this extremely well. But it is also its failure, for it is difficult to marvel at what we see. One goes about the galleries with a tremendous sense of having seen it all before, and not in reproduction either. The brash full-frontal esthetic, that subject of Rodchenko’s stirring clarion call in the ’20s, seems dull and dated to us now, while the artifacts seem, quite simply, collectable. The acceptance of Rodchenko’s theories of design—his rationalism and his utilitarianism—has waxed and waned since he first articulated them. His innovative techniques, like his photographic foreshortening of those “simple and commonplace things from unexpected places and in unexpected situations . . . with nothing accidental or unforeseen,” are universal now. This exhibition is a measure of Rodchenko’s triumph, opening our eyes to the great extent to which we are already familiar with his work through the assimilation of so many of his ideas into educational, industrial and artistic practice.
—Hugh Adams
