Alexander Rodchenko Russian, 1891-1956

Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956) was one of the founders of Russian Constructivism and modern Russian design, and among the most versatile artists to emerge from the Revolution. He worked as a painter, sculptor, graphic designer, photomonteur, and photographer, pursuing in each medium the same aim: the incorporation of art into everyday life. His photographs, taken from extreme heights or low angles to delay recognition, transformed both what a camera could depict and the positions from which it could look.

Born in Saint Petersburg, he moved with his family to Kazan at the age of fourteen and enrolled in the art school there, where he met Varvara Stepanova, whom he married and worked alongside for the rest of his life. The couple moved to Moscow in 1914, and Rodchenko entered the graphic arts section of the Stroganov School of Applied Arts. Malevich and Suprematism gave him his austerity, while the debates at INKHUK in 1920, with Stepanova, Tatlin, El Lissitzky, and Popova, helped shape his artistic position.

In 1921, he denounced easel painting, formed the First Working Group of Constructivists, and turned decisively toward design and photography. He worked across media, making propagandistic art from whatever materials came to hand: wood, linoleum, posters, advertisements, and magazines. He helped found the Museum of Artistic Culture and became its first director, taught at Vkhutemas, made photographic illustrations for Mayakovsky’s poem Pro Eto, and co-edited the Constructivist journal LEF with him. He also worked with Dziga Vertov, designed posters for Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and created the Soviet pavilion for the Paris exhibition of 1925.

His photographic method was deliberate and clearly stated. “One has to take several shots of a subject,” he wrote, “from different points of view and in different situations,” as if examining it in the round rather than looking through the same keyhole again and again. His extreme diagonals and vertiginous downward views grew from this principle. From 1932, he worked with Stepanova on The New Moscow, a book about the city after the first Five-Year Plan, and the Leica photographs made for it belong to his most productive period.

The political climate turned against him in the 1930s. Attacked for formalism, he increasingly worked within the demands of Socialist Realism, taking up sports and circus photography while also returning to painting. Rodchenko died in Moscow in 1956, when his photographic work had long been out of favour.

He was included in Film und Foto in Stuttgart in 1929 and in Fotomontage in Berlin, while The Museum of Modern Art included his work in Cubism and Abstract Art in 1936. His work is held by The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate, and the Pushkin Museum, among other institutions. Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented his work in Photographer as Sculptor, Sculptor as Photographer (2025), In Sequence (2025), Summer Glow (2024), and REWIND (2021).