TARGET WOMAN / KOHTEENA NAINEN – Alexander Rodtsenko

Aleksandr Rodchenko is considered one of the pivotal artists who elevated photography into a significant art form embodying 20th-century modernism. He quickly grasped its extraordinary expressive power and explored its endless potential for experimentation. He also recognized the essential role of ideological content in images, exploiting their multifaceted meanings. His experiments reached their zenith in photomontages.

Rodchenko’s exploration of visual language was closely tied to his quest, beginning in the early 1920s, to uncover the ultimate purpose of artistic expression across diverse fields—be it painting, photography, collage, typography, film, or theater. As a central figure and theorist of Constructivism and later Production Constructivism, he significantly influenced avant-garde photography in both the East and the West.

From 1924 to the late 1930s, Rodchenko devoted himself exclusively to photography. Behind his inquiries into form lay a search for meaning—a genuine strategy of imagery that he was forced to abandon by 1931, following criticism from both the avant-garde and Stalin’s state apparatus. In 1934, the shift to Socialist Realism relegated visual creativity to a secondary role compared to literature and the “engineers of the human soul,” marking the end of the dream that the avant-garde’s exceptional creative energy, once in service of a destructive utopia, might achieve official recognition.

Depictions of women remained a favorite subject for Rodchenko. Beyond their artistic beauty, his images provide insights into the avant-garde circles of the Soviet Union and help us better understand the evolution of his photography. They reflect the real and mythical roles of women in Soviet political life. The chasm between revolutionary ideals of free love and the realities of Soviet romantic life is embodied by the suicide of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky—a harrowing and shocking revelation of the gap into which much of the artistic avant-garde also fell.

The exhibition revolves around three themes: women artists associated with Constructivism, women who shared Rodchenko’s personal life—Varvara Stepanova and Evgenia Lemberg—and women portrayed in public roles. Whether related to private life and love, ideology and art, or politics and publicity, these subjects are mirrored in Rodchenko’s photographs, offering a lens through which to examine the complex fate of a Russian artist navigating the shifting Soviet society.

Rodchenko’s early experiments with photomontage and collage profoundly shaped his perspective on photography. These experiments fostered his ideas of fragmentation in subject treatment and the use of unconventional angles.

Rodchenko sought a new approach to photography that would bridge reportage and artistic expression. This approach reflected his ambition to transform the relationships between individuals and their environments, as well as between artists and the masses—hoping to create imagery suited to the industrial age.

For Rodchenko, photography was the perfect medium: an ideal means to produce modern images with a small, industrial device suitable for cultural use. He saw it as possessing the qualities essential for propaganda, enabling subjects to be immediately grasped and offering extraordinary potential for reproduction. Philosophically, it was a tool to revolutionize the viewer’s traditional perspective.

Rodchenko insisted on using photographic angles that deviated from the middle ground—eschewing eye-level or waist-level perspectives dictated by the linear tradition of Renaissance perspective. Instead, he experimented with top-down and low-angle views, short perspectives, and unexpected angles that imbued his images with dynamism and became his hallmark. He rejected synthetic, comprehensive, and narrative images in favor of an analytical, fragmented vision of the world, exemplified in his photographic series. These series feature perspectives that challenge the viewer’s expectations and are not immediately comprehensible.

In his factory and student series, individuals are fully integrated into abstract or absent surroundings, replaced by a conceptual vision of labor: workers appear as extensions of their machines. Understanding these series requires viewing them as a whole, as individual images lack narrative details and are designed for selective, incidental viewing.

By the early 1930s, Soviet authorities harshly criticized Rodchenko for formalism, as they sought to present only a falsified reality: the hero of labor glorified in simple images. On March 31, 1932, Rodchenko was expelled from the October Group, which he had helped found. A month later, the Communist Party dissolved the group along with all other Soviet cultural institutions.

The exhibition features Rodchenko’s most iconic and perhaps most tragic image, Girl with a Leica (1934). The composition is precise, based on diagonals, lines, and masses, with a tilted angle and geometric patterns formed by light and shadow. This image epitomizes Rodchenko’s photographic philosophy. At the time it was taken, Rodchenko and Evgenia Lemberg were ending their romantic relationship. The photograph is one of the last featuring Lemberg, who tragically died a few months later in a train accident.

This exhibition has been organized by Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne, and Musée-Château d’Annecy, in collaboration with Musée Nicéphore Niépce (Chalon-sur-Saône) and the Rodchenko Archives in Moscow.

Translated with ChatGPT

Publication:

ISBN 951-9355-64-2
Alexander Rodtsenko: La Femme enjeu/ Kohteena nainen
Appendix to the exhibition catalogue
Translated from French by Päivi Sihvonen