Alexander Rodchenko is nearly synonymous with the idea of the Russian avant-garde.

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1891, Rodchenko’s working-class family moved to Kazan in 1905. In 1910, at the age of nineteen, Rodchenko began his formal art education at the Kazan School of Art, where he met fellow artist Varvara Stepanova, who became his partner and collaborator. After art school, the couple moved to Moscow to experience life in the big city and mix with other artistic types. There, he befriended artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, who began to change his outlook on the purpose and nature of art. 

Rodchenko got swept into these artists’ heady conceptions of art and began flirting with abstract and nonobjective art. After he had reduced painting down to the application of pure color in 1921, Rodchenko declared the death of painting. Then, he helped found the Constructivist Working Group and began to create work using everyday materials and tools typically reserved for engineers, meaningfully merging art with life and labor. Whereas Malevich believed in the spirituality of his paintings, Rodchenko believed that his paintings were nothing but conglomerates of raw materials. Rodchenko began making hanging sculptures called “constructions” that anticipated the famous mobiles of Alexander Calder. Ever the innovator, Rodchenko purchased his first camera in 1925 during a trip to Paris. He developed a body of work that commented on the reality of the Soviet experience. The democratic nature of the medium likely appealed to him. By playing with sharp angles, extreme closeups, and double exposures, Rodchenko pushed photography to abstraction.

Because he was living and creating during a time of great social and political upheaval, as Russians sought to destroy the monarchy in favor of communism, Rodchenko’s art also stood firmly against tradition and, at its most extreme, supported anarchy. He developed terminology that conflated artists and rebels, as well as revolution and creation. Rodchenko believed that artists should serve the greater good by engaging with the social and political revolution that was taking place in early-twentieth-century Russia. Rooted in egalitarianism, the everyday, and utility, his art became a visual identity for the rising Communist party. He pushed the belief that art should be for and serve the population at large, not just the educated and moneyed elite. Alfred Barr, Jr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art traveled to Soviet Russia to experience the innovations of artists like Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, and El Lissitzky. This was the beginning of a long friendship between Barr and Rodchenko, who continued to correspond by letter over the next three decades.