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Lot Essay
The present work dates from a pivotal point in Rodchenko's career; it was in 1915 that the artist moved from his home town of Kazan to Moscow, a move which ultimately changed the direction of the artist's career. Having graduated from the Kazan School of Fine Arts in 1914, Rodchenko's work prior to 1915 is primarily figurative with a focus on heavy impasto and stark color contrasts. It is notable that as soon as 1921, the artist would renounce color in his own work, strictly limiting his use of it to red, blue and yellow.
In 1915 Rodchenko began a series of compass and ruler drawings which clearly mark a new direction in the artist's work, and as Magdalena Dabrowski has discussed:
Rodchenko's interest in figuration would soon be displaced by his experiments with purely pictorial elements such as surface qualities and the interaction of line and color. These come to the fore in a series of twelve non-objective compass-and-ruler drawings from 1915, which emphasize the expressive possibilities of mechanically created line and its relationship to flat areas of color or of 'noncolors' such as black. There series might be considered a 'next step' growing out of the fragmented forms in The Dancer [A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow], discarding that painting's semi-illusionistic space . . . It was a selection from this compass-and-ruler series that marked Rodchenko's entrance into the Moscow art world at the exhibition The Store [Magazin] organized by Vladimir Tatlin in March 1916. By that time Rodchenko had moved to Moscow (judging from his correspondence with Stepanova [Rodchenko's future wife], he did so sometime in the fall of 1915), and his meeting with Tatlin and participation in The Store put him at the very heart of the avant-garde. (M. Dabrowski, "Aleksandr Rodchenko: Innovation and Experiment", in Aleksandr Rodchenko, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, p. 22).
The motivating force behind the Constructivist movement and doctrinations, Rodchenko's legacy is lasting and pivotal in the development of the Russian avant-garde.
In 1915 Rodchenko began a series of compass and ruler drawings which clearly mark a new direction in the artist's work, and as Magdalena Dabrowski has discussed:
Rodchenko's interest in figuration would soon be displaced by his experiments with purely pictorial elements such as surface qualities and the interaction of line and color. These come to the fore in a series of twelve non-objective compass-and-ruler drawings from 1915, which emphasize the expressive possibilities of mechanically created line and its relationship to flat areas of color or of 'noncolors' such as black. There series might be considered a 'next step' growing out of the fragmented forms in The Dancer [A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow], discarding that painting's semi-illusionistic space . . . It was a selection from this compass-and-ruler series that marked Rodchenko's entrance into the Moscow art world at the exhibition The Store [Magazin] organized by Vladimir Tatlin in March 1916. By that time Rodchenko had moved to Moscow (judging from his correspondence with Stepanova [Rodchenko's future wife], he did so sometime in the fall of 1915), and his meeting with Tatlin and participation in The Store put him at the very heart of the avant-garde. (M. Dabrowski, "Aleksandr Rodchenko: Innovation and Experiment", in Aleksandr Rodchenko, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, p. 22).
The motivating force behind the Constructivist movement and doctrinations, Rodchenko's legacy is lasting and pivotal in the development of the Russian avant-garde.