The Russian avant-garde that came together in the 1910s was characterised by the coexistence in its works of a cultural tradition and deeply rooted traditional imagery accompanied by the assumption and interpretation of the languages and movements of contemporary European art, such as Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism and Dadaism. The October 1917 revolution and the triumph of Bolshevism redirected the artists’ work – their themes, the techniques and materials employed and the impact of their art – and converted them into central figures who were required to contribute to the advent of the political, social, economic, cultural and also artistic revolution.

Alexander Rodchenko (St Petersburg, Russia, 1891 – Moscow, Russia, 1956) took an active part in that project of transformation in the field of the applied arts, stimulated by the role that they played in Constructivism understood as a political language. Graphic design and photography corresponded to Lenin’s instruction about the urgency of the visual medium and were destined to become instruments for propaganda in the media in a country where two thirds of the population were illiterate.

After studying at the Kazanskaya Khudozhestvennaya Shkola (Kazan Art School), in 1915 Rodchenko moved to Moscow, where he met Kazimir Malevich, Liubov Popova and Vladimir Tatlin; his interest in Tatlin’s work led him to develop spatial constructions. After the revolution – and especially from 1922 onwards, when he abandoned painting, saying that, after his monochromes, he had exhausted all its possibilities – he concentrated on graphic design, using it to develop industrial and commercial propaganda for the party and to make its achievements and conquests visible. In that year, 1922, he began working with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was the designer of the magazine LEF and the author of the design and photocollages of the book Pro Eto (That’s What, 1923). He also made significant contributions in terms of covers and designs for other publishers and periodical publications, such as the magazine Kino-Fot, for which he made his first photomontages. From then on he showed an increasing inclination towards photography in his work, where it eventually established itself simply as image, with its own language and devices.

Rodchenko was enthusiastic in the period immediately after the revolution and became involved in running the Visual Arts Department of Narkompros (People’s Commissariat of Education), and he was also responsible for organising the network of art schools and the museum collections in the USSR. In 1920 he joined the Vkhutemas (Higher Art and Technical Workshops) as a teacher, and there he taught the course on constructive analysis and directed the metal workshop. However, as his letters and diaries reveal, during the 1930s he gradually lost confidence in the project. Rodchenko witnessed the intervention of politics in art (Stalin maintained that “artists are engineers of the human soul”), one of the first examples of which was a demand for a gradual abandon of abstract languages, especially Suprematism and Constructivism, and a rejection of photomontage in favour of a glorification of the realism of objects in themselves, as offered by photography.

This poster exemplifies the work and engagement of the Soviet artists with the political aims underlying the October 1917 revolution. It is one of various versions that Rodchenko made to promote the film Battleship Potemkin (1925), directed by Sergei Eisenstein (Riga, 1898 – Moscow, 1948), one of the filmmakers who transformed film language with his theory of the montage of attractions (1923), a key instrument in the process of constructing film narrative and one that is a notable feature of the film advertised here.

For the conception of this poster Rodchenko used the resources of graphic design and photomontage to obtain a clear, easily understandable, readable image with a regular, balanced composition. Suspended in the centre of the poster there is a horizontal rhomboidal form, while the four corners around it are clear with a white background, and in them there is an announcement that the film will soon be showing in the best theatres in Moscow. However, the diagonal arrangement of the text in the poster introduces a dynamic factor that contrasts with the central image of the military machine. For this image he worked from a photograph of the upper part of a battleship and played with the design of the ship to obtain the greatest advertising impact from the challenging arrangement of the two guns. Thus the poster uses the precision of the photographic image of the battleship to replicate its massive presence and importance in the film, presenting it not just as a setting but as one of the actors.

References

Rodchenko y Popova: definiendo el constructivismo. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía / TF Editores, Madrid, 2009.

Alexander N. Lavrentiev (ed.): Aleksandr Rodchenko, Experiments for the Future. Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2005.

Victor Margolin: The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917–1946. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998.

Rocío Robles Tardío.