Not since the 1920s has the Soviet Union experienced such a welter of activity on the cultural front. In contrast to just two years ago, foreign dealers and curators now move with relative freedom through many sectors of the Soviet art world, where the border between official and unofficial art is becoming increasingly faint. As a result, a heretofore unheard-of variety of contemporary Soviet art is beginning to reach Western audiences and markets.
'Forbidden Fruit'
A companion phenomenon to the increased freedom surrounding contemporary art is the Soviets' new "openness" toward Russian art history. As Art News proclaimed in its February 1989 issue, "The Soviet Union is reclaiming what was once 'forbidden fruit'"--Modernist paintings are being rescued from storerooms and celebrated in a number of exhibitions.
Coinciding with the art world's major celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of photography, one of the first fruits of this rehabilitation of Russian Modernism is a major U.S. exhibition of the photographs of pioneer Russian experimental photographer Alexander Rodchenko.
In less than twenty years, Rodchenko created one of the most important (and underexplored) bodies of photographic work in twentieth-century art. Since his death in 1956, the bulk of the Rodchenko oeuvre has remained in the Moscow apartment where he lived and worked with his wife, the artist Varvara Stepanova. And, as is the case with so much of the avant-garde work that fell into official disfavor under Stalin, it remains with his family--his daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren--who continue to reside in the artist's original Moscow apartment.
From September 26 through October 31, with the Rodchenko family's cooperation, the Walker, Ursitti & McGinniss Gallery, 500 Greenwich St., New York, NY, will be showing an extensive selection of the artist's photographs in an exhibit that, according to his grandson Aleksandr Lavrentiev, represents "the largest selection of Rodchenko's work ever to come out of the Soviet Union."
For American and Soviet audiences alike, Rodchenko's photographic imagery--from his sensitive portraits of the era's major cultural and intellectual figures to his dramatic angle shots of political and athletic gatherings in Red Square--bring into focus a brilliant, fervid period of Russian history.
Born in Moscow in 1891 and trained as a painter, Rodchenko was a part of that spectacular blossoming of the Russian avant-garde that included such key Modernists as the painters Vasily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, the sculptors Anton Pevsner and Naum Gabo, the visionary architect Vladimir Tatlin, and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Although many Russian artists emigrated west as the cultural climate became increasingly restrictive during the course of the 1920s, Rodchenko, a committed Bolshevik, remained.
To be sure, photography was not the only medium to occupy Rodchenko during the turbulent 1920s and '30s--throughout his career he was a consummate graphic artist and designer, producing posters, stage sets, costumes, furniture, even product advertising. But photography was the medium in which he achieved the
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