Aleksandr RodchenkoCity portraits were a favorite theme of avant-garde photographers. The booming industrial metropolises, whose faces were to change radically within a few years, called for a new vision and unaccustomed perspectives. This is revealed in The New Moscow, Aleksandr Rodchenko's view of the capital of the then still young Soviet Union, whose dynamic awakening during the Socialist era inspired the avant-garde artist to create this unusual project. After being expelled from the October group in 1932, Rodchenko was commissioned to take pictures of Moscow. Out of this series Varvara Stepanova, his wife and colleague, compiled a narrative sequence of eight-nine gelatin silver prints adding to it some photographs from the October period. The photos of street parades, housing projects, technical buildings, new sport facilities, and factories taken between the late twenties and early thirties were meant to appeal on two levels: firstly for their new aesthetics -- the famous Rodchenko perspective and secondly for their film-like sequencing. The artist prepared the series for a 1933 edition, which was never published. Many of his high quality vintage prints were preserved, however, and are now published in a complete reconstruction of The New Moscow. |
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30 cm Zentraler Aleksandr Rodchenko Arbat artists Arvatov auditorium avant-garde Botanical garden building on Miasnitskaia Central Park cinematic Club cm Botanischer Garten cm Portrait cm Zentraler Kultur collage Constructivist Culture and Leisure designed Disurbanists Dynamo Stadium Dziga Vertov Erholungspark exhibition Fabrikküche Factory kitchen film and photo filmmakers Five-Year Plan gelatin silver print Ginsburg graphs Heartfield human eye Ibid IZOGIZ John Heartfield Jonathan Crary Khan-Magomedov Kinderdorf Kinderdorf im Sokolniki-Park Kino-Eye Kino-Fot Kinoglaz Kukryniksy Lavrentiev Lefortovo Leica magazine Mezhericher's Miasnitskaia Street Mikhail Kaufman modernity Moscow NEP's nonobjective Novinskii Boulevard Novyi LEF October Association Old Moscow Osip Brik painting Paris Park of Culture Productivist Pushkin Square reportage RGALI Collection Rodchenko's photographs Rusakov Selim Sept film camera Shaikhet shots Sovetskoe foto Sovetskoe Kino Soviet Photograph Sportparade Sprengel Museum Studenten-Campus tion USSR in Construction Varvara Stepanova vintage gelatin silver visual Vkhutemas Water Stadium White Sea Canal workers x 30 cm