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Rodchenko And Popova: Defining Constructivism

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Tate Modern
Bankside, Holland Street, SE1 9TG

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Description: Work ranging from the abstract to graphic design by two significant avant-garde figures featuring paintings and cinema and theatre costume designs.

Phone: 0207887 8888
Website: www.tate.org.uk/modern
Email: visiting.modern@tate.org.uk

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Rodchenko and Popova construct the future

Geometry in motion: Liubov Popova’s Space-Force Construction was painted on plywood to emphasise physical material over spiritual content

Designs for life: Liubov Popova photographed by Alexander Rodchenko.

Poster boy: Rodchenko’s poster design for Sergei Eisenstein’s film The Battleship Potemkin

Wheels in motion: a model of Rodchenko’s set for the Magnificent Cuckold, staged at the Meyerhold Theatre in 1922

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The whole economic system of capitalism has been discredited. You think bankers were cynical speculators whose schemes enriched them at the expense of hard-working businesses. Your government led you into a pointless war. Millions are unemployed. It is time for revolution!

No, that’s not Britain in 2009 — not yet — but Russia in 1917. Our world bears more and more similarities to the one that led to the Russian Revolution and the creation of the world’s first communist state. That makes Tate Modern’s exhibition of two pioneering artists from this era wonderfully prescient and more enthralling than the curators could ever have imagined when they hatched the idea two years ago.

Rodchenko and Popova is a clever, meticulous exhibition, if a little dry, with 350 works, many of them never exhibited in the West before and borrowed from obscure museums deep in the Russian hinterland — such as the Dagestan Museum of the Arts and Regional Art Museum of Ivanovo. The focus on just two artists of different sexes but equal stature, who weren’t lovers, indicates the new sexual equality of the art of the Russian Revolution. Now, for the first time, men and women played an equal role in society and art, and the art of the women was indistinguishable in quality and themes from that of the men’s — as Alexander Rodchenko and Liubov Popova’s was.

They were an odd couple. She was the daughter of a wealthy family but “was never more happy than when she was making dresses for the workers’ co-operative”. He was the poor son of a circus performer. She dressed in pearls and furs and, as Rodchenko put it, “left the scent of expensive perfume behind at the exhibition”. He was working-class and macho — proud of his “iron constructive power”, which he taught at the new men-only wood and metalworking department of the state art school, and yet appalled at the “objectification” of women he encountered on a 1925 visit to Paris.

Her life ended in illness and tragedy — her husband died of typhoid in 1918, her son died of scarlet fever in 1924 and infected her, leading to her death, at only 35, a few days later. He was doomed to see his artistic horizons lowered by Stalin.

These contrasting personalities and backgrounds are wittily illustrated by Rodchenko in a cartoon from 1924 — he stands, legs astride, in boxing shorts with bulging biceps, while Popova bends her head coquettishly behind him in a fancy outfit. Theirs was an unlikely alliance but in 1919 they formed a group of artists who struck out from Suprematism — a movement defined by Malevich’s Black Square — and did what any ambitious artist of the period had to do — they launched a new “ism” to express the hopes of the new age: Constructivism.

Both Popova and Rodchenko were looking for a new kind of abstract art whose value resided in surface, texture, shape and line. The Russian Revolution had swept away a centuries-old society. Lenin called for “a war to the death against the rich” — overnight the Tsar abdicated, the land of the wealthy was seized, banks and factories were nationalised, private enterprise taxed out of existence. Millions of Russian peasants still tilling their fields with medieval ploughs were introduced to a new political theorist: Karl Marx. Soviet Communism sought to rebuild the world socially, economically and visually. That called for an equally new art.

The first half of the exhibition focuses on their paintings. Popova made flat, geometric compositions of trapezoids of different colours overlaid on each other. Her Space-Force Constructions abandoned the traditional canvas in favour of the coarse industrial material of plywood. On that she painted semi-circles and diagonal lines with white and black triangles painted to suggest volume.

Rodchenko, meanwhile, was producing radical “spatial constructions” — sculptures of geometric forms, some of which were literal abstractions of construction, others which, with brilliant formality, created hanging three-dimensional forms out of repeating two-dimensional shapes (such as Square with a Square, 1921).

As a strategy to overturn the bourgeois conventions and subjectivity of art, geometry had its own inbuilt limitations, but that’s nevertheless how they set about it.
But just when you have had about all you can take of trapezoids, diagonal lines and the semi-circles, the exhibition changes course dramatically. In 1921 the Constructivists announced the end of painting at an exhibition called 5 x 5 = 25 and declared that they would now make art for everyday life, a tendency that went by its own “ism”: Productivism.

So the second half of the exhibition is filled with commercial design — their attempt to “constructivise” the urban environment.

Rodchenko went into partnership with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the pair designed posters and packaging, while Popova made clothes for the workers’ co-op. Constructivism, therefore, is not only about abstract paintings and sculptures exhibited in art galleries, it’s also shop windows, biscuit tins, films and film posters and fabrics — a new egalitarian definition of high art that steamrollers over the old hierarchy.

In political posters with slogans such as “Keep Up the Revolutionary Pace”, the Cyrillic letters of the Russian alphabet, universal signs, like a directional arrow, and punctuation, like the question mark, are treated as graphic elements, magnified in scale, arranged with the symmetry of a monument or the excitement of a spray of diagonals. “All of Moscow was covered with our work,” Rodchenko wrote. “We made about 50 posters, about 100 sign boards, wrappers, containers, illuminated advertisements, advertising columns, illustrations in magazines and newspapers.” There were also fantasy projects: one of the highlights here is a model of a little kiosk, designed by Rodchenko. Soaring diagonals rise above the modest hut and counter of the kiosk, like the spire of a church, while other skewed horizontal planes intersect, creating an abstract monument in the heart of the city.

Already, the artists were having to make compromises, thanks to the inadequacies of the Soviet economy. There were constant shortages of basic materials. In the cities, people lived in cramped shared apartments, with a different family in each room. You could save for months to buy a light bulb, and then — as the short story by the contemporary writer Zoshenko relates — when you turned it on, you could see in what poverty you lived. Rodchenko looked enviously at the glass and steel furniture designed in the West — he had to make his designs for wood because they couldn’t mass-produce in such expensive materials under Communism.

The ending is abrupt — in the exhibition as in real life. By the mid-Twenties Popova was dead, and by the end of the decade Stalin’s conservative Social Realism replaced Constructivism, with its neoclassical depictions of industrial scenes and revolutionary struggle. Rodchenko turned to photography and made paintings of clowns.

This is a rollercoaster of a story yet it is given a rather dry treatment in this exhibition. The Tate curators could have had a bit more fun with their material. Some of the Constructivist designs are begging to be reconstructed — such as the lamps and biscuit tins. I wanted to see some shop dummies in Popova’s dresses with their big floppy collars. Rodchenko’s kiosk should have been at least half life-size.

These absences can probably be explained by budgetary limitations, and the exhibition does conclude with a life-size reconstruction of Rodchenko’s design for a workers’ club exhibited at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts and Modern Industry. Here, in a stark design of red and white, we see the faults of the Constructivist and the whole Communist project.

There is a long thin reading table with horribly uncomfortable-looking semi-circular chairs on either side, and a chess table and chairs which look very difficult to get up from. Here was a political system which was meant to liberate the working classes but which instead forced them to conform to its ideals. That is why most people prefer gentrification to geometrification.

Behind the reality of those uncomfortable chairs lies an art theory that was as daft as the politics — and the curators should be engaging far more with this. Rodchenko’s The Line is typical of the loony manifestos, full of cod art history and pseudo-scientific axioms, produced on a weekly basis by artists across Europe at this time. “Further work in this area,” he proclaims, “has made clear the supreme significance of the LINE as the primary factor in the construction of any organism, and the functional dependence of the line on various structural moments.” Whatever that might mean.

The hokum of the theory of the art of this time raises the most intriguing question today: if the theory behind the work is junk, why is the art still good? The curators should explain this but this is the dark room they daren’t enter/

Rodchenko’s paintings of lines drawn with a ruler on plain backgrounds exemplify the issue. This is set-square art yet these are beautiful and mesmerising pictures — why? It is not simply because they had their moment in history. Part of their charm is to do with the mountain of conventions they swept aside. But mostly the art is about the doomed struggle to find universal scientific laws that could be applied to human activities — a visual metaphor for communism and for the field of “human sciences” now. So this is art that brims with naivety, hope and optimism. That’s why it still works today.

I predict that in the coming months more similarities between our world and that of Popova and Rodchenko will emerge. The Constructivists scorned the figurative art of the past — the mythological paintings from the salon and academy — as bourgeois. Soon we are likely to view the gimmicky conceptual art of the last decade with its sentimentality (butterflies and hearts), its shiny opulence, its cynicism (those fag ends) and its formulae (stripes and spots) as the salon art of our day, and we too will want a new art.

Not many of us think like that yet, and unlike the Constructivists we haven’t taken to the streets. But if, by the time this exhibition closes, thousands of people have had their homes repossessed by the banks whom they have bailed out with their taxes, then I think we will have that parallel, too. Then we will be looking for artists such as Rodchenko and Popova to reinvent art for us — or at least paint the slogans on our banners.

Rodchenko and Popova is at Tate Modern (020 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk) until 17 May. Sun-Thurs 10am-6pm; Fri-Sat 10am-10pm. Admission: £9.80, concs available.

BRIAN SEWELL RETURNS NEXT WEEK

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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