Professor Aglaya Glebova is well aware of her expertise in her field, its creative techniques into the relation to the avant-garde and its political context after the fall of Tsar Nicholas II, the Provisional Government, and Aleksandr Rodchenko's role under Lenin and subsequently under Iosif Stalin. Rodchenko's creative career covered the whole period. He liked to say that he was still only one generation away from serfdom.
Glebova is aware of the great range and shifting cultural and political context of his works. As a painter, designer, and photographer, Rodchenko characteristically worked with elements assembled into visual and material constructions, even at the Kazan School of Art. At the same time photographs of cubist works by Pablo Picasso were carried to Russia by Ukrainian painters Alexandra Exter and David Burliuk, who had also seen cubist works by Picasso in the collection of Serge Shchukin in Moscow. In this way the sense of a constructive process, organized into series of works and variations, was confirmed in Rodchenko's thoughts. Other painters including Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, who equally responded to aspects of Picasso's constructed innovations, though Rodchenko was perhaps the most elemental and systematic. His techniques were increasingly evident in his paintings, material constructions, and his photographs and photomontages. His works were assembled without narrative, without a window space, and without aesthetic taste. He was able to operate in times of rapid cultural change in war and revolution under Lenin and under Stalin. The entire structure of communal culture led to belief in collective ownership by the proletariat. Art as luxury goods for the wealthy was banned. Rodchenko's methods were constructive, materialist, and dedicated to the masses.
Glebova traces this transition carefully, to keep her reader on board with Rodchenko's increasing use of photomontage assembling often second-hand images with texts, poetic, promotional, or political to offer the proletariat advice and propaganda. Surprisingly, Rodchenko was more readily engaged with photomontage than he was with the immense potential of hand-held photography in the living masses of the crowd. He recorded many sequences of pioneers, sports, parades, extreme viewpoints, building projects, street life, architecture, and industry.
Glebova maintains exquisite control in her analysis of Rodchenko's achievements using various techniques psychologically, in terms of persuasion, and in the materialist world of collective life. In this way his photography of the Vladimir Shchusev Radio tower in Moscow was promoted as an imagery of electrical, engineering, military, and police power.
Glebova's book is precisely argued and unique in its properties. Rodchenko was the leading portrait photographer of many important figures in Soviet culture, including Vladimir Maiakovskii and the theatre director Vsevolod Meierhol΄d. After the death of Lenin in 1924, his image became multiplied in repeated devotional images. Devotion to Lenin was sustained by Stalin, to preserve the cult. In 1925 Rodchenko commemorated the image of Lenin, set up in Konstantin Mel΄nikov's red Workers’ Club erected in Paris.
For most of their career, Varvara Stepanova and Rodchenko lived and worked in the Vkhutemas [the Higher Technical Studios] in Moscow while their works could be seen in book stands, on stage, in standard clothing, in exhibitions, and many other outlets. Rodchenko remained highly visible. Alongside these photomontages, dynamic lettering, posters, periodicals, and mechanistic constructions embodied the power of political mass movements. Looking down from the studio and living space, an intense concentration recorded photographs of Looking Down into the Courtyard and Gathering for a Demonstration.
Demands in the State Publishing Houses for serial snapshots, fragments of observation, and images of industrialization served to accelerate further Stalin's first Five-Year Plan. Later, large government sponsored albums were devoted to Stalin's achievement in creating canals in the White Sea and Baltic Sea, built with slave and prison labor. It was among the first prison camps photographed in December 1933. While Rodchenko survived the commission, the White Sea canal proved fatal to 175,000 prisoners and 25,000 workers.
