24 April – 20 June, 2010
Members of the Russian avant-garde worked towards a revolution in the arts in the years around the Russian Revolution. Young artists sought to bring art into active engagement with society and to make it part of daily life, rejecting the confinement of the fruits of creative activity in the arts to a privileged few. Constructivism was the most prominent of those avant-garde movements, with Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) and his wife Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958) among its leading artists.
Rodchenko worked towards a revolution in painting and more: he also engaged in spatial constructions, architecture, the design of items for everyday use, and graphic design, including books, magazines, and posters. Rodchenko also photographed family, friends, and urban and other landscapes from bold angles, an approach that opened up new possibilities in photography. Stepanova applied her abilities in fields ranging from costume and fabric to typographical design. What did this talented pair focus on? What were their objectives? This exhibition addressed those questions through 170 works from the collections of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the Rodchenko and Stepanova Archives.