Word: rodchenko
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...growth area for forgery today is the work of the Russian avant-garde -- Rodchenko, Popova, Larionov, Lissitsky, Malevich -- which, as a result of perestroika, is coming on the market in some quantity after 60 years of Stalinist-Brezhnevian repression. Prices are zooming, and authentication is thin. Sotheby's held a Russian sale in London in April 1989. It contained, according to some scholars, two outright fakes ascribed to Liubov Popova and one dubious picture, badly restored and signed on the front -- something Popova never did with her oil paintings. Doubts about the authenticity of these works were voiced...
...hottest bidding was for Line, a 1920 minimalist masterwork in black and white by Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956). It went for $567,000 to David Juda of London's Annely Juda Gallery, one of a growing number of Western dealers specializing in Russian art. Several other Rodchenko works drew high bids, including the cubist-inspired Composition, 1916. The second highest price of $ the sale, however, was fetched by a contemporary Soviet artist, Grisha Bruskin, 43, who has been harassed by the KGB for displaying his paintings to foreigners. An anonymous buyer paid $416,000 for his Fundamental Lexicon, a witty...
Artistic avant-gardes wither in totalitarian regimes, whether of the left or the right. The collective efforts of the constructivists Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Tallin and the rest were only possible, one may surmise, because they did not realize how totalitarian Leninism actually was. Oligarchs, whether collective or single, dislike the very idea of avant-garde art because it creates new elites. As Ortega y Gasset remarked, its first effect is to divide; it splits the audience into those who understand it and those who do not. This cleavage does not necessarily run along political lines, and so it may not conform...
...hostility to modernism, a permanent legacy of Stalin, seems especially ironic to Western eyes because it was in Russia, between 1910 and 1925, that one of the great experiments of modern art was carried out. The leaders of the avantgarde, among them Kasimir Malevich, Naum Gabo, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, wanted to serve the new power of the left by combining revolutionary art with revolutionary politics. Russian constructivism was, in fact, the only heroic modernist style that drew its strength from the revolutionary impetus. Yet its sin was in being abstract, and for that it was consigned...
...repression had begun. In Stalin's slow and terrible eye, such art was decadent and, because of its internationalism, bourgeois-formalist. The Gulag swallowed some artists, like Boris Kushner. Others, such as Larionov, Goncharova, Gabo and Ivan Puni, went into exile. Those who stayed, like Rodchenko or the architect Konstantin Melnikov, survived as ghosts, forgotten men in a culture of vindictive Stalinist toadies. Like Cronus, the Revolution devoured its children. As a wholesale trashing of a civilization, only Hitler's demolition of the German modernists compares with it. Inside the Soviet Union, the works themselves lay buried, invisible...