ALEXANDER RODCHENKO, Works on Paper 1914-1920.

One of the great figures of the twentieth-century avant-garde, and a founding member of the Russian Constructivist movement, Alexander Rodchenko was a highly versatile artist. After gaining an international reputation as a painter, sculptor and graphic artist, in the early 1920s, Rodchenko renounced 'pure' art in favour of a visual language that would serve society. Having introduced the technique of photomontage using found photographic images, he turned to photography itself because, as he later said, 'it seems that only the camera is capable of reflecting contemporary life'. In his first photographs, Rodchenko used traditional viewpoints and compositions, but in 1925 he began to experiment with startlingly unusual camera angles.His experiments with severe foreshortening, tilted perspective and close-up views of surprising details came to be known as 'Rodchenko's angles' and opened up an entirely new way of looking at the world. "Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography" reveals the artist's enduring talent for innovation as well as the extraordinary range of his work. It includes more than 250 of his photographs and photomontages spanning his career from the early 1920s onwards.

Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) was one of the leading figures in the Russian avant-garde. The eighty-two drawings assembled by the artist in the late 1930s or early 1940s, together with diary extracts, two introductory essays and previously unpublished illustrations present a pwerful record of Rodchenko's work. These 91 color and 35 mono illustrations and drawings give an insight into the evolution of his working method, from representational designs for theatre to his abstract compass drawings. They represent the artist's own narrative of the development of Constructivism and mark the end of an era of free expresoin. -- Midwest Book Review