Aleksandr RodchenkoRussian, 1891–1956Vladimir Mayakovsky
Can I see it?
Not on view at present
Where is “Vladimir Mayakovsky” now? Collection: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Not on view at present. Checked October 12, 2026.
Chicago, United States
It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.
- Checked
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum
About the work
Before turning to photography, Aleksandr Rodchenko was best known for the painting and innovative graphic design he made in the early years of Soviet Russia. He was among the pioneers of photomontage, which combined text and bold color with found photographs. His first foray into making photographs was a series of six portraits of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose forceful look he incorporated in book cover designs from 1925 to 1929.
Read on
After Mayakovsky’s death in 1930, Rodchenko was induced to turn several of his photographs into commemorative images for the newly lionized poet. The photograph’s afterlife as a popular icon was far from Rodchenko’s earlier aims, since he argued that the camera captures moments of a life rather than summarizes a person’s character. “Crystallize man not by a single ‘synthetic’ portrait,” he wrote in 1928, “but by a whole lot of snapshots taken at different times and in different conditions.”
Art Institute of ChicagoCC BY 4.0
Details
- Accession number
- 2015.192
What it shows
In the catalog
Sources
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Image: Art Institute of Chicago — © the artist or rights holder
In the life of Aleksandr Rodchenko
The whole life1920–1930
Professor at VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN
For ten years Rodchenko teaches in the woodworking and metalworking faculties (merged into the Dermetfak in 1928), training students to design multifunctional objects for everyday life and public buildings, expressive through construction rather than ornament.
1922
Works with Dziga Vertov
Rodchenko works intensively with the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, whose ideas and practice deeply influenced him.
1924
Takes up photography
From 1924 Rodchenko takes his own photographs, becoming famous for his experiments with angles and viewpoints. His credo: “I want to teach people to see extraordinarily ordinary things.”
1931
October group show at the House of the Press, and a backlash
At the October group's exhibition at the House of the Press in Moscow, Rodchenko shows “Pioneer Girl”, “Pioneer with a Trumpet” and the series “Vakhtan Sawmill”; the pictures draw devastating criticism and charges of formalism and of refusing to adapt to the tasks of “proletarian photography”. By some accounts, he is expelled from the group in 1931.
early 1933
Secret assignment to the White Sea Canal
On OGPU orders Rodchenko is to photograph the completion and opening of the canal for propaganda and to set up photo laboratories in the Gulag; with the canal's management he greets the steamer “Karl Marx” carrying writers led by Maxim Gorky. By his own account he took over two thousand photographs there — no more than thirty are known today.
1935
Masters of Soviet Art exhibition and a public recantation
Rodchenko is allowed to take part in the Masters of Soviet Art exhibition only on condition that he publicly denounce his earlier formalist work; the self-denunciation is printed in Sovetskoe Foto. Other accounts date his participation in the “Exhibition of Masters of Soviet Photographic Art” to 1936.
