Tate Modern: Rodchenko and Popova

In early twentieth century Russia, two great histories intersected. Revolutionaries tried to reinvent society and what it could be. Artists redefined not only what art would look like, but its purpose and role, which until then had been to decorate the living rooms of the bourgeoisie.

Into this larger-than-life, wide-screen epic, the figures of Rodchenko and Popova enter stage left. One expects their work at Tate Modern to be on the grand scale, overwhelming in the way that something like, say, Picasso’s Guernica or Rothko’s “Colour as Subject” canvases are; which is to say, somehow beyond the normal scale of things, emerging as mythic emblems or spiritual experience from far beyond the everyday.

In some ways, neither Popova nor Rodchenko disappoint. We witness some of the very earliest realisations of art as design; of design as art; of the marriages and cross-breeding of architecture, theatre and book design and art in the service of politics. Some of the poster designs manage to capture the scope, ambition and sheer numbers involved in the Revolution and its aftermath. Not to mention that Popova’s work marked the emergence of women in the avant-garde.

And yet it is the tiny prosaic details underlying the poetry which capture the attention. Most memorably, there are the constant reminders of the materials on which both Popova and Rodchenko composed. The grain of plywood re-emerging slowly over the years, as the vibrancy of oils used to compose early geometric pieces fades away. Rough drawings on card, cardboard, scraps of paper, the fraying textiles of abstract collages. All turning to dust.

Even for intellectuals, life was hard in Revolutionary Russia. Perhaps it’s fanciful to imagine these great proponents of technology-as-art scrabbling around for something – anything – to paint on. And yet Liubov Popova’s life was short and painful. She took a year to recover from a bout of typhoid in 1919, but her husband did not. In 1924, she and her son succumbed to scarlet fever. She was thirty five years old. Vita brevis, ars slightly longa.

There is plenty to see at this exhibition. For me, the early non-objectivist painting experiments and the photography and advertising posters are the highlights. In the photographs, subjects seem to want to burst forth from the confines of the frame. In the posters, the dynamism and boldness feel like they are charged with some Revolutionary life force.

What did not work for me were the agitprop pieces, extolling the virtues of trade union membership, economic plans and the like. They left me cold not on political grounds, but on aesthetic ones. They are mirrored in tone, perhaps, by some of Rodchenko’s pronouncements writ large on the walls of the Tate. These are deadening, impenetrable, over-intellectualised statements of what (apparently) Rodchenko thought he was playing at. I came away with the feeling that he was setting up a barrier between himself and the world. Given the circumstances, perhaps it was best for a Russian artist (who was marginalised during the 1930s as Social Realism became dominant), to be on his guard. Aleksandr Rodchenko died in 1956.

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