by Jon Lackman | 7 May 2009 | Modern, Museums
At Tate Modern through May 17, Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism has received several interested reviews.
Rachel Campbell-Johnston is struck by its revolutionary fervor:
Here is an aesthetic that takes occupancy by force. Look at all those diagonals: purposeful and persuasive as the slant of a rifle, as the rows of a regimental salute. The visitor to this show is stepping on to a cultural parade ground. Here are the pure clean patterns of abstract thought. You hear the clarion call of zealotry as you stare into the far horizons of unclouded ideals.
but is disappointed in the end, suggesting the exhibition may be no more than “a meticulously assembled and intellectually interesting historical document.”
Richard Dorment makes a striking observation about Popova, who was the daughter of an elite, cultured household:
[A]lthough she often paints on cheap plywood and in some works adds a layer of dust to give the surface the look of something built or made by a machine, Popova can’t eradicate the powerful force of art-for-art’s-sake aestheticism that had characterised Russian art from the 1890s until the Revolution. Her battle against aestheticism, I think, lies behind all of her work in two dimensions…
Waldemar Januszczak credits the pair with taking Constructivism “out of the gallery and into the babushka’s house” but is unimpressed with the physical condition of works lent from the likes of the Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts in Makhachkala, among other institutions that hold the legacies of the movement’s world-bettering ambitions. By contrast, William Haseltine applauds “the obsessive self-taught collector, George Costakis,” for his historical role, stating: “The paintings and drawing credited to the Costakis collection are in excellent condition, contrasting with the relatively poor state of most of those from the Russian museums.”
Harry Bellet regrets that the exhibition could not bring itself to discuss the many thousands of political prisoners who lost their lives building Stalin’s White Sea- Baltic Canal, in the context of Rodchenko’s photographs of the project for USSR in Construction magazine; he also laments the “terrible” misfit between the real “misery of the people” and the artists’ “futurist imagination,” while Michael Prodger is also disturbed that Rodchenko apparently “kept the faith” through the worst of Stalinism. Adrian Searle is more upbeat and a bit vaguer, referring in a general way to “the state,” “officialdom” and Leni Riefenstahl but not mentioning any canals.
Michael Spens notes the historical gender bias that contributes to Popova’s comparative obscurity (and is rebuked by co-curator Margarita Tupitsyn, in a comment, for not giving due credit in his review).
See also Charles Darwent and Peter Campbell ($).
