Alexander Rodchenko - Photographs New York Friday, April 5, 2024 | Phillips

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  • Multi-disciplinary artist Alexander Rodchenko found in photography the perfect tool for the modern age. As with many photographers in the 1920s, the appearance of the handheld Leica camera gave Rodchenko the ability to photograph anytime, anywhere. But few photographers experimented as adventurously, or with such remarkable results, as Rodchenko. The photograph offered here, Gathering for a Demonstration, is one of Rodchenko’s best known images and one that illustrates how radical his camera vision could be.  

     

    Made from the balcony of his studio, Gathering for Demonstration documents the prelude to a march, with participants assembling into formation while spectators on the street and the balconies above stand by. Lacking a horizon line or a definitive and central subject, the photograph deviated from the accepted pictorial conventions of the day. The strong Constructivist diagonal of the street, and the novel elevated angle of view create an abstracted depiction of the scene that is, nonetheless, entirely documentary. Photography, for Rodchenko, was not simply a tool for opportunistic abstraction, but one that could be used to depict the world in a thoroughly new way. In 1928, Rodchenko wrote: ‘Accustomed to seeing the usual and the banal, we have to discover the world of the visual. We have to revolutionize our way of seeing.’ Photography served Rodchenko as the ideal socially-relevant artform, one perfectly equipped to document the realities of the new world created by the Russian Revolution.  

    “Revolution in the photographic field consists of photographing in such a way that photography will have enough strength not just to rival painting, but also to point out to everyone a new and modern way of discovering the world.”
    —Alexander Rodchenko 
    The print offered here is a unique version of the image. It shows meticulous handwork throughout that accentuates and delineates certain details, most notably on the group of marchers at the top of the image, and on the balconies and their spectators. Perhaps the biggest difference between this version of the image and other more commonly seen iterations is that several puddles in the center of the street have been eliminated, creating a greater openness of space and a cleaner composition. This alteration was either done on the negative or on an intermediary print.  

     

    Rodchenko was as much a graphic artist as he was a photographer. Because his work was frequently reproduced in the Russian and European Press, he developed a keen understanding of how the full tonalities of a photograph would be translated into the limited vocabulary of halftone reproduction. To compensate for the loss of detail and depth of field, he utilized a variety of strategies including retouching and overpainting, as seen on this print.

     

    Another print of this image, likely made from the same negative, is in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  

     

     
    Read More about the collection

    • Provenance

      The Rodchenko/Stepanova Archives, Moscow
      To the Schickler - Lafaille Collection, 1980s
      Christie's, New York, 5 October 1995, lot 23

    • Exhibited

      The Utopian Dream: Photography in Soviet Russia, 1918-1939, Laurence Miller Gallery, New York, January-February 1992

    • Literature

      Howard Schickler and Laurence Miller Gallery, The Utopian Dream: Photography in Soviet Russia, 1918-1939, p. 27 (this print)
      Khan Magomedov, Rodchenko: The Complete Work, p. 266 (this print)
      Volkov-Lannit, Aleksandr Rodchenko, n.p.

FIGURE + FORM: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

320

Gathering for a Demonstration

1928
Unique gelatin silver print with applied pigment, printed early 1930s.
11 x 7 in. (27.9 x 17.8 cm)
Titled, dated in pencil and two credit stamps on the verso.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$80,000 - 120,000 

Sold for $101,600

Contact Specialist

Sarah Krueger
Head of Department, Photographs
skrueger@phillips.com
 

Vanessa Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs and Chairwoman, Americas
vhallett@phillips.com

Photographs

New York Auction 5 April 2024