Sale!!! Mega RARE! Unique!!!
Alexander RODCHENKO - Mother, 1924
(Alexandre RODTCHENKO)
Old Authentic Original Drawing Offset print
Beautiful Famous photo! Iconic!!!
Size: 14.3 cm x 19.8 cm
This is a print controlled and validated on press by the customer that the printer had archived as a color reference model and laminated on a support in order to be able to preserve it over time.
A wonderful testimony to traditional fine art printing
which unfortunately has completely disappeared today.
Remarkable print close to a photograph, very shiny, with tones of a beautiful density.
Its contrasting rendering, its luminosity, as well as its definition with sharp details, are absolutely magnificent.
Print made in 2000 by a former art printer
Archival Model Printer duotone print enhanced with gloss varnish
This old print comes from a first printing limited to a few copies in different tones, the client selected one that he approved and validated as proof "good to print". It was kept by the printer and served as a color model for setting up on the machine during reprints. When everything was in order, the customer signed the print which then became contractual, the customer's approval committed the printer to obtain an identical result for all the prints he had to produce.
This unpublished Validation Print was found in the depths of an assembly workshop in the archives of a former Art printing works, preciously kept flat and protected from light. Although it is old with its 23 years of age, it has remained in a good state of conservation. Some marks and traces of dirt on the back due to the manipulations of the printer. On the other hand, the front is intact, in excellent condition and of an extraordinary shine.
In 1924, Alexandre Rodchenko, after having broken down and reduced reality to its very essence in his collages, moved on to photography, his friends and family under his lens.
This photo with a tight framing of his own mother's face reading the newspaper, originally including the newspaper itself lying on the table, but as in his collages, it focuses on the essentials of the subject, the sentiment, his mother is a character like any other, with a Russian-style scarf on her head, one hand, only one, holding her glasses like a monocle, recounting her years of work as a washerwoman, she looks serious, almost dramatic , she who learned to read in the 1920s at the age of 55 and who suddenly discovered a new world, a new way of life. His son Alexandre, soon after invented a new kind of perspective, from bottom to top and vice versa, with a new vision of seeing.
Alexandre Rodtchenko creates his photomontages from found photos, then begins to take photographs himself from 1924. His theoretical and critical positioning leads him to shake up the traditional rules of composition inherited from painting. He opposes the creative and experimental photography "of Chevalet" which he describes as bourgeois and embodied by Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy.
For his part, he unbalances the images, favoring off-framing, dizzying dives or low-angle shots and the structuring role of the lines, he upsets their visual coherence. The effects of depth are annihilated by the loss of horizontality. His photography is torn from its mimetic relationship to reality, it becomes the space of a discourse seeking to arouse the consciousness of the masses. Freed from its pictorial models, the space defined by the frame of the image is reinvented.
Etymologically "photography" comes from the Greek and means "to draw with light", this is what Rodchenko's work illustrates, wefts and squares the space in shadows, in dark lines that intersect. He uses meshes to connect shadows and lights, the perspectives he installs complete the effect of modernity by destroying any reference to an art rooted in the past.
He strives to refresh the public's gaze by using unexpected points of view and angles, in order to awaken the spirits. His camera floats in turn above, below, or around people and objects, he visually claims his freedom from fixed points to the laws of gravity, gravity.
Through his original, daring and innovative approach, he cuts all ties with the old methods of photography. His images impose themselves, by their productivist themes, their formal dynamism or by an art of the portrait where the new man figures.
Photography has every right and deserves to be treated with respect as an art of today. » Alexander Rodchenko
Alexander Rodtchenko (1891-1956) Russian photographer, born Alexander Mikhailovich Rodtchenko in Saint Petersburg to a father, a props man and decorator for a small theater and a mother, a laundress.
From 1910 to 1914 he was a pupil of the painter Nicolai Fechin at the Kazan School of Fine Arts in Kazan, where he met his future wife, Varvara Stepanova. At the end of his studies, he moved to Moscow where he enrolled at the Stroganoff School of Applied Arts, which he quickly left. In 1915, he worked alone and produced his first geometric compositions in black and white, drawn with a compass and ruler. In 1916 through the architect Viktor Vesnin, he met the painter and architect Tatline and exhibited his works in the group exhibition "Store" alongside the painters Lioubov Popova, Alexandra Exteret and Ivan Klioune. He continued his research around abstract painting and approached the most innovative painters of the time.
In 1917 he designed lamp projects for the picturesque Café, an opportunity for him to apply his research to everyday objects. He begins to create spatial constructions and architectural projects, newsstands, buildings. In 1918, he moved from abstract painting to three-dimensional constructions.
In 1920, he founded with other artists "the Union of painters" in the most avant-garde so-called "left" federation, he was part of many official institutes and taught, in the new art schools created during the Revolution, until their suppression by the political power, worried about innovations in education in 1930.
In 1921, he took part in several exhibitions, including one of them, entitled "5x5 = 25", where he presented a triptych of monochrome canvases each comprising a primary color, a pure red color, a pure yellow color and a pure blue color. Subsequently, he signed the productivist manifesto in which he undertook to abandon easel painting in favor of the production of everyday objects. In March of the same year, he joined the new artistic movement which had just been born, “constructivism”.
From 1922 he made many political posters, film posters, posters and advertising objects influenced by this movement. For him, there is an “absolute necessity to link all creation to production and to the very organization of life”. In 1923, he began to collaborate with numerous publishing houses for layout work by producing covers for the futurist and constructivist magazine “LEF” then those for “Novy LEF”, directed by Vladimir Maïakovski.
From 1924, he turned to photography, making photocollages and photomontages, then he took his first shots, initially portraits, those of his friends, such as the Russian poet, Nikolaï Asseïev and his family including his mother, portraits through which he continues his pictorial experiments, discovering new points of view and new angles of framing.
In 1925, he set up the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris and presented his project for a "worker's club". He then worked for the cinema and the theater designing furniture, sets and costumes. In 1929 he was selected by the painter Lazar Lissitzki for the “Film und Photo” exhibition in Stuttgart.
In 1933, he was commissioned to photograph the construction of the White Sea Canal in the Baltic for the magazine "SSSR na Stroïké" ("the USSR under construction").
From 1934 to 1939 Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova together produced photographic albums entitled “Cinema in the USSR” illustrated with photomontages, “The Soviet Air Fleet”, and “The Ten Years of Uzbekistan”.
During the Second World War, he left Moscow and took refuge in the Perm region, along with other artists, while working on the design of posters on the theme of the Great Patriotic War. After the war, Rodchenko published works glorifying the Soviet Union, he experimented with color photography. Today his private collection is on display at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
We were for the new fashion, we were for the new man. » Alexander Rodchenko
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thanks a lot to the following photographers
Edward Weston
Daido Moriyama
Araki
Josef Koudelka
Saul Leiter
Ray K Metzker
Paolo Roversi
Helmut Newton,
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Ernst Haas
Harry Gruyaert
Annie Leibovitz
Peter Lindbergh
Guy Bourdin
Richard Avedon
Herb Ritts,
Ellen Von Unwerth
Comme des Garçons
Rei Kawakubo
Irving Penn,
Bruce Weber,
Edward Steichen,
George Hoyningen-Huene,
Hiro,
Erwin Blumenfeld
Bruce Weber,
Alex Webb
Robert Frank
Issey Miyake
Robert Doisneau
Steve Hiett
Gueorgui Pinkhassov
Andy Warhol
Yayoi Kusama
Magnum photos
Harry Callahan
Andre Kertesz
Elliott Erwitt
Bruce Davidson
Guy Bourdin
Steven Meisel,