At the Petrol Station

At the petrol station  is an original vintage silver salts photograph, made by the great Russian Constructivist artist  Aleksandr Michajlovic  Rodcenko    (Saint Petersburg, 1891 - Moscow, 1956) in 1935 ca.

Printed later, presumably between the 1940s and the 1950s. On the  verso , the autograph pencil inscriptions of the author, title and year.

In very good conditions, this is a rare and precious piece. A scene of ordinary life is portrayed in an unusual point of view. The  oblique cuts , the use of dynamic diagonals, and the close position of the car are constants in  Rodcenko's style  and absolutely revolutionary and innovative  tricks at that time in the field of photography!

Provenance :

Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, Great Britain; Forum Auction, London; Private Collection.

Bibliography :

Alexander Rodchenko. Catalog of the retrospective exhibition published from the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1979.

Aleksandr Michajlovic Rodcenko (St. Petersburg, 1891 - Moscow, 1956)

Aleksandr Michajlovic Rodcenko was a Russian painter, photographer and graphic designer, a leading figure of the Russian avant-gardes who collaborated in the establishment of the Constructivist movement .

In 1924, Rodcenko definitively abandoned painting as the main artistic technique to embrace photography ; in the same year, he made a manifesto that became history and created a campaign against illiteracy with the photomontage technique for Lengiz, in which Lilja Jur'evna Brik shouts: " Books for all fields of knowledge ". His first photos are illustrations of the poem by Mayakovsky Pro Eto .

In 1928, he bought the historic camera  Leica  with which he captured images of  unusual and bold perspectives of balconies, stairs, windows and walls, precisely as a sign of rupture with respect to conventional photography of the period. Experimenting with oblique cuts , using the diagonal to give dynamism to the images, the close position of the camera, and unusual shots , he isolates and emphasizes shapes and simple graphic elements such as lines, circles, curves, as his compatriot Kazimir Malevich was doing in painting.

Rodcenko's photographic career lasts only about 16 years, from 1924 to 1940, a time in which, however, he revolutionized the concept of photography .

" If you want to teach the human eye to see in a new way, you need to show it everyday and familiar objects from totally unexpected perspectives and angles and in unexpected situations; new objects should be photographed from different angles to offer a complete representation of the object ", writes Rodcenko in 1928.

He combines theory with practice, and in 1926 he wrote articles on photography and cinema for Sovetskoe Kino ( Soviet Cinema ) magazine. In 1927, he obtained his first photographic exhibition, which was followed by many others in his home country and abroad. Called too Western and too "formalist", Rodcenko was ordered to portray only state events (in 1933): Stalinism ruled and it was necessary to "obey" to the aesthetics of the state. Rodcenko was not in line with the ideals of the regime. He worked with his partner Stepanova until 1940, when he abandoned photography in favor of painting.