Portrait of Varvara Stepanova

Date1925, printed in 1989

Credit LineGift of Sarit Rozycki and Robert Cromwell

Dimensions12 x 9 3/8 in. (30.5 x 23.8 cm)

Object number2003.067.058

Label TextRodchenko came to photography rather late in his career. In the post-revolutionary atmosphere of Soviet Russia, in the early 1920s, Rodchenko had abandoned painting as a bourgeois medium and began to make photocollages, drawing on the wealth of images by then available in advertising and popular magazines. When he was unable to find exactly the kind of image he required, he began to take his own photographs for the collages. He then became intrigued with photography for its own sake because it was a suitably revolutionary medium: modern, machine-made, and infinitely reproducible. Used to the freedom and surprise obtained through the manipulation and juxtaposition of images in collage, Rodchenko took advantage of the mobility and flexibility of the hand-held camera to make pictures that showed the world in radical new ways. In the portrait the artist's wife Varvara Stepanova's appearance is transformed by the light shining through netting, casting a pattern of shadow on her face.
Exhibition HistoryThe Objective Eye: Photographs from the Rozycki-Cromwell Collection, Michael C. Carlos Museum, August 10, 2005 - January 15, 2006
Embodied Seeing: Modernist Works on Paper, Michael C. Carlos Museum, February 4 - May 20, 2012
Published ReferencesMCCM Newsletter, March - May 2004.

ProvenanceEx coll. Sarit Rozycki and Robert Cromwell, United States.

Status

Not on view

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