At Fernand Léger's Museum, in Biot, here is the work of the constructivism supporter, at the same time graphist and photographer: when arts had to be subservient to politics…
The Fernand Léger Museum, in Biot, will exhibit until Nov.6th, the Russian photographer, painter, graphist and posterist Alexandre Rodtchenko (1891-1956). An exhibition of exceptional works, which makes us think about the great illusion of the intellectual and artistic world of the second half of the 20th century and the fierceness in the wrong way the most famous European writers,philosophers and artists proved.
Arts and its age
The personality and the art of Rodtchenko are impossible to separate from the environment in which he grew, and above all from a Saint-Petersburg theater where his father was working. His whole upbringing was founded on the perception of a contrasted world like the one in which he grew: dark rooms, lighted up stages, empty rooms during the day and full in the evenings, contrast between the full theater and the wings…
This illusion world is in almost all his pictures, which are supposed to describe the reality of a would-be society made up again with itself after the revolution. In an article dedicated to the artist, the Léger Museum curator, Brigitte Hedel-Samson, noticed that Rodtchenko was above all a towsman, a city-lover. Thus, we understand better his approval, which is not hidden in his works, to the Leninist-Marxist revolution, workers' revolution essentially urban, and different from the Maoist revolution in China.
Politics were controlling
Nowhere in Rodtchenko's work the politic aspect appears, today far from the flashing politic changes Russia has experimented since the end of the 1980s. Rodtchenko's work becomes an historical testimony of a past age where the imposed definition of arts was obliging him to educate population and had to lead to a changing society.
Thus, painters were paiting, sculptors were sculpting, writers were writing all the illusions of an age, to force happiness in spite of horrible real things, nobody was seing or decided not to see. Politics were leading and arts were a subservient tool. Rodtchenko's merit, beyond his own illusions, is that he was never artistically perverted.
Information
Musée National Fernand Léger, chemin du Val-de-Pomme, 06410 Biot
Closed on Tuesdays. Opening hours: 10:00 to 12:30 and 2:00 to 6:00
Entrance: 38 FF, tel: 04 92 91 50 30