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| The years 1918 through 1921 were a period of intense creativity in Rodchenko's art. Establishing a practice that would persist throughout his career, he worked in discrete series, each of which explored a single formal premise through a series of permutations. In harmony with the revolutionary goal of an ordered, technologically advanced society, Rodchenko strove for an objective, impersonal art, stripped of description and narrative, and devoid of spiritual or metaphysical trappings. Taking as his point of departure the abstract vocabulary of Malevich and Tatlin, he isolated individual qualities of painting and analyzed them in successive series: the planar surface of the work, its faktura or material and texture, the density and weight of color, the complete absence of color (in the Black on Black series), and line. A corollary to Rodchenko's preoccupation with the material qualities of the artwork was his emphasis on the process of making it, which he regarded as a significant aspect of the finished painting. |