Alexander Mikhailovich Rodchenko

large-format, initialed in the negative, inscribed and dated by the photographer’s daughter, Varvara Rodchenko, in pencil and ink, and with her collection stamps on the reverse, 1933

Sotheby’s New York, 7 April 1995, Sale 6684, Lot 63

This print:

Marianne Karabelnik, Stripped Bare: The Body Revealed in Contemporary Art: Works from the Thomas Koerfer Collection (London, 2004), p. 169

Other prints of this image:

Alexander Lavrentiev, Alexander Rodchenko, Photography 1924-1954 (Cologne, 1995), pp. 310-11

Alexandr Rodčenko, I Grandi Fotografi–serie argento (Milan, 1983), pp. 2-3

20 Soviet Photographers (Amsterdam, 1990), pl. 118

Soviet Photography: An Age of Realism (New York, 1980), p. 66

This impressive large print is on double-weight paper with a matte surface and slightly warm tones. There is age-appropriate silvering in the dark areas. The print is trimmed to the image, and very slight wear to the edges can be seen upon close examination. There is a faint 1.5-inch crease parallel to the center of the bottom edge which breaks the emulsion very slightly. There is a small graphite mark in the upper right corner. On the reverse are faint glue remains which indicate that this print was at one time affixed to a mount.
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Along with László Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky, Rodchenko was a principle strategist for the new visual art of the early 20^th-century.  Like his colleagues, he was a painter, designer, and theorist who came to see photography as an ideal art for the modern world.  Unlike Moholy and Lissitzky, however, who experimented extensively with photograms, photo-montage, and other innovative techniques, Rodchenko practiced photography primarily as a documentarian, although his images were no less iconoclastic.  The present photograph shows how Rodchenko was able to bring rather complex compositional ideas into his documentary work.  The subject matter of this picture – two children in a boat, one holding a paddle, the other a clutch of flowers and two metal cans for worms – could have yielded, in a more conventional photographer’s hands, a sentimental genre study.  In Rodchenko’s composition, however, the image incorporates a dynamic diagonality within which the two children are very carefully placed.  The photograph functions both as a documentary image and as a record of how the camera could be used to present reality in novel ways.  

In 1933, Rodchenko travelled to Karelia to photograph the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal for the magazine SSR na Strojka.  It is possible that Catching Worms for Bait was photographed on that trip.  Like Rodchenko’s portrait of his elderly mother, the studies of his young daughter Varvara, and his famous images Steps (see previous lot) and Girl With a Leica, this image shows the strong current of humanism that runs through his photographs, no matter how radical the compositions.