In the ferment of post-Revolutionary Russia, the avant-garde was as militant as its name suggested – a true advance guard, sweeping aside every preconception that lay in its path. Death to the aristocracy, death to the bourgeoisie, death to capitalism. For each of those brusque sentences, there was to be a correlative in art and aesthetics. Away with hierarchies of taste, away with beautifully crafted works of art, serpent symbols of wealth and status. Away with the old romantic shibboleth that great paintings are holy relics, invested with the aura of individual genius.

Nothing was sacred to those who sought to express the collectivist ideals of Communism’s new world order. The painter, photographer and designer Aleksandr Rodchenko looked forward to a day when art and the State itself would have metamorphosed into one and the same thing. “Non-objective painting is the street itself, the squares, the towns and the whole world. The art of the future will not be the cosy decoration of family homes. It will be just as indispensable as 48-storey skyscrapers, mighty bridges, wireless, aeronautics and submarines, which will be transformed into art.”

Rigorously curated by the Russian art historian Margarita Tupitsyn, “Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism”, at Tate Modern, revisits the dawn of Russian Revolutionary art. Its subject is the Russian Constructivist movement, and the debates and arguments that attended its birth. The show concentrates on the contributions of two pivotal figures, namely Rodchenko himself – whose work as a photographer was explored in an exhibition of exactly a year ago at the Hayward Gallery – and his comrade in art, Liubov Popova. Over two hundred exhibits include paintings, drawings and constructions, as well as designs for posters, advertisements, textiles, stage sets and a host of objects of ordinary daily use. Yet so tight is the exhibition’s focus on the early development of Constructivism that it spans just eight years, from 1917 to 1925. 

Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) is a celebrated figure in the annals of early modern art. Liubov Popova (1889-1924) is considerably less well known. Her life was marked by a succession of tragedies. She lost her husband to typhoid in 1919, and her mother soon afterwards. She died young, succumbing to scarlet fever, together with her infant son, in 1924. During her brief career, she seized the opportunity afforded to her by the ethos of early Communism, with its strong emphasis on the equality of the sexes. An intellectual firebrand, and a founding member of the “Working Group of Objective Analysis”, she helped to formulate the key distinctions on which the whole Constructivist enterprise would depend. It was Popova who, at the second meeting of the group, in 1921, proposed that the artists of the new Soviet State emancipate themselves altogether from the notion of composition in art. “Composition”, she dismissively declared, was no more than “the taste-oriented distribution of material”. Soviet art should not be composed but, instead,  “constructed”. Its principles should be those of “purpose and necessity, expediency of construction.”

What could an “uncomposed”, purely “constructed” painting possibly look like? A little later in the same year, 1921, Rodchenko came up with his own answer. He exhibited three totally monochrome canvases, simply entitled Pure Red Colour, Pure Yellow Colour, Pure Blue Colour. Flat fields of unmodulated pigment, modest on scale, they loiter with mute intent about half-way through Tate Modern’s exhibition. They have been assembled on the same principles as the spray-painted panels of a Soviet  armoured car. They stand for rejection, for the ambition to abolish old styles of art forever. Rodchenko gave them the collective title of The Last Painting, declaring that painting as a medium was itself finished: “We should no longer represent, only process and construct.”

 

By the early 1920s Rodchenko had largely abandoned fine art for  photography and design. Popova’s attitude to painting seems to have been a little less terminally radical. Her response to the conundrum of how to paint “uncomposed” compositions was a series of 1921 called Space-Force Constructions. She mixed her paint with sand and dirt to give it a densely material texture, and worked on raw unprimed plywood which she allowed to show through in the finished composition. Her goal was to remove even the slightest aura of preciousness from the finished work of art. The pictures she created from these self-consciously poor materials look almost as though they might have been composed at random, in a game of pickup sticks. Monochrome bars and bands criss-cross minimally suggested backgrounds. They might be abandoned piles of scaffolding, or searchlights combing the sky.

Between them, Rodchenko and Popova developed the distinctive language of Soviet agitprop advertising, with its hard angles and sharp edges, its bold use of red and black, its collage elements and uncompromising san serif typography. They loved grid forms and repetitions, finding in a whole range of such motifs – wire mesh, graph-paper squares, skyscraper windows, multiplied hammer and sickle – a metaphor for the collective enterprise of Communist politics itself. One of Popova’s last designs was for a dress decorated with forms resembling cogs and flywheels, making its wearer into a visible emblem of the individual subsumed into the machinery of the State. Time has exposed such aspirations, while the ineluctable workings of capitalism have ensured that works of art intended to escape the bourgeois chicanery of the market are now worth millions. But the works of Rodchenko and Popova still radiate a spirit of naive, enchanting optimism. Dug up from what now seems like an almost incomprehensibly alien past, this show amounts to a kind of archaeology of early Soviet idealism.