[MARK 3C CY Cover for Mayakovsky's poem Pro…]

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MARK 3C CY Cover for Mayakovsky's poem Pro Eto' (About This). The construct'. But they are all doing the. same old thing: little pictures, landscapes, portraits. There are others who do not paint pictures, and work in production, who also talk about material, texture, construction but once again out come the very same age old ornamental and applied types of art, little cockerels and flowers, or cireles and dashes.

"There is a consumer who does not need pictures and ofraid of firon and steel. This consumer is the proletariat. With the victory of the proletariat will come the victory of constructivism."

Detached art

This drive against 'painter" liness' was directed against those who wanted art to be detached, superior and important in the sense of being mystically significant.

In 1921. Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova (an artist married to Rodchenko) produced 'productivist Among ideological aims was:

"To make intellectual production truly participate in the building up of communist culture, as an element equal in value with others".

And amongst its political aims:

"Establishing contacts with all the productive centres and main bodies of the united soviet woman was his lover, Lilya Brik. 'About This'.

In 1924 Lenin died: In 1926 Mayakovsky wrote a poem against bureaucratic interference "Conversations with a Tax Inspector about Poetry"

Workers' overalls

In these years Rodchenko designed furniture, crockery and a set of workers! overalls. He and Mayakovsky began covering the streets with copies of advertisments-for the Soviet air industry, for cigarettes, tor baby's dummies I''suck them till you're old"') and for films by Vertov, Eisenstein and others.

The art had come to the people. The formost poet of the revolution and the most politically direct of its artists were designing advertising posters, book covers and news kiosks.

The . link between Rodchenko and the cinema was strong. His posters for 'Battleship Potemkin' are direct, challenging and vivid. Tne Productivists redesigned type faces paring away serif. frills to get the simplicity and directness they wanted.

1926 Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and in the years, that followed art was forced to serve the needs of Stalin.

Rodchenko's photographs continued to develop, taken from sharp distorting angles or many full face prints to express the variety and reality of the sitter.

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