VARVARA RODCHENKO GOUACHE, 1969

Varvara Rodchenko. “IX.” Gouache on paper (or card), 11 ¼” x 8” (sheet, sight), signed (Rodchenko, in Cyrillic) and dated (“1969” or perhaps “1961”), upper right; matted, 7/8”-wide black-painted wood frame glazed with glass, framed dimensions 16 5/8” x 13 3/8”, the frame back securely wired for hanging the picture. Unexamined out of the frame. Varvara Rodchenko, 1925 - 2019. 

Varvara Alexandrovna Rodchenko (1925 – 2019) began painting in 1943, initially to the tenets of her father (still life, for example), and subsequently following her parents’ example, designing, after graduating from the Moscow Graphic Institute, books, posters and journals. The artist favored photomontage and photograms, the latter sometimes produced from natural elements (grass, flowers, leaves) collected in the summer at her family’s dacha. Rodchenko perpetuated her parents’ idealism, stating for a 1989 exhibition, “I would like to have a constant stream of people coming here [the workshop established by Varvara Stepanova and Aleksandr Rodchenko]. People who are carried away by art, students, young people and people who see, for the first time, the history of our art from the first years of the Revolution” (The Rodchenko Family Workshop; Glasgow and Strathclyde: New Beginnings, and London: The Serpentine Gallery).