David Elliott (ed.): Alexander Rodchenko (1979)

The first English-language monograph on the constructivist and productivist artist and designer Alexander Rodchenko.

With essays by Alexander Lavrentiev, John Milner, Andrei Nakov, Szymon Bojko, Gail Harrison, Galina Chichagova, Zakhar Bykov, Hubertus Gassner, and historical writings by Rodchenko, Osip Brik, and Varvara Stepanova.

Published to coincide with the first retrospective exhibition of Rodchenko’s work shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 10 Feb 79 to 25 Mar 79; Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 11 May 79 to 17 Jun 79; Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal, 26 Jul 79 to 2 Sep 79.

Edited and with an Introduction by David Elliott
Designed by David King
Publisher Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1979
ISBN 0905836138, 9780905836133
136 pages
via Bint Bint

WorldCat

PDF (10 MB)

Patrizia C. McBride: The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany (2016)

“The Chatter of the Visible examines the paradoxical narrative features of the photo montage aesthetics of artists associated with Dada, Constructivism, and the New Objectivity. While montage strategies have commonly been associated with the purposeful interruption of and challenge to narrative consistency and continuity, McBride offers an historicized reappraisal of 1920s and 1930s German photo montage work to show that its peculiar mimicry was less a rejection of narrative and more an extension or permutation of it—a means for thinking in narrative textures exceeding constraints imposed by “flat” print media (especially the novel and other literary genres).

McBride’s contribution to the conversation around Weimar-era montage is in her situation of the form of the work as a discursive practice in its own right, which affords humans a new way to negotiate temporality; as a particular mode of thinking that productively relates the particular to the universal; or as a culturally specific form of cognition.”

Publisher University of Michigan Press, 2016
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0
ISBN 9780472053032, 0472053035
x+236 pages

Publisher
OAPEN
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (94 MB)

Konstantin Akinsha: The Second Life of Soviet Photomontage, 1935-1980s (2012)

“This dissertation explores the development of Soviet photomontage from the second half of the 1930s to the end of the 1970s. Until now, the transformation of the modernist medium and its incorporation into the everyday practice of Soviet visual propaganda during and after the Second World War has not attracted much scholarly attention. The firm association of photomontage with the Russian avant-garde in general, and with Constructivism in particular, has led art historians to disregard the fact that the medium was practised in the USSR until the final days of the Soviet system. The conservative government organisations in control of propaganda preserved satirical photomontage in its post-Dadaist phase and Heartfield-like form, finding it useful in the production of negative propaganda.”

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation
University of Edinburgh, 2012
328 pages + 368 pages of illustrations

Publisher
Author

PDF (29 MB)