Redko Kliment

Suprematism. To the construction of light sound oil on cardboard, 1923

Redko Kliment Nikolaevich (1897-1956) – Soviet artist, representative of the picturesque avant-garde of the 1920s – early 1930s.

At the time of apprenticeship K.N. Radko received extremely conflicting skills: first there was an icon-painting school at the Kisvo-Pechersk Lavra (1910), then lessons from A. A. Rylov at the Drawing School at the OPKh (1914-15), then a class of V.V. Kandinsky in Moscow Vkhutemas ( 1920-22).

Equally controversial are the artist’s early pictorial experiences – in the 1920s. realistic portraits and landscapes coexist with symbolism and “cosmism” (“Number of births”, “Rebellion”, “Midnight sun”), a general view of Suprematism – with its own versions of constructivism. The latter trend is the strongest: being carried away by the theories of combining science and art, Redko develops the doctrine of the “electroorganism” (later “Svenism”), realizing it in a series of works (“Dynamite”, “Speed”, “Focus Dynamics”, all 1920s ), close to Italian futurism.

With similar works, he participates in the “First Discussion Exhibition of Associations of Active Revolutionary Art” (1924) as a member of the Method group; the fascination with the machine world, on the other hand, brings it closer to the artists of the OCT. At this point of his creative development, he seeks from the patronage of A.V. Lunacharsky a trip to France (1927).

He rarely stayed in France until 1935. There, he departed from constructivism and became a master of portraits and landscapes made in the spirit of the Paris Salon, combining realism with decorative shapes and brilliance of performance with semantic divergence (“Motherhood”, 1928; “Nina. Girl with a scythe “, 1929;” Parisian “, 1931). These things were successful – the artist held four solo exhibitions. But upon arriving in the USSR, Redko shared the fate of many “returnees”: creative lack of demand, work at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (1938–39), expulsion from the Union of Soviet Artists (1948). The last years of his life (1950–55), he directed the art studio at the Moscow Agricultural Academy. To A. Timiryazev.

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