Non-objective art, the audioguide helpfully explains, is 'an impersonal kind of abstract art with no recognised subject, story or emotion'; and non-objective artists, declared Rodchenko, 'are the only innovators of this earth, who play with inventiveness like jugglers play with balls.' I decide I am prepared to be educated and entertained by abstract inventiveness - or, indeed, inventive abstraction - and find myself drawn to a dark canvas.
Rodchenko's 'Black on Black' appears to have foreshadowed Rothko's 'black-form' paintings half a century later. Margarita Tupitsyn, the curator of the exhibition, comes on the audioguide to explain how it 'emphasise [sic] colour black as a complex colour, rather than just a mechanical colour'. The audioguide goes on to talk of 'textures appearing within the blacks' although, thankfully, it doesn't go so far as to describe the painting as 'luminous' (that solecism was reserved by the Tate for one of Rothko's black-on-black paintings in a previous exhibition).
I suppose the whole idea of submitting single-colour canvasses (or, indeed, a blank canvas) was clever before it became clichéd. Rodchenko's triptych, 'Pure Red Colour, Pure Yellow Colour, Pure Blue Colour', is a case in point. Three blocks of primary colour, which he displayed at the 5 x 5 = 25 exhibition in Moscow in 1921 under the bold assertion: 'I reduced painting to its logical conclusion. [...] It is over. Basic colours. Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation.'
As with all pronouncements of the kind (the end of art, the end of history, the end of boom and bust), it proved to be wide of the mark. Fashion is a fickle mistress, and the Constructivist movement would subsequently be deemed subversive and disbanded, to be replaced by a Socialist realism which - in a final ironic twist - would usher a return to the 'bourgeois' representational art which the Constructivists so maligned.
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