Boris Ignatovich - Stories in a Building designed by Le Corbusier, Moscow, 1933

Boris Ignatovich - Stories in a Building designed by Le Corbusier, Moscow, 1933

(Modernism - Designing a New World - 1919 - 1939,
exhibition at Corcoran Gallery of Art)

Boris Ignatovich was a Constructivist artist, one of the pioneers of Soviet photo. He was great in using tilted aerial perspectives and extreme foreshortening (Philip Brookman, Paul Greenhalgh, Sarah Newman: Essential Modernism, published by Corcoran).

Like most of the Constructivists, Ignatovich was an enthusiast Communist and depicted the radical changes that took place after the Bolshevic Revolution.

Only his photographs were witnessing such a huge talent, with their unexpected angles, their choices for framing, the view they offer, that he began to be considered too non-conformist, too far from the orthodoxy of the Socialist Realism; he was even expelled for a period from the Communist Party.



















Though most of his photographs are devoted to the urban, industrial and agricultural landscape of the Soviet Union, there are some works of him of pure artistry. Bath dates from 1935 and is famous, for good reasons. It finds the Surreal in the banality of everyday!

But look at Motherhood, it gives us the fundamental, as only great Russian art can give.




(Suprematism and Constructivism)