Mounting and dismounting. About the series of illustrations by Yuri Rozhkov for the poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky “To the Workers of Kursk Who mined the First Ore”

Abstract

In 1924 the artist Yuri Rozhkov created a series of illustrations for Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem To the workers of Kursk who mined the first ore, dedicated to the discovery of iron ore in the area of the Kursk magnetic anomaly. Rozhkov’s illustrations, made using the technique of photomontage, are among the earliest examples of turning to such technique, which played a key role in the development of avant-garde art in the 1920s. However, they did not become widely known, unlike, for example, the works of Klutsis and especially Rodchenko, whose photomontages for Mayakovsky’s poem About That (1923) served as the source and prototype of Rozhkov’s photomontages. But Workers of Kursk is an original and and yet characteristic of its time work, in which the key ideas of the Soviet avant-garde were embodied. The main one is a polemic against the restoration tendencies, expressed in support of traditional types and genres of art, in particular the sculptural monument. Rozhkov, following Mayakovsky, contrasts it with the idea of a “temporary monument”, not separated from the process of socialist construction. The idea corresponds to the image of a split, kaleidoscopic world, in creating which the artist uses some principles of the early avant-garde, including the technique of “words in freedom” by Marinetti. Unlike Rodchenko, he includes the full text of the poem in his illustrations, thereby blurring the boundaries between word and image.