How Gino Sarfatti made a Rodchenko avant garde lamp

Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) was one of the leading figures of the Russian Avant Garde. He was a painter, sculptor, designer and photographer, and as a central exponent of Russian Constructivism saw art as a practice serving social purposes. He set a new standard for design and advertising in the USSR. His photography was socially engaged, stylistically innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Rodchenko’s experimentation embodied the spirit of the early days of the Soviet era.

Just after the October Revolution in 1917, people of all sorts, anarchists, intellectuals, workers, Bolsheviks and soldiers, began meeting to share their ideas. These gatherings would eventually find a fixed location in the Café Pittoresque in Moscow.

The main architects of the Café were Georgy Yakulov, Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko, who at the time were emerging artists. Rodchenko designed the lamps and made large-scale working drawings from Yakulov’s rough sketches.

In the standard work on Rodchenko by Selim O. Khan-Magomedov some wonderful examples of his designs are presented. Furthermore, we found some even more abstract images on Russian website Alyonshin.

These sketches were very similar to the abstract compositions that had first appeared in his paintings. According to Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, “One can see that they were executed by a painter accustomed to working on flat surfaces. What is missing, in fact, is the space-volume relationship of a real object.” He also noted: “The lamps are designed in such a way that they are at one and the same time lampshade, reflector and decorative element.”

And indeed, if you compare another sketch (in colour this time!) with one of his early paintings you clearly see the similarities.

You would think that it would be rather complicated to build an actual product based on these drawings alone. But fortunately Rodchenko made more than just paper sketches, some of the concepts were actually prototyped. And fifty years after Rodchenko concentrated on designing lamps, in 1971, Germano Celant, a famous Italian art historian, critic and curator, encouraged Gino Sarfatti, the owner of Arteluce and a gifted designer, to realise lamps based on (sketches of) the prototypes. Gino Sarfatti liked the idea and decided to create two lamps in the style of the Russian Avant Garde: No. 576 & No. 577.

No. 577 was composed of four opaline frosted acrylic glass elements, suspended by four thin iron cords.

This lamp came about due to the participation of the Soviet Union in an international exhibition of industrial and applied arts in Paris in 1925. Rodchenko was represented by a set of model furnishings for a worker’s club. Many of these objects were moveable or could be rotated or modified easily and thus allowed to change the organisation of the space.

Today a reconstruction of the Workers’ Club is presented in the new Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. There, you can see first hand how Rodchenko created an interior on the principle of transformation.

In 1929 the playwright Anatolii Glebov invited Rodchenko to design modular furniture for his new play Inga. The aim of the play was to contrast the old model of bourgeois life with the new work, living and recreation of the young working class. Rodchenko created various collapsible elements that were not only suitable on stage, but could actually be used in apartments.

One of his designs was an elegant table lamp that was used in the second act of the play and as you can see it formed the inspiration for Gino Sarfatti to construct Arteluce No. 576. So Rodchenko produced sketches and lamps in Russia, and half a century later Sarfatti, an Italian, made lamps based on Rodchenko’s sketches, and based on the actual lamps he made for the play and the Workers’ Club. The Arteluce lamps are collaboration through time and across space, between two inspirational designers who never met.

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