Alexander Rodchenko was a pivotal figure in the Constructivist art movement, which arose in Russia following the revolution of 1917 and expanded in the Soviet Union, formed in 1922. These artists sought to develop a new practice of artistic creation that would complement the emerging socialist society and perhaps even contribute directly to economic production. One of their overriding goals was to find an exit route from the preceding tradition of bourgeois art, with its emphasis on individual expression and aesthetic contemplation. By contrast, Rodchenko and his counterparts cast themselves as artist-laborers who worked in a kind of artistic laboratory for industrial science. In this drawing, however, the arrangement of shapes seems more arbitrary than analytical: there is a free and even whimsical quality to the work, suggesting that the need for scientific exactitude in service of the revolution had not yet expunged the impulse toward lyrical expression.