Throughout the 1920s, Rodchenko's work was very abstract. Rodchenko joined the October Group of artists in 1928 but was expelled three years later, charged with "formalism", an accusation first raised in the pages of Sovetskoe Foto in 1928. In the 1930s, with the changing Party guidelines governing artistic practice in favour of Socialist realism, he concentrated on sports photography and images of parades and other choreographed movements. He returned to painting in the late 1930s, stopped photographing in 1942, and produced abstract expressionist works in the 1940s. He continued to organize photography exhibitions for the government during these years. He died in Moscow in 1956.