four-year pensioner’s trip
Avant-garde and socialist realism
Avant-gardism, developed in the literature by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov, since the 1910s has also spread powerfully in Russian painting. Back in the 1910s avant-gardism in Russia was fond of Kazimir Malevich (who created the style of suprematism), Vasily Kandinsky, Vladimir Tatlin. The heyday of the Russian avant-garde came in 1914–1922. What was the avant-garde? Combining abstractionism, constructivism, cubism, suprematism and some other postmodernist movements in painting, he abandoned realism, while retaining an emphasis on the form of objects as such. Thus, Malevich’s Suprematism appeared in the 1910s as a writing style in the form of combinations of multi-colored planes and the simplest geometric outlines. Continue reading
Socialist realism
Social realism as a way of perceiving reality and labor in an embellished form appeared in the USSR in the 1930s and was intended to replace the “bourgeois” art, which then belonged to everything that does not sing the “man of action.” Being ridiculed by Mikhail Bulgakov in The Master and Margarita, such an approach ordered the artist to relate to his art “according to workdays”: how many blessings he received, so much text he had to pass. In the same way as in the writers’ union (invented by Bulgakov MASSOLIT) “if you have a trip for a week, then the writer must pass the story, for two weeks – the story, and only for three weeks in the“ Swallow Nest ”in Crimea – and the whole novel can be” .
In alliance with the revolution?
Such unions, punishing and testing the activities of people of liberal professions were introduced in all areas. Thus, in the early 1930s, the People’s Commissar Lunacharsky devoted a series of articles in the Izvestia newspaper to new realism as a style in which writers and artists should strive to work. Continue reading
Artist Konstantin Andreevich Somov, Soviet painting
Konstantin Somov is one of the representatives of Russian symbolism. The development of the artist’s style was largely influenced by his studies at the Paris-based Colorassi studio (1897–1899); it was then that he mastered the lessons of modern and French rococo. The scenes of his canvases resemble gallant balls and masquerades, which were characteristic of the bygone XVIII century. Modernity in his works is mystically connected with the previous epoch, the genre scenes of his canvases are reminiscences of the last century, his characters vaguely resemble puppet Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard, but unlike their predecessors, the artist endows those depicted more mystical ghostly than elegant elegance. V.A. Lenyashin rightly noted that the sources of Somov “beyond the borders of the past days” are much deeper, more blunt: Botticelli, Watteau, Hoffmann.
The ghostly transparent eroticism, without which Somov did not think of art, then permeates the irreversibly spicy pages of the Book of the Marquise, appears about (like the Casanova doll) in the naively challenging and mechanically outspoken image of Columbine. Continue reading
