Arts & Entertainment, Art
"Bathing a red horse." Petrov-Vodkin: description of the pictures. Painting "Bathing the Red Horse"
A truly unique personality was the famous Russian artist Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin. Pictures, stories, memoirs, new techniques in painting, the fruits of the rich pedagogical activity he left us in the inheritance. His fate was formed with the same kaleidoscopy, with which the genius of his works appeared to the world.
The Legacy of the Master
The most famous paintings of the artist - "Portrait of Anna Akhmatova", "1918 in Petrograd", "Bathing the Red Horse", "The Death of the Commissioner", "A. S. Pushkin in St. Petersburg "," Violin "," Youth "," The thirsting warrior "," The Fisherman's Daughter "," The Morning Still Life "," The Beach ". This, of course, is not the whole list of paintings by the artist. Petrov-Vodkin created paintings in all known genres - portraits, still lifes, landscapes, embodied everyday, historical and allegorical subjects. Each of his works breathes an original perception of the world and spiritual independence.
The Origins of Creative Individuality
Among the contemporaries who created "on the turn" two centuries - two very different epochs, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin differs in a special handwriting and admirable artistic audacity. The description of the paintings created by the master, is not without mentioning the innovative principles and techniques born in the manner of the artist, strangely enough, from the partial study of the painting of distant antiquity.
The first shocking shock for the artist, almost still a boy, were the Novgorod icons, which he saw in the house of the acquaintances of the Old Believers. It happened at a time when the family lived in Khvalynsk - a cozy, drowning city in the green on the Volga. These impressions were joined by joyful fairy-tale pictures that Andrei Kondratych, a neighbor and friend of the family, drew in the presence of Kuzma. The boy himself tried to draw, surprising with skilful sketches of his parents. In the environment in which Petrov-Vodkin was born and grew, the paintings were not considered a great value, and the artist's work was perceived as something like pampering. A native of the shoemaker's family and maid, Kuzma Sergeevich often mentioned that when drawing, he felt like a bohemian barchuk. Did his family at that time think that the name of their son would go down in the annals of history and adorn the collections of famous museums, such as the famous Tretyakov Gallery, whose paintings the entire civilized world knows!
Finding Your Own Way
In those years, when the fate of the artist did not look through the way prepared for the boy from the lower layers of society, providence persistently pushed the young man to master the art of painting. After graduating from the secondary urban school, Kuzma began to work in ship repair shops and was preparing to enter the railway school. In the autumn he went to Samara, the exam could not stand it, and then he gave himself completely to his hobby. Interrupting by chance work, Kuzma decided to learn drawing in Painting Classes of Fedor Burov. It was a useful experience, but he did not give any substantial knowledge. The students were mostly engaged in academic theory and never once took up nature. After the death of the teacher Petrov-Vodkin tried to get a job as an icon painter. Together with his classmates he organized an artel of lavers. However, neither of these enterprises was successful. This did not diminish the young man's determination to draw. From Samara he spent the summer in his native Khvalynsk.
Fateful meeting
Luck came from the other side: the lady, the sister of the hostess, came from St. Petersburg to the house where the mother of the artist was in the service of the gentlemen, with the intention of building a dacha in Khvalynsk. To this end, the court architect was invited, who was amazed at Kuzma's drawings. He offered to arrange a young man to study in the capital. In the same year Petrov-Vodkin entered the Central School of Technical Drawing of Baron Stieglitz, who produced masters of applied art from his walls. Here, diligence and accuracy were valued, painting was practically not taught. A keen and interested disciple, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, could reach great heights in the craft, but his talent attracted him further - the young man lacked juicy and free paints of painting. If he remained within the framework of the craft, we would never see either his masterpiece "Bathing the Red Horse" or other expressive paintings.
Greedy interest in science and art
A new page in the life of a beginning artist is the transition to the Moscow School of Painting, in which the idols of youth - Valentin Serov, Isaak Levitan, Konstantin Korovin, Martiros Saryan - began to teach. After the provincial Khvalynsk and Academic Petersburg Petrov-Vodkin plunges headlong into the democratic and vibrant life of Moscow. He longs to embrace everything, to know the laws of the universe. The artist learns to play the violin, learns the basics of physics and chemistry, writes stories and plays.
A journey that turned the mind
At the beginning of the new century, the young man was seized by the desire to go round the world. He sits on a bicycle with a route in his head: "Warsaw-Munich-Italy". Kuzma only managed to get to Germany. Here the young man enters the school of Anton Ashbe, highly valued by Russian artists. New places, way of life, works of art gave the young draftsman a lot of fruitful impressions. All this was original and happy in the painting of Petrov-Vodkin.
In Italy, the artist was almost five years later. He passionately dreamed of seeing Vesuvius. Strong elements captivated his imagination. Having risen to the shaking and breathing fire vent, the young artist Petrov-Vodkin experienced the sensations, which, according to his testimony, forever changed his understanding of life and art, shocked his creative consciousness.
Painting "Bathing the Red Horse"
This artist created the canvas in 1912, when he was about 34 years old. According to the researchers, the idea of the painting originated with the artist after his student Sergey Kalmykov wrote red horses in the framework of his academic work. There is an opinion that the first version of the painting "Bathing the Red Horse" (it was not preserved) was created in the estate of a familiar general, where the artist and his wife were invited by the hospitable hosts. The prototype of the animal in the central part of the canvas was a real horse named Boy. Later, in St. Petersburg, Petrov-Vodkin re-painted the painting. Sergey Kalmykov inspired the master as a model for the main character. In the face of a slender young man, sitting on horseback, the traits of the artist's pupil are guessed.
Symbols of the Silver Age
The theme of bathing horses, for the most part with nude nature, was extremely popular in the early twentieth century painting. Among the compatriots of swimming horses and people wrote Arkady Plastov, Peter Konchalovsky, Valentin Serov and other painters. Impetuating the indomitable energy, valor and enchanting grace, the stallion with the rider sitting on it represented the power of the elements, guided by the power of spirit and mind. The naked athletic-muscular body of the boy, which we see in the painting "Bathing the Red Horse", is also in the mainstream of artistic predilections of the beginning of the last century. The hymn to plasticity and sophistication of the well-built male body sounded not only in the works of talented painters, but also in Diaghilev's ballet performances that had thundered all over the world.
"There are no such horses"
This was the main reproach that Petrov-Vodkin heard about him. "Bathing the red horse," the work that caused as much controversy as the admiring responses, is clearly inspired by the early impressions that the artist received once in the icon painting workshop. A symbolic scarlet horse is present in the Old Russian icon, for example, in the depiction of the archangel Michael of the saints Boris and Gleb, etc. In the picture of Petrov-Vodkin this color is also allegorical. It personifies will and swiftness, uncompromising and thirsty for a new one, to which prerevolutionary Russia was so eager. In iconography, red color symbolizes a crowned and effective force, our compatriots living a hundred years ago gave the same awakened and ready to change country with the same force.
Artistic features of the canvas
On the canvas in front of the viewer is a magnificent picture in the spherical perspective, fascinating round lines. According to the artist, this image of the perspective most accurately conveys the ideological pathos of the role of Man in the universe. In the foreground is a red horse with a confident and graceful sitting rider. In the middle part of the canvas - in the water - the figures of a white horse, pulled by the bridle its dismounted rider, and a light scarlet stallion with a rider, we see it from the back. The entire group, including the central boy on horseback, creates a movement of the circle, underlined by the slow cycle of the lake water. The background of the picture is a beach, also made with rounded regular lines.
Strength of paints
Remarkably combines and contrasts in the painting color. Petrov-Vodkin appears here as a great connoisseur of the exquisite color range. "Bathing a red horse" - a sample of how the semantic solution of the picture is expressed in the language of color. The cool blue-green tones of the lake reflecting the smoothness of the sky, along which the smooth circles disperse with flexible streams, and also the semicircular strip of the pink shore with the green interspersed bushes become an ideal background for the bright scarlet stallion and the swarthy, almost golden boy, representing the compositional and content center of the painting .
What the Madonna tells about
Another no less colorful and symbolic work of the master was the canvas created in 1920 "1918 in Petrograd", nicknamed "Petrograd Madonna". This canvas also complements the paintings of the Tretyakov Gallery (the photo is located below).
Why did the commissar die
Petrov-Vodkin's works are owned not only by the Moscow Tretyakov Gallery, paintings of the painter are represented in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. There, in particular, the canvas "The Death of the Commissioner", created in 1928, is on display. His theme - the death of a red commander in the fields of civil war - develops a specific historical plot and becomes a timeless symbol of the sacrifice in the name of a high idea. This picture once again presents the author primarily a philosopher, seeking to embrace and connect the manifestations of the material and non-material world in the artistic space.
The canvases of the artist are also exhibited in the Voloshin house-museum in Koktebel, in the Saratov Art Museum. Radishchev. An extensive catalog of almost 900 master works is available in the museum of the artist in his homeland in Khvalynsk.
Similar articles
Trending Now