"Bathing the Red Horse". Petrov-Vodkin: description of paintings. The painting "Bathing the red horse"

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

A truly unique personality was the famous Russian artist Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin. Pictures, stories, memoirs, new techniques in painting, the fruits of a rich pedagogical activity, he left us as a legacy. His fate evolved with the same kaleidoscopicity with which his brilliant works appeared to the world.

Master's Legacy

The most famous paintings of the artist are “Portrait of Anna Akhmatova”, “1918 in Petrograd”, “Bathing of the Red Horse”, “Death of the Commissar”, “A. S. Pushkin in St. Petersburg", "Violin", "Youth", "Thirsty Warrior", "Fisherman's Daughter", "Morning Still Life", "Coast". 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 with an original perception of the world and spiritual independence.

The origins of creative individuality

Among contemporaries who worked "at the turn" of two centuries - two eras that were strikingly different from each other,Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin is distinguished by a special handwriting and delightful artistic audacity. The description of the paintings created by the master is not complete without mentioning the innovative principles and techniques that were born in the artist's manner, oddly enough, from a biased study of painting of distant antiquity.

The first stunning shock for the artist, who was almost still a boy, was the Novgorod icons that he saw in the house of old believers he knew. It happened at the time when the family lived in Khvalynsk, a cozy, verdant city on the Volga. These impressions were joined by joyful fairy-tale pictures, which were painted in the presence of Kuzma by a neighbor and family friend Andrei Kondratych. The boy himself tried to draw, surprising his parents with skillful sketches. In the environment in which Petrov-Vodkin was born and grew up, paintings were not considered of great value, and the work of an artist was perceived as something of a prank. Coming from a family of a shoemaker and a maid, Kuzma Sergeevich mentioned more than once that, while drawing, he felt like a kind of bohemian barchuk. Did his relatives think at that time that the name of their offspring would go down in the annals of history and adorn the collections of famous museums, such as the famous Tretyakov Gallery, whose paintings are known to the whole civilized world!

Finding your own path

In those years when the fate of the artist did not look through the path prepared for the boy from the lower strata of society, providence persistently pushed the young man to mastery of painting. After graduating from the secondary city school, Kuzma began working in ship repair shops.workshops and was preparing to enter the railway school. In the fall, he left for Samara, did not pass the exam, and then completely devoted himself to his hobby. Surviving by odd jobs, Kuzma decided to study drawing at the Painting Classes of Fyodor Burov. It was a useful experience, but he did not give significant knowledge. The students were mostly engaged in academic theory and never once took up nature. After the death of his teacher, Petrov-Vodkin tried to get a job as an icon painter. Together with classmates, he organized an artel of signers. However, neither of these ventures was successful. This did not detract from the young man's determination to draw. From Samara, he moved to his native Khvalynsk for the summer.

Fateful meeting

Luck came from the other side: in the house where the artist's mother was in the service of the masters, a lady, the mistress's sister, came from St. Petersburg, with the intention of building a dacha in Khvalynsk. For this purpose, the court architect was invited, who was struck by 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, which produced masters of applied art from its walls. Perseverance and accuracy were valued here, while painting was practically not taught. The diligent and interested student Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin could have reached great heights in the craft, but his talent attracted him further - the young man lacked the rich and free colors of painting. If he had stayed within the framework of the craft, we would never have seen himthe masterpiece "Bathing the Red Horse", nor other expressive paintings.

Greedy interest in science and art

A new page in the life of an aspiring artist - the transition to the Moscow School of Painting, in which the idols of youth then began teaching - Valentin Serov, Isaac Levitan, Konstantin Korovin, Martiros Saryan. After provincial Khvalynsk and academic St. Petersburg, Petrov-Vodkin plunges headlong into the democratic and vibrant life of Moscow. He passionately wants to embrace everything, to know the laws of the universe. The artist learns to play the violin, comprehends the basics of physics and chemistry, writes stories and plays.

A mind-bending journey

At the beginning of the new century, a young man was seized by the desire to travel around the world. He gets on the bike with the route in his head: Warsaw-Munich-Italy. Kuzma managed to get only 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 is peculiarly and happily refracted in the painting of Petrov-Vodkin.

The artist came to Italy almost five years later. He passionately dreamed of seeing Vesuvius. Strong elements captivated his imagination. Rising to the shaking and breathing fire vent, the young artist Petrov-Vodkin experienced sensations that, according to him, forever changed his understanding of life and art, shook his creative mind.

The painting "Bathing the Red Horse"

This painting was created by the artist in 1912, when he was about 34 years old. According to researchers, the idea for the painting came from the artist after his student Sergei Kalmykov painted red horses as part of his academic work. There is an opinion that the first version of the painting “Bathing a Red Horse” (it has not been preserved) was created on the estate of an acquaintance of the general, where the hospitable hosts invited the artist and his wife. The prototype of the animal in the central part of the canvas was a real horse named Boy. Later, in St. Petersburg, Petrov-Vodkin repainted the picture. Sergey Kalmykov inspired the master as a model for the main character. The face of a slender young man sitting on a horse bears the features of an artist's apprentice.

Symbols of the Silver Age

The theme of bathing horses, mostly nude, was extremely popular in early twentieth century painting. Among compatriots bathing horses and people Arkady Plastov, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Valentin Serov and other painters wrote. Personifying indomitable energy, valor and enchanting grace, the stallion with the rider seated on it represented the power of the elements, guided by the power of the spirit and mind. The naked athletic-muscular body of the boy, which we see in the painting “Bathing the Red Horse”, is also in line with the artistic preferences of the beginning of the last century. A hymn to plasticity and sophistication to a well-built male body sounded not only in the works of talented painters, but also in Diaghilev's ballet performances that thundered all over the world.

There are no such horseshappens

This was the main reproach that Petrov-Vodkin heard addressed to him. "Bathing the Red Horse", a work that caused as much controversy as admiring responses, is clearly inspired by early impressions that the artist once received in an icon-painting workshop. The symbolic scarlet horse is present in the ancient Russian icon, for example, in the image of the Archangel Michael, Saints Boris and Gleb, etc. In the painting by Petrov-Vodkin, this color is also allegorical. He personifies the will and swiftness, uncompromisingness and thirst for something new, for which pre-revolutionary Russia was so eager. In icon painting, the red color symbolizes crowned and active power, the same power was endowed by our compatriots who lived a hundred years ago to the awakened and ready for change country.

Artistic features of the canvas

A magnificent picture unfolds in front of the viewer on the canvas in a spherical perspective, bewitching with rounded lines. According to the artist, such an 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 confidently and gracefully seated rider. In the middle part of the canvas - in the water - there are figures of a white horse, which is pulled by the bridle by its dismounted rider, and a light scarlet stallion with a rider, we see him from the back. This entire group, including the central boy on horseback, creates a whirling movement emphasized by the slow cycling of lake water. The background of the picture represents the coast, also made with rounded regular lines.

Strengthcolors

Wonderfully blends and contrasts the color in the picture. Petrov-Vodkin appears here as a great connoisseur of exquisite color palette. "Bathing the Red Horse" is an example of how the semantic solution of the picture is expressed in the language of color. The cool blue-green tones of the lake surface reflecting the sky, along which flowing circles diverge in flexible jets, as well as a semicircular strip of the pink coast with green patches of bushes become an ideal background for a bright scarlet stallion and a swarthy, almost golden boy, which are the compositional and meaningful center of the picture.

What the Madonna is talking about

Another no less colorful and symbolic work of the master was the canvas “1918 in Petrograd”, created in 1920, nicknamed the “Petrograd Madonna”. This canvas also complements the paintings of the Tretyakov Gallery (photo below).

The picture strikes with drama and gentle touching harmony. The features of the young Bolshevik, carefully holding her baby in her arms, are filled with serene peace and femininity in a world engulfed in cardinal changes. Everything is in rapid motion, but eternal motherly love and beauty are inescapable.

Why did the commissar die

The works of Petrov-Vodkin are owned not only by the Moscow Tretyakov Gallery, the paintings of the painter are presented in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. There, in particular, the canvas “Death of the Commissar”, created in 1928, is exhibited. Its theme is the death of the red commander in the fieldscivil war - outgrows a specific historical plot and becomes a timeless symbol of sacrifice in the name of a lofty idea. This picture once again represents the author, first of all, as a philosopher, striving to embrace and connect the manifestations of the material and non-material world in the artistic space.

The artist's canvases are also exhibited in the Voloshin House Museum in Koktebel, in the Saratov Art Museum. Radishchev. An extensive catalog of almost 900 works by the master is available in the artist's museum in his homeland in Khvalynsk.