Abstract: "Blue Rose" and "Jack of Diamonds". Society of painters of the early twentieth century

"BLUE ROSE" AND "JACK OF DIAMONDS"

"Blue Rose"

the largest art education after the "World of Art" and the "Union of Russian Artists" came the "Blue Rose". Under this name, in 1907, an exhibition was held in Moscow that brought together a group of young artists, recent students of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture - followers of Borisov-Musatov. Although this exhibition was the only one, it revealed the commonality of the initial creative principles and visual techniques of the masters represented by her, who formed special direction in Russian painting. The Blue Rose exhibition itself marked only a passing moment in their creative evolution, but the moment is significant. It was a time of confusion that engulfed a significant part of Russian society in an atmosphere of reaction after the defeat of the revolution, a time that was reflected in art by the vagueness of goals. Heightened sensitivity to shades, nuances of vague moods gave rise to unsteady, elusive images, attracted artists to search for refined and refined color relationships, subtle decorative and ornamental melodic rhythm, and complex effects of matte-shimmering pictorial texture.

A characteristic example of this kind of painting is the "Blue Fountain" (1905) - an early painting by one of the leading masters of the direction P.V. Kuznetsov (1878-1968). The further evolution of this artist is typical for most of the Blue Rose masters. It consisted in overcoming hypertrophied psychologism, in an effort to return to the original simplicity of sensations of reality. It was not, however, a way of abandoning the former picturesque system, and her logical development and improvement. So there is a series of paintings dedicated to the Trans-Volga and Central Asian steppes. The contemplation of the vast expanses, the observation of the measured and calm life of nomadic tribes brought with it liberation from the power of vague moods, turned the artist from the eternally elusive to the eternally existing.

Mirage in the Steppe (1912) is one of the most perfect works of this cycle. High sky, calm lines of the horizon, soft outlines of tents freely scattered in space, fused with the ground and repeating the outlines of the heavenly dome, simple and rhythmic movements of people shearing sheep, preparing food, sleeping - all this is due to the surprisingly subtle rhyme, consonance of color, shapes and contours is formed into a poetically integral picture of the world, over which time has no power. Before us is a primitive patriarchal idyll, a "golden age", a dream of harmony between man and nature, which has come true.

The painting of these canvases is based on the subtle nuances of the colorful surface, which has acquired richness and sonority. color tone, before foggy and hazy. Flexible living contours seem to be seen through the transparent swell of air heated by the sun. Thanks to this, objects remain on the canvas as if in a suspended state, spiritualize, acquire a kind of magical weightlessness. It seems that the whole image is permeated with a single living rhythm, like a quiet wave of lyrical delight, transforming the picture of reality into a kind of "paradise vision". Fine soulful lyrics of painting are combined with the solemn rhythm of the compositions, balanced and symmetrical.

The oriental theme organically enters the work of another member of the Blue Rose, who studied at the Moscow School together with Kuznetsov - M.S. Saryan (1880-1972). The picturesque method of Saryan receives a perfected form in the 10s of the XX century. under the impression of trips to Turkey, Iran and Egypt. The artist does not write off from nature everything that the eye sees, but is looking for a holistic pictorial image, a colorful formula. Just like Kuznetsov, the expressiveness of his paintings is based on a color spot and an ornamental and decorative organization of the image on a plane. Such works by Saryan as "Street. Noon.

Constantinople" (1910), "Walking Woman" (1911), "Date Palm" (1911), are distinguished by what could be called the dynamism of vision. This is not a long contemplation, but a quick fixation of the main colorful relationships in sharply contrasting comparisons.

If Kuznetsov's painting is like a lyrical outpouring, then Saryan's painting is a colorful aphorism about what he saw. Saryan prefers intense, bright, definitely directional light, concealing shades of color and revealing contrasts, sharply marking the boundaries of light and dark. In this respect, his painting is reminiscent of color graphics, sometimes, as, for example, in "The Walking Woman", it reveals a resemblance to the application.

Reality on the canvases of Saryan appears condensed into colorful hyperbole, reaching the heights of pathetic sound. His palm tree, placed in the center of the canvas, proudly raising its leaves above the squalid dwellings, which resemble a violent colorful fountain, beating up and out with force from the trunk, seems to be the personification of the elemental power of nature, truly the "tree of life". So in his own way, through the specific activation of the pictorial form, Saryan comes to the condensation of the ordinary-real to the eternal poetic symbols.

As a direction of Russian painting at the beginning of the 20th century. "Blue Rose" is closest to the poetics of symbolism. The basis of this closeness is the fundamental attitude to the transformation of images of reality in order to exclude the possibility of a literal perception of things and phenomena, awakening in them unusual, high connections and meanings.

IN fine arts this translates into an addiction to all kinds of transformations in the field of visual perception - to sharp perspective reductions and unexpected angles, modifying the shape of objects, to reflections in water, on glass, in mirrors, to light-air vibration that dissolves contours, etc.

At that time, the theater became the sphere of the most effective not only visual, but universal transformation of reality. It was he who turned out to be the soil where the painting of the "Blue Rose" and symbolism met directly. The most interesting version of this dialogue between painting and symbolism in the theater is the work of N.N. Sapunova (1880-1912).

Together with another master of the "Blue Rose" - S.Yu. Sudeikin (1882-1946), he became the first designer in Russia symbolic dramas M. Maeterlinck (at the Studio Theater of the Moscow Art Theater on Povarskaya, 1905). This is where Sapunov's collaboration with Vs. Meyerhold - in productions of "Hedda Gabler" by Ibsen, Blok's "Balaganchik".

On the other hand, the "magic of the theater", which makes one experience the artificial, fictional and fantastic, as genuine and alive, is transferred by Sapunov to easel painting. So there is a whole group of works written "about" the corresponding theatrical productions.

A romantic artist, closed in a world created by the whims of the imagination, begins to take the creations of his own fantasy for reality. There is a transformation of the symbolic "magic world" into a "booth" - these are the "thesis" and "antithesis" of symbolism, noted by Blok in 1910, and even earlier, in 1906, which became the theme of the lyrical drama "Balaganchik", staged by Sapunov . It was from the moment of working on this performance in the work of Sapunov that elements of fair buffoonery, popular stylization and grotesque are constantly present. These tendencies reach their apogee in the unfinished painting The Tea Party (1912)

"Jack of Diamonds"

The turn of 1910-1911 marked by the appearance on the arena of artistic life of a new group under the defiant name "Jack of Diamonds". The permanent core of the society, which actually existed until 1916, was made up of the artists P. Konchalovsky, I. Mashkov, A. Lentulov, A. Kuprin, R. Falk, who later became prominent masters Soviet art. "Jack of Diamonds", which had its charter, exhibitions, collections of articles, was a new influential trend in Russian art at the beginning of the 20th century.

Impressionism in all its modifications was at the same time the starting point artistic development, and that creative method, in overcoming which the artists of the "Jack of Diamonds" saw their primary task. From the very beginning, they act as fierce opponents of the previous art - the stylism of the "World of Art", the refined psychologism of the painting of the "Blue Rose" are rejected from the threshold. The dissatisfaction of young artists with the state of affairs in contemporary art was based on social motives - the crisis of tsarism in Russia, which manifested itself with particular force during the revolution of 1905-1907, and the years of reaction that followed (1907 - 1910). This dissatisfaction with the "twilight" era was expressed in the rejection of everything vague, mysterious, unsaid in art.

In contrast to the symbolic painting of the "Blue Rose", the artists of the "Jack of Diamonds" sought to most radically express the movement from focusing on subjective vague sensations to gaining stability visual image, the full sound of color, to the constructive logic of picture construction. The affirmation of the object and objectivity, as opposed to spatiality, constitutes the initial principle of their art.

In this regard, it is the painting of objects - the still life - that is put forward in the first place. The polemical tasks of painting "The Jack of Diamonds" found a particularly vivid embodiment in the work of one of the founders of the group, I.I. Mashkov (1881 - 1944). His "Blue Plums" (1910) can be considered a kind of slogan of this direction. The image of fruits, laid in a static decorative composition, seemed to freeze halfway from the raw substance of the colors of the palette to the real color of nature. The artist likens his work to the work of a craftsman who makes things. IN this case that thing is the painting itself. The artist brings painting closer to folk art with its inherent sense of the source material.

In the nakedness of the very process of creating a pictorial thing and in the pathetic elation of a colorful sound, Mashkov, as it were, formulates the initial principle folk art: a combination of two sides of folk life - work and holiday.

Just as declaratively as in Mashkov's Blue Plums, P.P. Konchalovsky (1876-1956) in "Portrait of G. Yakulov" (1910). The artist introduces a still-life, reification principle into the traditional area of ​​domination of psychological tasks. He eliminates all that pertains to the transient internal state of a person, emphasizing everything that makes up the most stable, bright, in the proper sense of the word picturesque signs of an individual external appearance. Here we are dealing with a specific system of simplifications inherent in folk print, toy, signboard. It is no coincidence that critics sometimes defined the painting style of the "Jack of Diamonds" as a whole as "the style of a signboard." The same criticism has repeatedly noted the direct connection of the new generation of Moscow painters with contemporary French painting, which goes back to Cezanne in its origins. However, Cezanne's painting was perceived by the "Jack of Diamonds" through the decorative version of Cezanneism presented by the Fauvists, especially Matisse.

The cult of decorativism, which reigned at first among the artists of the "Jack of Diamonds", diverged from Cezanne's painting in one very significant point: in the weakening of the sculptural sense of form. The impression of the materiality of the object, which the artists tried to achieve in their first works, arose not due to the sculptural-volumetric construction of the form, but due to the massiveness of the texture, while the space looked decoratively flattened and often amorphous because of this. In overcoming this shortcoming, cubism played a certain role - a trend in painting that found theoretical motivation for its experiments in the recommendation given once by Cezanne to produce mental analysis complex shapes by bringing them closer to the basic geometric configurations - a cube, a cone and a ball. Similar techniques were used by the masters of the Jack of Diamonds. Thus, Konchalovsky's "Agave" (1916) is a variant of assimilation of the experience of cubism, bypassing the extremes of the schematic splitting of form. The artist saw in cubism a way of analyzing spatial relationships. The space of the picture is conceived as a kind of object, objects depicted crystallize out of it with an effort, the form of which seems to break, deform, with an effort conquering the necessary living environment for itself. Things are actively introduced into the space surrounding them, as if overcoming its resistance. Hence the impression of drama. Things, as it were, stand guard over their won place, they are not easily given into hands, they seem hostile to a person, alienated from him.

The genre of still life itself becomes capable of conveying new content, consonant with modernity, with its contradictions and a sense of impending upheavals. In the painting of the "Jack of Diamonds" still life was returned to the value of high art.

Along with cubism important component The pictorial style of the "Jack of Diamonds" from the mid-10s becomes futurism - another movement of painting that arose in Italy in the same years. Proclaiming the industrial rhythms of the era of the scientific and technological revolution as the true language of the future, it required the introduction of these rhythms into the very structure artwork. One of his techniques is the "mounting" of objects or parts of objects, taken as if in different time and from different vantage points. The movement of the subject, i.e. the viewer is transferred to the object, which is endowed with spontaneous dynamics, the ability to bizarre modifications of form. This effect, combined with the cubic "shift" of forms and the stratification of spatial plans, we see in the decorative panel paintings by A.V. Lentulov (1882-1943) "Vasily the Blessed" (1913) and "Ringing" (1915).

The surface of the image is conceived here as a semblance of a rattling and split powerful sound wave a mirror that reflects the colorful Moscow architecture. In relation to Russian artists to the techniques of modern Western European art there was a certain amount of irony. With Lentulov, it had an effect, for example, in transferring the techniques of futurism, intended to express the rhythms of the industrial era, to a completely different object in its essence - the old patriarchal architecture. From this paradoxical combination of modern pictorial language with the images of Moscow antiquity, an unexpectedly bright artistic effect arises - ancient architecture, as if excited by the invasion of industrial rhythms, involved in the orbit of perception of modern man, who feels himself and everything around him in constant motion.

The works of another representative of the "Jack of Diamonds" R.R. Falk (1886 - 1958) is characterized neither by the decorative scope of Lentulov's canvases, nor by the brutal brilliance and materiality of Mashkov's painting. A lyricist with a creative temperament, Falk avoids intentional coarsening of form, strives for a fine elaboration of the pictorial surface, achieves exquisite colorful harmonies. Permeated with an atmosphere of spiritual concentration and silence, Falk's painting is distinguished by a kind of psychologism, endowed with the ability to reproduce subtle shades of mood. It is no coincidence that therefore among his works significant place occupies a portrait. One of the best pictures pre-revolutionary works of Falk - "At the piano. Portrait of E.S. Potekhina-Falk" (1917). Close in style to Falk's painting are the works of A. Kuprin and V. Rozhdestvensky - the artists of the Jack of Diamonds, who worked mainly in the still life genre.

A kind of permanent rebellion characterizes the work of one of the organizers of the "Jack of Diamonds" M.F. Larionov (1881 - 1964). Already in 1911, he broke with this group and became the organizer of new exhibitions under the shocking names "Donkey's Tail", "Target". In the work of Larionov, the primitivist tendency of the art of the "Jack of Diamonds" found its most consistent development, associated with the assimilation by professional art of the style of signs, popular prints, folk toys, children's drawing. In contrast to most artists of the 10s, Larionov consistently defends the rights genre painting, without abandoning the narrative story in the picture, But life in Larionov's genres is a special, "primitive" life of provincial streets, cafes, hairdressers, soldiers' barracks.

One of the most typical works Larionov - painting "Resting soldier" (1911). The grotesque, exaggerated characterization of the pose of a healthy fellow with a blush on his cheek is undoubtedly inspired by the naivete of a child's drawing. At the same time, the large scale of the image and the skillfully conveyed duration of the lazy reclining in front of the viewer turn the picture into a subtly parodied formal portrait. But at the same time - not a shadow of ridicule. The attitude of the artist to the model looks like a "love irony". If the artists of the "Jack of Diamonds", especially in the initial period of creativity, preferred a bright palette, strong color contrasts, then Larionov, as a rule, turns to prosaic and rough, dull and colorless objects, cultivating shades of similar colors, achieving exquisite silvery and harmonious coloring. Close to the works of this artist were the canvases of Larionov's constant companion and like-minded person in his quest N.S. Goncharova (1881 - 1962). In the painting "Washing the Canvas" (1910), the figures of two women against the background of a popularly "painted" rural landscape, squat, with heavy feet, are painted with that naively touching sympathy for the depicted, which distinguishes children's drawings, especially when a child reproduces well-known, familiar objects and situations. Here we are no longer dealing with an aesthetic-playful stylization of common life, as, for example, by Kustodiev, but with an attempt through the art of the primitive to find a way out of the labyrinths of modern psychologism and speculation, to find the lost sources of a naive-holistic view of the world.

In a slightly different form, the same tendency appears in the art of M.3. Chagall (1887-1985). Chagall's extraordinarily close thoroughness in reproducing the most prosaic details of the situation of provincial shtetl life, transformed by the radiant iridescent colors of a spicy, lush palette, is combined in Chagall with fabulous motifs fantastic flights, heavenly signs, etc. All this is akin to the vagaries of romantic fiction, whimsically mixing the sublime and the base, reminiscent of Gogol's romantic stories.

The pre-revolutionary work of the most original of painters, P.N., comes into contact with the primitivist line in Russian art. Filonov (1883-1941). Modern primitivism is understood by him only as a means of "modeling" in painting a certain integral picture of the world, a type of worldview that gives an idea of ​​the pracultural myths of mankind in modern visual experience. For an artist of the 20th century, this was a way to recall what constitutes the reverse side of machine civilization, what it pushed to the periphery of public attention, namely, about the natural-generic in man, about that “part” of man, by which he is fused with nature, with its dark, unyielding, inert, mysterious nocturnal forces, "contact" with which forms the essential content of labor, especially peasant, life. Thus, in Filonov's "Korovniki" (1914), everything is clung to each other, as if in a chaotic disorder. The complicated syntax of the pictorial phrase invites the viewer to search for meaning and consistency in combinations of objective forms and figures, following the path of guessing, recalling that ring in the bundle of human memory where the key to the cipher of this picture could be located. But the direction of these searches is set by the picture itself, leading to the realm of primitive natural myths.

The usual ratio of upper and lower is inverted here: toy houses are perceived as visible at a distance from above, so that the figures of animals and cowsheds "hang" in the dark skies above the world and are outlined in zoomorphic and anthropomorphic forms with the paradoxical, angular-accurate approximation with which they are outlined. zodiac figures in a kaleidoscope of constellations in the night sky. A purely earthly scene is shown as a mythical pre-history created in heaven, but this heavenly is at the same time something densely primitive, reminiscent of the original involvement of man in the animal world, of those times and of that state of consciousness when the supreme deity of heaven appeared in the image "heavenly cow", and pastoral labor was a ritual sacred action, "heavenly service". This is life as it looks from the dark depths of ancestral memory. "To humanize the impersonal" - with this Blok formula one can define the method and at the same time the theme of Filonov's art, recreating in the "hieroglyphic" form familiar to Russian art, the path, process, stages of this incarnation of the impersonal-natural into the human-spiritual.

The specific metaphorical nature of pictorial language, symbolic in its origin, bifurcates the perception of visible forms and qualities of the objective world between direct and figurative meanings. So "dark" in Filonov's pre-revolutionary paintings is both night and metaphysical "darkness", prehistoric "darkness"; primitively squat figures are both massive and ethereal; light and color are merged into a single quality of light color, reminiscent of the stained glass effect; the figures are as much reminiscent of primitive idols as they are of medieval "chimeras". Many qualities of Filonov's visual system, as well as the very way of creating a "new attitude to reality by revising a series of forgotten worldviews," have their closest prototype in Vrubel's art.

The tendency of artists of the 10s to experiment, to decompose a holistic artistic impression into the sum of elementary influences for the sake of familiarizing with the primary foundations artistic expressiveness led to the allocation of this area of ​​form creation in an independent sphere of art. In 1913 Larionov published his book Luchism, which was one of the first manifestos of abstract art. However, the real leaders - theorists and practitioners of abstractionism in Russia were V.V. Kandinsky (1866-1944) and K.S. Malevich (1878-1935).

Since its inception abstract painting develops in two directions: for Kandinsky it is a spontaneous, irrational play of color spots, for Malevich it is the appearance of mathematically verified, rational-geometric constructions. Abstractionism claimed to be inside artistic practice as if embodied by the theory of fundamental principles of painting in general. The tasks of painting were reduced to the study of possible combinations of primary elements - lines, colors, shapes.

If the abstractionism of Malevich and Kandinsky initially develops exclusively within the limits of easel painting, then in the work of V.E. Tatlin (1885-1953), another element of painting, texture, becomes the object of an abstract experiment. The tactile qualities that belong in painting to one material - paint, Tatlin turns into combinations of textures various materials- tin, wood, glass, transforming the picture plane into a kind of sculptural relief. In the so-called counter-reliefs of Tatlin, the "heroes" are not real objects, but abstract categories of texture - rough, fragile, viscous, soft, sparkling - entering into complex relationships with each other without the mediation of any specific pictorial plot.

In architecture, we are faced with the ability of art to express without depicting, bypassing the imitation of the "facts of life". The properties of the pictorial surface as an architectonic field contain expressive possibilities, not data, but given to the image, just as the laws of gravity are given to the movement of bodies or the rhythm, size, order of rhymes are given to a verse. The study of these possibilities was the experiment that was carried out abstract art. On this path to the ancestral foundations of artistic influence, hidden in the structure of human memory, the art of the 20th century inevitably had to meet with artistic worlds, where the sought-for laws of expressiveness had once already been implemented in the fullness of the principle. The new gave a hand to the well-forgotten old - and almost all the masters of the so-called avant-garde in the art of the 20th century went through such contact.

Among them, an outstanding place belongs to K - S. Petrov-Vodkin (1878 - 1939). The long path of the creative development of this master, rich in complex searches, culminates in the creation in 1912 of the painting Bathing the Red Horse. This work is significant not only for its internal content, but also for the fact that many sharp questions art of the early 20th century. It itself sounds like a call and a question, and above all because the sharpness and expressiveness of the form, recreating, transforming the images of reality, to which the art of the 20th century so painfully aspired, was achieved here through mastering the lessons of ancient Russian painting. Directly declaring a continuity with icon painting, this work makes us recall at the same time Serov's The Abduction of Europe, under whom Petrov-Vodkin studied at the Moscow School. The image of a rider on a horse, turning the thought to folklore representations, in the languid unresolved frozen movement, gives rise to a question. Festive jubilation of color and sleepy bewitching rhythm of lines, a powerful horse and a teenage boy, frozen in an obscure thought, limply lowering the reins, surrendering to the power of a force that leads him to no one knows where, a memory of the past and a vague presentiment of the future - such a combination of opposite elements is symbolic in its inner structure. Because of this, it was perceived by contemporaries as a symbol of the moment being experienced.

Even more consistently Petrov-Vodkin refers to the images ancient Russian art in such works as "Mother", "Girls on the Volga" (1915), "Morning. Bathers" (1917). Here you can hear the echoes of icon-painting images - in the fixed ™ movements, in the self-immersion of the characters, in the contemplation that the heroines of these paintings are imbued with. In the work of Petrov-Vodkin, the importance of eternal images and themes: sleep and awakening, age stages of life - adolescence, youth, motherhood, the cycle of life between birth and death - such is the range of these topics. In the interpretation of this kind of themes, every new era expresses its ideal ideas about the place of man in the cosmic whole. In the artistic world, they play the role of philosophical universals, rising above the variability of fluid reality. Accordingly, in visual system Petrov-Vodkin, all qualities of the world subject to observation tend to their limiting, absolute states: color tends to be spectrally pure, freed from atmospheric fluctuations, light has the character of an astral "eternal radiance", the horizon line reproduces the curvature of the planetary surface of the earth according to the principle of the so-called spherical a perspective that transforms everything that happens in the intra-picture space into the rank of phenomena on a cosmic scale. in diversity modern forms of artistic generalization, Petrov-Vodkin singles out those that have a specific historical and artistic address - the ancient Russian icon and fresco, as well as the Italian quattrocento, i.e. precisely those phenomena on the scale of the national and European artistic tradition that directly approach the threshold of later differentiation and analytical fragmentation, but where art world and the very image of the world in art was still conceived and presented as a kind of integrity that gave the means of artistic expression the stamp of its monumental greatness. The contemplation of the world as a whole in the sense of the universal connection of times and phenomena - this is what Petrov-Vodkin longs to express and revive in contemporary art. Programmatically appealing to the associative ability of artistic memory, he seems to call for guessing what shape and image they have. modern world and its inherent artistic sense in proportion to nature and history in the space of world cultural experience.

At the same time, they are dictated by the need for a sufficiently objective scientific approach and comprehensive insight into the problems of each museum; 6) allows not only to single out the SSC, but to constantly conduct an examination (reassessment) of values cultural heritage Russia. CHAPTER 2. RUSSIAN STATE MUSEUM Reference: RUSSIAN MUSEUM State, founded. 13/4/1895 by decree of the imp. Nicholas II as "...

Rus', the process of Europeanization of Russian spiritual culture begins, which does not end even by the time of the 1917 revolution. Plekhanov turned out to be right in this assessment. The events of the period of Russian revolutions of the 20th century brought Russian culture into completely new conditions of historical existence, paradoxically combining features of both the West and the East. 4. Culture during the years of the first Russian revolution Features ...

Somewhere in the corner, like Andreevsky Gogol. Perhaps, it can be said that the most acute in the history of the city has always been experienced not the right to give birth to something new, even if it is completely unusual for Moscow, but the threat or reality of the destruction of the old. Oddly enough, but right now, when everything is open to criticism, there has been a marked decrease in criticism of Novy Arbat, which, with the label of "Moscow false teeth" ...

Association of Russian Artists (1903-1923). Was created Wanderers and members "World of Art" united in 1901 at the "Exhibition of 36 Artists". For the creativity of the main core of S. r. X. characterized by an interest in native nature and original features of Russian folk life, the decorativeness of the pictorial manner, sometimes the gravitation towards impressionism. The Union organized 18 exhibitions in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, Kazan. Over the years it included A. Arkhipov, A. Vasnetsov, K. Korovin, S. Malyutin, A. Rylov, L. Turzhansky, K. Yuon, A. Benois, M. Dobuzhinsky, K. Somov and others. The union collapsed in 1923 due to internal contradictions.

UNION ST. LUKY-cm. Nazarenes.

"UNION OF RUSSIANS ARTISTS.

One of the largest exhibition associations of the early XX century. became the Union of Russian Artists. The initiative for its creation belonged to Moscow painters - participants in the exhibitions of the "World of Art", who were dissatisfied with the limited aesthetic program and the stylistic orientation of the "world of artificers" - Petersburgers. The establishment of the "Union" dates back to 1903. Vrubel, Borisov-Musatov, Serov were the participants of its first exhibitions. Until 1910, all the major masters of the former World of Art were members of the Union. And yet the face of the "Union" was determined mainly by the painters of the Moscow school, who opposed themselves to the graphic stylism of the Petersburgers. Many of the indigenous members of the Union were at the same time Wanderers. WITH latest artists The "Union" was united mainly by upholding the rights of national themes in art, as opposed to the programmatic Westernism of the "World of Art". The core of the "Union" were graduates of the Moscow School, who developed the traditions of Levitan's lyrical landscape. It was in the bowels of the "Union" that the Russian version of pictorial impressionism was formed, combining the immediacy and freshness of the perception of nature with the loving poeticization of the images of peasant Russia.

In the landscapes and still lifes of I. E. Grabar (1871 - 1960), the poetry of Russian nature is revealed as a special kind of color harmony in unexpected colorful revelations. The painting “February Blue” (1904) is, in the words of the artist himself, “a holiday of the azure sky, pearl birches, coral branches and sapphire shadows on lilac snow.” The same intensity of experience is read in the painting "March Snow" painted in the same year. The painting itself, its porous, loosened texture, seems to imitate the surface of melting March snow, and the rhythm of the vibrating strokes resembles a stream spring waters. In these landscapes by Grabar, for the first time in Russian painting, we encounter the method of divisionism, which consists in decomposing visible color into spectrally pure colors of the palette.

In the painting of the "allies" a new understanding of the theme was defined. Among the Wanderers, the theme is the general social meaning of the event, revealed by means pictorial story. But already in the landscapes of Levitan, we are dealing with lyrical theme, i.e. with certain state| soul, finding its likeness and reflection in the state of nature. In the paintings of the Soyuz artists, the theme becomes a pictorial phenomenon, a special play and combination of colors caught in nature, forming an original coloristic effect. This is something that could be combined with the concept of "picturesque theme". In cases where a work goes beyond what is directly seen in nature, artists are looking for precisely the pictorial and plastic equivalent of this theme.

Thus, the theme of folk festive fun in the painting “Whirlwind” (1906) by F. A. Malyavin (1869-1940) is translated into a grandiose vision of a colorful whirlwind that swept the surface of the canvas with a powerful stream of bright color spots. Open-sounding red dominates, interspersed with deep blues and dark - green. Peasant calicos scattered in a violent round dance fold into a bizarre decorative pattern, in which the plastically sculpted faces of laughing girls stand out. The red cloths of sarafans are like a flame of fire fluttering and growing in gusts of wind. The furious and formidable fun of the Malyavinsky "Whirlwind", striking with unprecedented courage, a riot of brush, seemed to contemporaries the personification of the very elements of peasant rebellion.

K. F. Yuon (1875-1958) stood out among the artists of the "Union" with the originality of his creative appearance. His paintings are an original fusion of the everyday genre with the architectural landscape. Depicting the colorful panoramas of old Moscow and ancient Russian cities, the artist seems to encrust them with scenes of ordinary street life.

Admiring the exoticism of antiquity in the guise of Russian cities makes Yuon related to the “world-artists”. All the more clearly appear in the art of this master features specific to the Moscow school of painting. In contrast to frank fantasizing, the composition of the "world of art" paintings, Yuon is dominated by direct natural impressions.

The national Russian flavor that the Soyuz artists were looking for was associated primarily with the colors and images of winter and early spring. One of the best landscapes Yuona - " March sun"is just dedicated to the development of this favorite, starting with Levitan's "March", motive.

In addition to the richness of shades of mood, long appreciated by landscape painters-lyricists, these motifs of winter and especially spring nature are endless color variations. difficult game light, as it were, encouraged and justified the tendency of Moscow artists to juicy, improvisational-free painting.

The overwhelming majority of the artists of the "Union" continued the Savrasov-Levntanov line of the Russian landscape. The tradition of the compositional and decorative landscape of Kuindzhi was presented at the exhibitions of the "Union" by the works of A. A. Rylov 0870-1939). The leitmotif of Rylov's painting "Green Noise" (1904) is a whiff fresh wind, carrying thunderclouds, merrily fluttering branches of birches, inflating sails. The very name of the picture, as well as its image as a whole, seems to lead beyond the limits of landscape perception proper to the moods of the pre-revolutionary time. Exciting expectation of future changes, both joyful and disturbing, is the inner theme of this work.

However, this type of composed landscape, associated with a certain symbolic and literary program, is not characteristic of the Union of Russian Artists.

The art of the pre-revolutionary decade is distinguished by the ever-increasing complexity of artistic opposition, expressed in the abundance of groupings, mutually exclusive slogans and stylistic orientations.

"BLUE ROSE" - art association that existed in Moscow in 1907-10. (P. Kuznetsov, N. Krymov, N. Sapunov, M. Saryan, S. Sudeikin, G. Feofilaktov). It was created in opposition to the Petersburg "World of Art". Artists G. R." created their own type of slightly stylized (see. Stylization) under art XVIII V. paintings similar to panel or tapestries. Their work was also close to theatrical scenery.

The next major art formation after the "World of Art" and the "Union of Russian Artists" was the "Blue Rose". Under this name, in 1907, an exhibition was held in Moscow that brought together a group of young artists, recent students of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture - followers of Borisov-Musatov. Although this exhibition was the only one. she revealed the commonality of the initial creative principles and pictorial techniques of the masters she represented, who formed a special trend in Russian painting. The Blue Rose exhibition itself marked only a passing moment in their creative evolution, but a significant moment. It was a time of confusion that engulfed a significant part of Russian society in an atmosphere of reaction after the defeat of the revolution, a time that was reflected in art by the vagueness of goals. Heightened sensitivity to shades, nuances of vague moods gave rise to unsteady images. elusive, attracted artists to the nuances of refined and refined color relationships, subtle decorative and ornamental melodic rhythm, and complex effects of matt shimmering pictorial texture.

A characteristic image of this kind of painting is the "Blue Fountain" (1905) - an early canvas by one of the leading masters of the direction P. V. Kuznetsov (1Y78-1968). The further evolution of this artist is typical of most Blue Rose masters. It consisted in overcoming hypertrophied psychologism, in an effort to return to the original simplicity of sensations of reality. This was not, however, a way of abandoning the former pictorial system, but its logical development and improvement. So there is a series of paintings dedicated to the Trans-Volga and Central Asian steppes. The contemplation of the vast expanses, the observation of the measured calm life of nomadic tribes brought with it liberation from the power of vague moods, turned the artist from the eternally elusive to the eternally existing.

Mirage in the Steppe (1912) is one of the most perfect works of this cycle. The high sky, the slender lines of the horizon, the soft outlines of tents freely scattered in space, fused with the ground and repeating the outlines of the heavenly dome and the rhythmic movements of people shearing sheep, preparing food, sleeping - all this, thanks to the surprisingly subtle rhyming of forms and contours, is formed into a poetically integral picture. world over which time has no power. Before us is a primitive patriarchal idyll, a dream of harmony between man and nature, which has come true.

The painting of these canvases is based on the subtle nuances of the colorful surface, the diverse richness and sonority of the color tone, previously cloudy and hazy. Flexible living contours seem to be seen through the transparent expanse of air heated by the sun. Thanks to this, objects remain on the canvas as if in a suspended state, spiritualize, acquire a kind of magical weightlessness. It seems that the whole image is permeated with a single living rhythm, like a quiet wave of lyrical delight, transforming the picture of reality into a kind of "paradise vision". The subtle, penetrating lyrics of painting are combined with the solemn rhythm of compositions, balanced and symmetrical.

The oriental theme organically enters the work of another member of the Blue Rose, who studied at the Moscow School together with Kuznetsov, M. S. Saryan (1880-1972). The pictorial method of Saryan is looking for a holistic pictorial image, a colorful formula. Just like Kuznetsov, the expressiveness of his paintings is based on a color spot and an ornamental and decorative organization of the image on a plane. Saryan's works, like "Street Doldan. Constantinople (1910), Walking Woman (1911), Date Palm (1911), are distinguished by what might be called the dynamism of vision. This is not a long contemplation, but a quick fixation of the main color relationships in sharply contrasting comparisons.

If Kuznetsov's painting is like a lyrical outpouring, then Saryan's painting is a colorful aphorism about what he saw. Saryan prefers intense, bright, definitely directional light, concealing shades of color and revealing contrasts, sharply marking the boundaries of light and dark. In this respect, his painting is reminiscent of color graphics, sometimes, as, for example, in "A Walking Woman", it reveals a resemblance to an appliqué.

Reality on the canvases of Saryan appears condensed into colorful hyperbole, reaching the heights of pathetic sound. His palm tree, placed in the center of the canvas, proudly raising its leaves above the squalid dwellings, which resemble a violent colorful fountain, beating up and out with force from the trunk, seems to be the personification of the elemental power of nature, truly the "tree of life". Thus, in his own way, through a specific activation of the pictorial form, Saryan comes to the condensation of the ordinary-real to the eternal poetic symbols.

As a direction of Russian painting at the beginning of the 20th century. "Blue Rose" is closest to the poetics of symbolism. The basis of this closeness is the fundamental attitude to the transformation of images of reality in order to exclude | the possibility of a literal perception of things and phenomena, awakening in them unusual, high connections and meanings.

In the visual arts, this translates into a predilection for all kinds of transformations in the field of visual perception - for sharp perspective cuts and unexpected angles that change the shape of objects, for reflections in water, on glass, in mirrors, for light-and-air euphoria that dissolves contours,

At that time, the theater became the sphere of the most effective not only visual, but universal transformation of reality. It was he who turned out to be the soil where the painting of the "Blue Rose" and symbolism met directly. The most interesting version of this duet of painting with symbolism in the theater is the work of N. N. Sapunov (1880-1912).

Together with another master of the "Blue Rose" - S. Yu. Sudeikin (1882-1946), he became the first designer in Russia of the symbolic dramas of M. Maeterlinck (at the Moscow Art Theater Studio Theater on Povarskaya, 1905). From here, Sapunov's collaboration with Meyerhold began - in the productions of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Blok's Puppet Shows.

On the other hand, the "magic of the theater", which makes one experience the artificial, invented and fantastic, as genuine and alive, is transferred by Sapunov to easel painting. This is how a whole group of works written about the corresponding theatrical performances arises.

A romantic artist, closed in a world created by the whims of the imagination, begins to take the creations of his own fantasy for reality. There is a transformation of the symbolic "magic world" into a "booth" - such are the "thesis" and "antithesis" of symbolism, noted by Blok in 1910, and even earlier, in 1906, which became the theme of the lyrical drama "Balaganchik", staged by Sapunov . It was from the moment of working on this performance in the work of Sapunov that elements of fair buffoonery, popular stylization and grotesque are constantly present. These tendencies reach their apogee in the unfinished painting The Tea Party (1912).

"JACK OF DIAMONDS" - association of Moscow painters (P. Konchalovsky, I. Mashkov, A. Lentulov, R. Falk, A. Kuprin, Ya. Goncharova, M. Larionov, D. and V. Burlaki), leading the beginning of the exhibition of the same name (1910). The name is associated with an old French saying: "The jack of diamonds is a swindler and a rogue." The artists, as it were, teased and fooled the St. Petersburg public, opposing the strict, classical art capitals for its rough and bright creativity. They worked primarily in still life, landscape and portraiture, and were influenced to varying degrees by cezannism, cubism, Russian folk art (lubok, signs). They are characterized by a constructive composition, simplified forms, and colorfulness. In 1916 the society broke up.

"JACK OF DIAMONDS"

frontier 1910-1911 marked by the appearance on the arena of artistic life of a new group under the defiant name of "Jack of Diamonds". The permanent core of a society that actually existed until 1916 were composed by the artists P, Konchalovsky, I. Mashkov, A. Lentulov, A. Kuprin, R. Falk, who later became prominent masters of Soviet art. "Jack of Diamonds", which had its charter, exhibitions. collections of articles, was a new exciting trend in Russian art at the beginning of the 20th century.

Impressionism in all its modifications was at the same time the starting point of artistic development, and the creative method, in overcoming which the artists of the "Jack of Diamonds" saw their primary task. From the very beginning, they act as fierce opponents of the previous art - the stylism of the "World of Art", the refined psychologism of the painting of the "Blue Rose" are rejected from the threshold. At the heart of the dissatisfaction of young artists with the state of affairs in contemporary art were social motives - the crisis of tsarism in Russia, which manifested itself with particular force during the revolution of 1905-1907, and the years of reaction that followed (1907-1910). This dissatisfaction with the "twilight" era was expressed in the rejection of everything vague, mysterious, unsaid in art.

In contrast to the symbolic painting of The Blue Rose, the artists of the Jack of Diamonds sought to most radically express the movement from focusing on subjective vague sensations to gaining the stability of the visual image, the full sound of color, and the constructive logic of pictorial construction. The affirmation of the object and objectivity, as opposed to spatiality, constitutes the initial principle of their art.

In this regard, it is the painting of objects - the still life - that is put forward in the first place. The polemical tasks of painting "The Jack of Diamonds" found a particularly vivid embodiment in the work of one of the founders of the group, I. I. Mashkov (1881 - 1944). His "Blue Plums" (1910) can be considered a kind of slogan of this direction. The image of fruits, laid in a static decorative composition, seemed to freeze halfway from the raw substance of the colors of the palette to the real color of nature. The artist likens his work to the work of a craftsman who makes things. In this case, that thing is the painting itself. The artist brings painting closer to folk art with its inherent sense of the source material,

In the nakedness of the very process of creating a pictorial thing and in a pathetic | The elation of the colorful sound, as it were, formulates by Mashkov the initial principle of folk art: a combination of two sides of folk life - work and holiday.

Just as declarative as in Mashkov's "Blue Plums", the new approach to mastering nature, approved by the "Jack of Diamonds", is expressed by P. P. Konchalovsky (1876-1956) in "Portrait of G. Yakulov" (1910). The artist introduces a still-life, reification principle into the traditional area of ​​domination of psychological tasks. It eliminates everything that relates to the transient inner state of a person, emphasizing everything that makes up the most stable, bright, in the proper sense of the word picturesque signs of an individual external appearance. Here we are dealing with a specific system of simplifications, characteristic of popular popular prints, toys, signboards. It is no coincidence that critics sometimes defined the painting style of the "Jack of Diamonds" as a whole as "the style of a signboard." The same criticism has repeatedly noted the direct connection of the new generation of Moscow painters with contemporary French painting, which goes back to Cezanne in its origins. However, Cezanne's painting was perceived by the "Jack of Diamonds" through the decorative version of Cezanneism presented by the Fauvists, especially Matisse.

The cult of decorativeism, which at first reigned among the artists of the Jack of Diamonds, diverged from Cezanne's painting in one very significant point: in the weakening of the sculptural sense of form. The impression of the materiality of the object, which the artists tried to achieve in their first creations, arose not due to the sculptural and three-dimensional construction of the form, but due to the massiveness of the texture, while the space looked decoratively flattened and often amorphous because of this. | In overcoming this shortcoming, a certain role was played by cubism - a current of painting that found theoretical motivation for its experiments in the recommendation once given by Cezanne to make a mental analysis of complex forms by approaching them to the basic geometric configurations - a cube, a cone and a ball. Similar techniques were used by the masters of the Jack of Diamonds. Thus, Konchalovsky's "Agave" (1916) is a variant of the assimilation of the experience of cubism, which has the extremes of a schematic splitting of form. The artist saw in cubism a way of analyzing spatial relationships. The space of the picture is conceived as a kind of object, objects depicted crystallize out of it with an effort, the form of which seems to break, deform, with an effort conquering the necessary living environment for itself. Things are actively introduced into the space surrounding them, as if overcoming its resistance. Hence the impression of drama. Things, as it were, stand guard over their won place, they are not easily given into hands, they seem hostile to a person, alienated from him.

The still life genre becomes capable of conveying new content, consonant with modernity with its contradictions and a sense of impending upheavals. In the painting of the “Jack of Diamonds”, the still life was returned to the value of higher art.

Along with cubism, futurism has become an important component of the pictorial style of the Jack of Diamonds since the mid-10s - another art movement that arose in Italy in those same years. Proclaiming the industrial rhythms of the era of the scientific and technological revolution as the true language of the future, it required the introduction of these rhythms into the very structure of a work of art. One of his techniques is the "mounting" of objects or parts of objects "taken as if at different times and from different points of view. The movement of the subject, i.e. the viewer, is transferred to the object, which is endowed with spontaneous dynamics, the ability for bizarre form modifications. This effect, combined with a cubic “shift” of forms and a stratification of spatial plans, we see in the decorative panel paintings by A. V. Lentulov (1882-1943) “Basil the Blessed” (191.3) and “Ringing” (1915). The surface of the image is conceived here as a mirror rattling and split by a powerful sound wave, which reflects the colorful Moscow architecture. There was a certain amount of irony in the attitude of Russian artists towards the methods of modern Western European art. For Lentulov, it was reflected, for example, in the use of futurist techniques designed to express the rhythms of the industrial era, a completely different object in its essence - ancient patriarchal architecture. From this paradoxical combination of modern pictorial language with images of Moscow antiquity, an unexpectedly vivid artistic effect arises - ancient architecture, as if agitated by the invasion of industrial rhythms, involved in the orbit of perception of modern man, who feels himself and everything around him in constant motion.

The works of another representative of the "Jack of Diamonds" R. R. Falk (1886-1958) are not characterized by either the decorative scope of Lentulov's paintings, or the brutal brilliance and materiality of Mashkov's painting. A lyricist with a creative temperament, Falk avoids intentional coarsening of form, strives for a fine elaboration of the pictorial surface, achieves exquisite colorful harmonies. Permeated with an atmosphere of spiritual concentration and silence, Falk's painting is distinguished by a kind of psychologism, endowed with the ability to reproduce subtle shades of mood. It is no coincidence that a portrait occupies a significant place among his works. One of the best paintings of Falk's pre-revolutionary work is “At the piano. Portrait of E. S. Potekhina-Falk” (1917). Close in style to Falk's painting are the works of L. Kuprin and V. Rozhdestvensky - the artists of the Jack of Diamonds, who worked mainly in the still life genre.

A kind of permanent rebellion characterizes the work of one of the organizers of the "Jack of Diamonds" M. F. Larionov (1881 - 1964). Already in 1911, he broke with this group and became the organizer of new exhibitions under the shocking names "Donkey's Tail", "Target". In the work of Larionov, the primitivist tendency of the art of the "Jack of Diamonds" found its most consistent development, associated with the assimilation by professional art of the style of signboards, popular prints, and folk toys. children's drawing. In contrast to most artists of the 10s, Larnonov consistently defends the rights of genre painting, without abandoning the narrative story in the picture. But life in the genres of Larionov is a special, "primitive" life of provincial streets, cafes, hairdressers, soldiers' barracks.

One of Larionov's most typical works is the painting The Resting Soldier (1911). The grotesque, exaggerated characterization of the pose of a healthy fellow with a blush on his cheek is undoubtedly inspired by the naivete of a child's drawing. At the same time, the large scale of the image and the skillfully conveyed duration of the lazy reclining in front of the viewer turn the picture into a subtly parodied ceremonial portrait. But at the same time - not a shadow of ridicule. The attitude of the artist to the model looks like a "love irony". If the artists of the "Jack of Diamonds", especially in the initial period of creativity, preferred a bright palette, strong color contrasts, then Larionov, as a rule, turns to prosaic and rough, dull and non-colored objects, cultivating shades of similar colors, achieving exquisite silvery and harmonious coloring. . Close to the works of this artist were the canvases of Larionov's constant companion and like-minded person in his quest, N. S. Goncharova (1881 - 1962). In the painting “Washing the Canvas” (1910), the figures of two women against the backdrop of a popularly “painted” rural landscape, squat, with heavy feet, are painted with that naively touching sympathy for the depicted, which distinguishes children's drawings, especially when a child reproduces well-known, familiar objects and situations. Here we are no longer dealing with an aesthetic-playful stylization of common life, as, for example, by Kustodiev, but with an attempt through the art of the primitive to find a way out of the labyrinths of modern psychologism and speculation, to find the lost sources of a naive-holistic view of the world.

In a slightly different form, the same tendency appears in the art of M. Z. Chagall (1887-1985). Chagall’s unusually close thoroughness in reproducing the most prosaic details of the situation of provincial shtetl life, transformed by the radiant iridescent colors of a spicy, lush palette, is combined in Chagall with fabulous motifs of fantastic flights, heavenly signs, etc. All this is akin to the vagaries of romantic fiction. whimsically mixing the sublime and the base, evoking the memory of Gogol's romantic stories.

The tendency of the artists of the 10s to experiment, to decompose a holistic artistic impression into a sum of elementary influences for the sake of familiarizing themselves with the primary foundations of artistic expression, led to the separation of this area of ​​form creation into an independent sphere of art. In 1910 Larionov published his book, which was one of the first manifestos of abstract art. However, V. V. Kandinsky (1866-1944) and K. S. Malevich (1878-1935) became the true leaders - theorists and practitioners of abstractionism in Russia.

From the moment of its inception, abstract painting has been developing in two directions: for Kandinsky it is a spontaneous, irrational play of color spots, for Malevich it is the appearance of mathematical

constructions. Abstractionism claimed to be inside artistic practice as

would be an embodied theory of the fundamental principles of painting in general. The tasks of painting were reduced by them to the study of possible combinations of primary elements - lines, colors, shapes.

"BLUE ROSE" AND "JACK OF DIAMONDS"

"Blue Rose"

The largest art formation after the World of Art and the Union of Russian Artists was the Blue Rose. Under this name, in 1907, an exhibition was held in Moscow that brought together a group of young artists, recent students of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture - followers of Borisov-Musatov. Although this exhibition was the only one, it revealed the commonality of the initial creative principles and visual techniques of the masters it presented, which formed a special trend in Russian painting. The Blue Rose exhibition itself marked only a passing moment in their creative evolution, but a momentous one. It was a time of confusion that engulfed a significant part of Russian society in an atmosphere of reaction after the defeat of the revolution, a time that was reflected in art by the vagueness of goals. Heightened sensitivity to shades, nuances of vague moods gave rise to unsteady, elusive images, attracted artists to search for refined and refined color relationships, subtle decorative and ornamental melodic rhythm, and complex effects of matte-shimmering pictorial texture.

A characteristic example of this kind of painting is the "Blue Fountain" (1905) - an early painting by one of the leading masters of the direction P.V. Kuznetsov (1878-1968). The further evolution of this artist is typical for most of the Blue Rose masters. It consisted in overcoming hypertrophied psychologism, in an effort to return to the original simplicity of sensations of reality. This was not, however, a way of abandoning the former pictorial system, but its logical development and improvement. So there is a series of paintings dedicated to the Trans-Volga and Central Asian steppes. The contemplation of the vast expanses, the observation of the measured and calm life of nomadic tribes brought with it liberation from the power of vague moods, turned the artist from the eternally elusive to the eternally existing.

Mirage in the Steppe (1912) is one of the most perfect works of this cycle. High sky, calm lines of the horizon, soft outlines of tents freely scattered in space, fused with the ground and repeating the outlines of the heavenly dome, simple and rhythmic movements of people shearing sheep, preparing food, sleeping - all this is due to the surprisingly subtle rhyme, consonance of color, shapes and contours is formed into a poetically integral picture of the world, over which time has no power. Before us is a primitive patriarchal idyll, a "golden age", a dream of harmony between man and nature, which has come true.

The painting of these canvases is based on the subtle nuances of the colorful surface, which has acquired the richness and sonority of a color tone that was previously cloudy and hazy. Flexible living contours seem to be seen through the transparent swell of air heated by the sun. Thanks to this, objects remain on the canvas as if in a suspended state, spiritualize, acquire a kind of magical weightlessness. It seems that the whole image is permeated with a single living rhythm, like a quiet wave of lyrical delight, transforming the picture of reality into a kind of "paradise vision". Fine soulful lyrics of painting are combined with the solemn rhythm of the compositions, balanced and symmetrical.

The oriental theme organically enters the work of another member of the Blue Rose, who studied at the Moscow School together with Kuznetsov - M.S. Saryan (1880-1972). The picturesque method of Saryan receives a perfected form in the 10s of the XX century. under the impression of trips to Turkey, Iran and Egypt. The artist does not write off from nature everything that the eye sees, but is looking for a holistic pictorial image, a colorful formula. Just like Kuznetsov, the expressiveness of his paintings is based on a color spot and an ornamental and decorative organization of the image on a plane. Such works by Saryan as "Street. Noon.

Constantinople" (1910), "Walking Woman" (1911), "Date Palm" (1911), are distinguished by what could be called the dynamism of vision. This is not a long contemplation, but a quick fixation of the main colorful relationships in sharply contrasting comparisons.

If Kuznetsov's painting is like a lyrical outpouring, then Saryan's painting is a colorful aphorism about what he saw. Saryan prefers intense, bright, definitely directional light, concealing shades of color and revealing contrasts, sharply marking the boundaries of light and dark. In this respect, his painting is reminiscent of color graphics, sometimes, as, for example, in "The Walking Woman", it reveals a resemblance to the application.

Reality on the canvases of Saryan appears condensed into colorful hyperbole, reaching the heights of pathetic sound. His palm tree, placed in the center of the canvas, proudly raising its leaves above the squalid dwellings, which resemble a violent colorful fountain, beating up and out with force from the trunk, seems to be the personification of the elemental power of nature, truly the "tree of life". So in his own way, through the specific activation of the pictorial form, Saryan comes to the condensation of the ordinary-real to the eternal poetic symbols.

As a direction of Russian painting at the beginning of the 20th century. "Blue Rose" is closest to the poetics of symbolism. The basis of this closeness is the fundamental attitude to the transformation of images of reality in order to exclude the possibility of a literal perception of things and phenomena, awakening in them unusual, high connections and meanings.

In the visual arts, this translates into a predilection for all kinds of transformations in the field of visual perception - for sharp perspective reductions and unexpected angles that change the shape of objects, for reflections in water, on glass, in mirrors, for light-air vibration that dissolves contours, etc. .P.

At that time, the theater became the sphere of the most effective not only visual, but universal transformation of reality. It was he who turned out to be the soil where the painting of the "Blue Rose" and symbolism met directly. The most interesting version of this dialogue between painting and symbolism in the theater is the work of N.N. Sapunova (1880-1912).

Together with another master of the "Blue Rose" - S.Yu. Sudeikin (1882-1946), he became the first designer in Russia of the symbolic dramas of M. Maeterlinck (at the Moscow Art Theater Studio on Povarskaya, 1905). This is where Sapunov's collaboration with Vs. Meyerhold - in productions of "Hedda Gabler" by Ibsen, Blok's "Balaganchik".

On the other hand, the "magic of the theater", which makes one experience the artificial, fictional and fantastic, as genuine and alive, is transferred by Sapunov to easel painting. So there is a whole group of works written "about" the corresponding theatrical productions.

A romantic artist, closed in a world created by the whims of the imagination, begins to take the creations of his own fantasy for reality. There is a transformation of the symbolic "magic world" into a "booth" - these are the "thesis" and "antithesis" of symbolism, noted by Blok in 1910, and even earlier, in 1906, which became the theme of the lyrical drama "Balaganchik", staged by Sapunov . It was from the moment of working on this performance in the work of Sapunov that elements of fair buffoonery, popular stylization and grotesque are constantly present. These tendencies reach their apogee in the unfinished painting The Tea Party (1912)

"Jack of Diamonds"

The turn of 1910-1911 marked by the appearance on the arena of artistic life of a new group under the defiant name "Jack of Diamonds". The permanent core of the society, which actually existed until 1916, was made up of the artists P. Konchalovsky, I. Mashkov, A. Lentulov, A. Kuprin, R. Falk, who later became prominent masters of Soviet art. "Jack of Diamonds", which had its charter, exhibitions, collections of articles, was a new influential trend in Russian art at the beginning of the 20th century.

Impressionism in all its modifications was at the same time the starting point of artistic development, and that creative method, in overcoming which the artists of the "Jack of Diamonds" saw their primary task. From the very beginning, they act as fierce opponents of the previous art - the stylism of the "World of Art", the refined psychologism of the painting of the "Blue Rose" are rejected from the threshold. The dissatisfaction of young artists with the state of affairs in contemporary art was based on social motives - the crisis of tsarism in Russia, which manifested itself with particular force during the revolution of 1905-1907, and the years of reaction that followed (1907 - 1910). This dissatisfaction with the "twilight" era was expressed in the rejection of everything vague, mysterious, unsaid in art.

In contrast to the symbolic painting of the Blue Rose, the artists of the Jack of Diamonds sought to most radically express the movement from focusing on subjective vague sensations to gaining stability in the visual image, the full sound of color, and the constructive logic of pictorial construction. The affirmation of the object and objectivity, as opposed to spatiality, constitutes the initial principle of their art.

In this regard, it is the painting of objects - the still life - that is put forward in the first place. The polemical tasks of painting "The Jack of Diamonds" found a particularly vivid embodiment in the work of one of the founders of the group, I.I. Mashkov (1881 - 1944). His "Blue Plums" (1910) can be considered a kind of slogan of this direction. The image of fruits, laid in a static decorative composition, seemed to freeze halfway from the raw substance of the colors of the palette to the real color of nature. The artist likens his work to the work of a craftsman who makes things. In this case, that thing is the painting itself. The artist brings painting closer to folk art with its inherent sense of the source material.

In the nakedness of the very process of creating a painting and in the pathetic elation of a colorful sound, Mashkov, as it were, formulates the initial principle of folk art: a combination of two sides of folk life - work and holiday.

"BLUE ROSE" AND "JACK OF DIAMONDS"

"Blue Rose" The largest art formation after the World of Art and the Union of Russian Artists was the Blue Rose. Under this name, in 1907, an exhibition was held in Moscow that brought together a group of young artists, recent students of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture - followers of Borisov-Musatov. Although this exhibition was the only one, it revealed the commonality of the initial creative principles and visual techniques of the masters it presented, which formed a special trend in Russian painting. The Blue Rose exhibition itself marked only a passing moment in their creative evolution, but a momentous one. It was a time of confusion that engulfed a significant part of Russian society in an atmosphere of reaction after the defeat of the revolution, a time that was reflected in art by the vagueness of goals. Heightened sensitivity to shades, nuances of vague moods gave rise to unsteady, elusive images, attracted artists to search for refined and refined color relationships, subtle decorative and ornamental melodic rhythm, complex effects of a dull-shimmering pictorial texture. A typical example of this kind of painting is the "Blue Fountain" ( 1905) - an early painting by one of the leading masters of the direction P.V. Kuznetsov (1878-1968). The further evolution of this artist is typical for most of the Blue Rose masters. It consisted in overcoming hypertrophied psychologism, in an effort to return to the original simplicity of sensations of reality. This was not, however, a way of abandoning the former pictorial system, but its logical development and improvement. So there is a series of paintings dedicated to the Trans-Volga and Central Asian steppes. Contemplation of the vast expanses, observation of the measured and calm life of nomadic tribes brought with it liberation from the power of vague moods, turned the artist from the eternally elusive to the eternally existing. Mirage in the Steppe (1912) is one of the most perfect works of this cycle. High sky, calm lines of the horizon, soft outlines of tents freely scattered in space, fused with the ground and repeating the outlines of the heavenly dome, simple and rhythmic movements of people shearing sheep, preparing food, sleeping - all this is due to the surprisingly subtle rhyme, consonance of color, shapes and contours is formed into a poetically integral picture of the world, over which time has no power. Before us is a primitive patriarchal idyll, a "golden age", a dream of harmony between man and nature, which has come true. The painting of these canvases is based on the subtle nuances of the colorful surface, which has acquired richness and sonority of a color tone that was previously cloudy and hazy. Flexible living contours seem to be seen through the transparent swell of air heated by the sun. Thanks to this, objects remain on the canvas as if in a suspended state, spiritualize, acquire a kind of magical weightlessness. It seems that the whole image is permeated with a single living rhythm, like a quiet wave of lyrical delight, transforming the picture of reality into a kind of "paradise vision". The subtle penetrating lyrics of painting are combined with the solemn rhythm of the compositions, balanced and symmetrical. Saryan (1880-1972). The picturesque method of Saryan receives a perfected form in the 10s of the XX century. under the impression of trips to Turkey, Iran and Egypt. The artist does not write off from nature everything that the eye sees, but is looking for a holistic pictorial image, a colorful formula. Just like Kuznetsov, the expressiveness of his paintings is based on a color spot and an ornamental and decorative organization of the image on a plane. Such works of Saryan as "Street. Noon. Constantinople" (1910), "Walking Woman" (1911), "Date Palm" (1911) are distinguished by what could be called the dynamism of vision. This is not a long contemplation, but a quick fixation of the main colorful relationships in sharply contrasting comparisons. If Kuznetsov's painting is like a lyrical outpouring, then Saryan's painting is a colorful aphorism about what he saw. Saryan prefers intense, bright, definitely directional light, concealing shades of color and revealing contrasts, sharply marking the boundaries of light and dark. In this regard, his painting resembles color graphics, sometimes, as, for example, in "A Walking Woman", it reveals a resemblance to an appliqué. Reality on Saryan's canvases appears condensed into colorful hyperbolas, reaching the heights of pathetic sound. His palm tree, placed in the center of the canvas, proudly raising its leaves above the squalid dwellings, which resemble a violent colorful fountain, beating up and out with force from the trunk, seems to be the personification of the elemental power of nature, truly the "tree of life". So in his own way, through a specific activation of the pictorial form, Saryan comes to the condensation of the ordinary-real to the eternal poetic symbols. As a direction of Russian painting at the beginning of the 20th century. "Blue Rose" is closest to the poetics of symbolism. The basis of this closeness is the fundamental attitude to the transformation of images of reality in order to exclude the possibility of a literal perception of things and phenomena, awakening in them unusual, high connections and meanings. In the visual arts, this translates into a predilection for all kinds of transformations in the field of visual perception - for sharp perspective reductions and unexpected angles that change the shape of objects, for reflections in water, on glass, in mirrors, for light-air vibration that dissolves contours, etc. At that time, the theater became the sphere of the most effective, not only visual, but universal transformation of reality. It was he who turned out to be the soil where the painting of the "Blue Rose" and symbolism met directly. The most interesting version of this dialogue between painting and symbolism in the theater is the work of N.N. Sapunova (1880-1912). Together with another master of the "Blue Rose" - S.Yu. Sudeikin (1882-1946), he became the first designer in Russia of the symbolic dramas of M. Maeterlinck (at the Moscow Art Theater Studio on Povarskaya, 1905). This is where Sapunov's collaboration with Vs. Meyerhold - in productions of "Hedda Gabler" by Ibsen, Blok's "Balaganchik". On the other hand, the "magic of the theater", which makes one experience the artificial, fictional and fantastic, as genuine and alive, is transferred by Sapunov to easel painting. Thus, a whole group of works appeared, written "about" the corresponding theatrical productions. A romantic artist, closed in a world created by the whims of the imagination, begins to take the creations of his own fantasy for reality. There is a transformation of the symbolic "magic world" into a "booth" - these are the "thesis" and "antithesis" of symbolism, noted by Blok in 1910, and even earlier, in 1906, which became the theme of the lyrical drama "Balaganchik", staged by Sapunov . It was from the moment of working on this performance in the work of Sapunov that elements of fair buffoonery, popular stylization and grotesque are constantly present. These tendencies reach their apogee in the unfinished painting The Tea Party (1912) "Jack of Diamonds" The turn of 1910-1911 marked by the appearance on the arena of artistic life of a new group under the defiant name "Jack of Diamonds". The permanent core of the society, which actually existed until 1916, was made up of the artists P. Konchalovsky, I. Mashkov, A. Lentulov, A. Kuprin, R. Falk, who later became prominent masters of Soviet art. The "Jack of Diamonds", which had its charter, exhibitions, collections of articles, was a new influential trend in Russian art of the early 20th century. Impressionism in all its modifications was both the starting point of artistic development and the creative method in overcoming which the artists of the "Jack of Diamonds" "saw their first priority. From the very beginning, they act as fierce opponents of the previous art - the stylism of the "World of Art", the refined psychologism of the painting of the "Blue Rose" are rejected from the threshold. The dissatisfaction of young artists with the state of affairs in contemporary art was based on social motives - the crisis of tsarism in Russia, which manifested itself with particular force during the revolution of 1905-1907, and the years of reaction that followed (1907 - 1910). This dissatisfaction with the "twilight" era was expressed in the rejection of everything vague, mysterious, unsaid in art. In contrast to the symbolic painting of the "Blue Rose", the artists of the "Jack of Diamonds" sought to most radically express the movement from focusing on subjective vague sensations to gaining the stability of the visual image, the full sound of color , to the constructive logic of pictorial construction. The statement of the object and objectivity, as opposed to spatiality, is the initial principle of their art. In this regard, it is the painting of objects - the still life, that comes to the fore. The polemical tasks of painting "The Jack of Diamonds" found a particularly vivid embodiment in the work of one of the founders of the group, I.I. Mashkov (1881 - 1944). His "Blue Plums" (1910) can be considered a kind of slogan of this direction. The image of fruits, laid in a static decorative composition, seemed to freeze halfway from the raw substance of the colors of the palette to the real color of nature. The artist likens his work to the work of a craftsman who makes things. In this case, that thing is the painting itself. The artist brings painting closer to folk art with its inherent sense of the source material. In the nakedness of the very process of creating a pictorial thing and in the pathetic elation of a colorful sound, Mashkov, as it were, formulates the initial principle of folk art: a combination of two sides of folk life - work and holiday. Just as declaratively as in Mashkov's Blue Plums, P.P. Konchalovsky (1876-1956) in "Portrait of G. Yakulov" (1910). The artist introduces a still-life, reification principle into the traditional area of ​​domination of psychological tasks. It eliminates everything that relates to the transient inner state of a person, emphasizing everything that makes up the most stable, bright, in the proper sense of the word picturesque signs of an individual external appearance. Here we are dealing with a specific system of simplifications, characteristic of popular popular prints, toys, signboards. It is no coincidence that critics sometimes defined the painting style of the "Jack of Diamonds" as a whole as "the style of a signboard." The same criticism has repeatedly noted the direct connection of the new generation of Moscow painters with contemporary French painting, which goes back to Cezanne in its origins. At the same time, Cezanne's painting was perceived by the "Jack of Diamonds" through the decorative version of Cezanneism presented by the Fauvists, especially Matisse. forms. The impression of the materiality of the object, which the artists tried to achieve in their first works, arose not due to the sculptural-volumetric construction of the form, but due to the massiveness of the texture, while the space looked decoratively flattened and often amorphous because of this. In overcoming this shortcoming, cubism played a certain role - a trend in painting that found theoretical motivation for its experiments in this once Cezanne recommendation to conduct a mental analysis of complex forms by approaching them to the main geometric configurations - a cube, a cone and a ball. Similar techniques were used by the masters of the Jack of Diamonds. Thus, Konchalovsky's "Agave" (1916) is a variant of assimilation of the experience of cubism, bypassing the extremes of the schematic splitting of form. The artist saw in cubism a way of analyzing spatial relationships. The space of the picture is conceived as a kind of object, objects depicted crystallize out of it with an effort, the form of which seems to break, deform, with an effort conquering the necessary living environment for itself. Things are actively introduced into the space surrounding them, as if overcoming its resistance. Hence the impression of drama. Things, as it were, stand guard over their won place, they are not easily given into hands, they seem hostile to a person, alienated from him. The genre of still life itself becomes capable of conveying new content, consonant with modernity, with its contradictions and a sense of impending upheavals. In the painting of the "Jack of Diamonds", the still life was returned to the significance of high art. Along with cubism, futurism has become an important component of the pictorial style of the "Jack of Diamonds" since the mid-10s - another movement of painting that arose in Italy in those years. Proclaiming the industrial rhythms of the era of the scientific and technological revolution as the true language of the future, it required the introduction of these rhythms into the very structure of a work of art. One of his techniques is the "mounting" of objects or parts of objects, taken as if at different times and from different points of view. The movement of the subject, i.e. the viewer is transferred to the object, which is endowed with spontaneous dynamics, the ability to bizarre modifications of form. This effect, combined with the cubic "shift" of forms and the stratification of spatial plans, we see in the decorative panel paintings by A.V. Lentulov (1882-1943) "Vasily the Blessed" (1913) and "Ringing" (1915). The surface of the image is conceived here as a mirror rattling and split by a powerful sound wave, which reflects the colorful Moscow architecture. There was a certain amount of irony in the attitude of Russian artists towards the methods of modern Western European art. With Lentulov, it had an effect, for example, in transferring the techniques of futurism, intended to express the rhythms of the industrial era, to a completely different object in its essence - the old patriarchal architecture. From this paradoxical combination of modern pictorial language with images of Moscow antiquity, an unexpectedly vivid artistic effect arises - ancient architecture, as if agitated by the invasion of industrial rhythms, involved in the orbit of perception of modern man, who feels himself and everything around him in constant motion. The works of another representative of the "Jack of Diamonds" R.R. Falk (1886 - 1958) is characterized neither by the decorative scope of Lentulov's canvases, nor by the brutal brilliance and materiality of Mashkov's painting. A lyricist with a creative temperament, Falk avoids intentional coarsening of form, strives for a fine elaboration of the pictorial surface, achieves exquisite colorful harmonies. Permeated with an atmosphere of spiritual concentration and silence, Falk's painting is distinguished by a kind of psychologism, endowed with the ability to reproduce subtle shades of mood. It is no coincidence that therefore among his works a significant place is occupied by a portrait. One of the best paintings of Falk's pre-revolutionary work is "At the piano. Portrait of E.S. Potekhina-Falk" (1917). Close in style to Falk's painting are the works of A. Kuprin and V. Rozhdestvensky, the artists of the Jack of Diamonds, who worked mainly in the still life genre. A kind of permanent rebellion characterizes the work of one of the organizers of the Jack of Diamonds, M.F. Larionov (1881 - 1964). Already in 1911, he broke with this group and became the organizer of new exhibitions under the shocking names "Donkey's Tail", "Target". In the work of Larionov, the primitivist tendency of the art of the "Jack of Diamonds" found its most consistent development, associated with the assimilation by professional art of the style of signboards, popular prints, folk toys, and children's drawings. In contrast to most artists of the 10s, Larionov consistently defends the rights of genre painting, without abandoning the narrative story in the picture. But life in Larionov's genres is a special, "primitive" life of provincial streets, cafes, hairdressers, soldiers' barracks. One of the most typical Larionov's works - the painting "Resting Soldier" (1911). The grotesque, exaggerated characterization of the pose of a healthy fellow with a blush on his cheek is undoubtedly inspired by the naivete of a child's drawing. At the same time, the large scale of the image and the skillfully conveyed duration of the lazy reclining in front of the viewer turn the picture into a subtly parodied ceremonial portrait. But with all this - not a shadow of ridicule. The attitude of the artist to the model looks like a "love irony". If the artists of the "Jack of Diamonds", especially in the initial period of creativity, preferred a bright palette, strong color contrasts, then Larionov, as a rule, turns to prosaic and rough, dull and colorless objects, cultivating shades of similar colors, achieving exquisite silvery and harmonious coloring. Close to the works of this artist were the canvases of Larionov's constant companion and like-minded person in his quest N.S. Goncharova (1881 - 1962). In the painting "Washing the Canvas" (1910), the figures of two women against the background of a popularly "painted" rural landscape, squat, with heavy feet, are painted with that naively touching sympathy for the depicted, which distinguishes children's drawings, especially when a child reproduces well-known, familiar objects and situations. Here we are no longer dealing with an aesthetic-playful stylization of common life, as, for example, by Kustodiev, but with an attempt through the art of the primitive to find a way out of the labyrinths of modern psychologism and speculation, to find the lost sources of a naive-holistic view of the world. In a slightly different form, the same tendency appears in the art of M.3. Chagall (1887-1985). Chagall’s unusually close thoroughness in reproducing the most prosaic details of the situation of provincial shtetl life, transformed by radiant iridescent colors of a spicy, lush palette, is combined in Chagall with fabulous motifs of fantastic flights, heavenly signs, etc. All this is akin to the vagaries of romantic fiction, whimsically mixing the sublime and the base, evoking the memory of Gogol's romantic stories. The pre-revolutionary work of the most original of the painters, P.N. Filonov (1883-1941). Modern primitivism is understood by him only as a means of "modeling" in painting a certain integral picture of the world, a type of worldview that gives an idea of ​​the pracultural myths of mankind in modern visual experience. For an artist of the 20th century, this was a way to recall what constitutes the reverse side of machine civilization, what it pushed to the periphery of public attention, namely, about the natural-generic in man, about that “part” of man, by which he is fused with nature, with its dark, unyielding, inert, mysterious nocturnal forces, "contact" with which forms the essential content of labor, especially peasant, life. Thus, in Filonov's "Korovniki" (1914), everything is clung to each other, as if in a chaotic disorder. The complicated syntax of the pictorial phrase invites the viewer to search for meaning and consistency in combinations of objective forms and figures, following the path of guessing, recalling that ring in the bundle of human memory where the key to the cipher of this picture could be located. But the direction of these searches is set by the picture itself, which leads into the realm of primitive natural myths. The usual ratio of the upper and lower is reversed here: toy houses are perceived as visible at a distance from above, so that the figures of animals and cowsheds "hang" in the dark skies above the world and are outlined in zoomorphic and anthropomorphic forms with that paradoxical, angular-accurate approximation with which the zodiac figures are outlined by the eye in the kaleidoscope of constellations in the night sky. A purely earthly scene is shown as a mythical pre-history created in heaven, but this heavenly is at the same time something densely primitive, reminiscent of the original involvement of man in the animal world, of those times and of that state of consciousness when the supreme deity of heaven appeared in the image "heavenly cow", and pastoral labor was a ritual sacred action, "heavenly service". This is life as it looks from the dark depths of ancestral memory. “To humanize the impersonal” - this block formula can define the method and at the same time the theme of Filonov’s art, recreating in the “hieroglyphic” form familiar to Russian art, the path, process, stages of this incarnation of the impersonal-natural into human-spiritual. origin, bifurcates the perception of visible forms and qualities of the objective world between direct and figurative meanings. So "dark" in Filonov's pre-revolutionary paintings is both night and metaphysical "darkness", prehistoric "darkness"; primitively squat figures are both massive and ethereal; light and color are merged into a single quality of light color, reminiscent of the stained glass effect; the figures are as much reminiscent of primitive idols as they are of medieval "chimeras". Many qualities of Filonov's visual system, as well as the very way of creating a "new attitude to reality by revising a series of forgotten worldviews", have their closest prototype in the art of Vrubel. familiarization with the primary foundations of artistic expression led to the allocation of this area of ​​form creation into an independent sphere of art. In 1913 Larionov published his book Luchism, which was one of the first manifestos of abstract art. At the same time, V.V. Kandinsky (1866-1944) and K.S. Malevich (1878-1935). Since its inception, abstract painting has been developing in two directions: for Kandinsky it is a spontaneous, irrational play of color spots, for Malevich it is the appearance of mathematically verified, rational-geometric constructions. Abstractionism claimed to be within artistic practice, as it were, an embodied theory of the fundamental principles of painting in general. The tasks of painting were reduced to the study of possible combinations of primary elements - lines, colors, forms. If the abstractionism of Malevich and Kandinsky develops initially exclusively within the limits of easel painting, then in the work of V.E. Tatlin (1885-1953), another element of painting, texture, becomes the object of an abstract experiment. The tactile qualities that belong in painting to one material - paint, Tatlin turns into combinations of textures of various materials - tin, wood, glass, transforming the picture plane into a kind of sculptural relief. In the so-called counter-reliefs of Tatlin, the "heroes" are not real objects, but abstract categories of texture - rough, fragile, viscous, soft, sparkling - entering into complex relationships with each other without the mediation of any specific pictorial plot. In architecture, we are faced with the ability the art of expressing without depicting, bypassing the imitation of the "facts of life". The properties of the pictorial surface as an architectonic field contain expressive possibilities, not given, but given to the image, just as the laws of gravity are given to the movement of bodies or rhythm, size, rhyme order are given to verse. The study of these possibilities was the experiment that was carried out by abstract art. On this path to the ancestral foundations of artistic influence, hidden in the structure of human memory, the art of the 20th century inevitably had to meet with artistic worlds, where the sought-for laws of expressiveness had once already been implemented in the fullness of the principle. The new gave a hand to the well-forgotten old - and almost all the masters of the so-called avant-garde in the art of the 20th century went through such contact. Among them, an outstanding place belongs to K - S. Petrov-Vodkin (1878 - 1939). The long path of the creative development of this master, rich in complex searches, culminates in the creation in 1912 of the painting Bathing the Red Horse. This work is significant not only for its internal content, but also for the fact that many acute questions of art of the early 20th century are concentrated in it. It itself sounds like a call and a question, and above all because the sharpness and expressiveness of the form, recreating, transforming the images of reality, to which the art of the 20th century so painfully aspired, was achieved here through mastering the lessons of ancient Russian painting. Directly declaring a continuity with icon painting, this work makes us recall at the same time Serov's The Abduction of Europe, under whom Petrov-Vodkin studied at the Moscow School. The image of a rider on a horse, turning the thought to folklore representations, in the languid unresolved frozen movement, gives rise to a question. Festive jubilation of color and sleepy bewitching rhythm of lines, a powerful horse and a teenage boy, frozen in an obscure thought, limply lowering the reins, surrendering to the power of a force that leads him to no one knows where, a memory of the past and a vague presentiment of the future - such a combination of opposite elements is symbolic in its inner structure. Because of this, it was perceived by contemporaries as a symbol of the moment being experienced. Even more consistently Petrov-Vodkin refers to the images of ancient Russian art in such works as "Mother", "Girls on the Volga" (1915), "Morning. Bathers" (1917). Here you can hear the echoes of icon-painting images - in the fixed ™ movements, in the self-immersion of the characters, in the contemplation that the heroines of these paintings are imbued with. In the work of Petrov-Vodkin, the significance of eternal images and themes rises: sleep and awakening, the age stages of life - adolescence, youth, motherhood, the cycle of life between birth and death - such is the range of these topics. In the interpretation of this kind of themes, every new era expresses its ideal ideas about the place of man in the cosmic whole. In the artistic world, they play the role of philosophical universals, rising above the variability of fluid reality. Accordingly, in the visual system of Petrov-Vodkin, all the qualities of the world subject to observation tend to their limiting, absolute states: color tends to be spectrally pure, freed from atmospheric fluctuations, light has the character of astral "eternal radiance", the horizon line reproduces the curvature of the planetary surface of the earth according to the principle of the so-called spherical perspective, which transforms everything that happens in the intra-picture space into the rank of phenomena on a cosmic scale. In the variety of modern forms of artistic generalization, Petrov-Vodkin singles out those that have a specific historical and artistic address - the ancient Russian icon and fresco, as well as the Italian quattrocento, i.e. precisely those phenomena on the scale of the national and European artistic tradition that directly approach the threshold of later differentiation and analytical fragmentation, but where the artistic world and the very image of the world in art were still conceived and presented as a kind of integrity that communicated to the ways of artistic expression the stamp of its monumental greatness. The contemplation of the world as a whole in the sense of the universal connection of times and phenomena - this is what Petrov-Vodkin longs to express and revive in contemporary art. Programmatically appealing to the associative ability of artistic memory, he seems to call for guessing what shape and image the modern world and its inherent artistic feeling have in comparison with nature and history in the space of world cultural experience. Petrov-Vodkin, like a number of other masters of his generation, in the post-revolutionary years he became one of the prominent masters Soviet painting, bringing with it to the new era living artistic traditions, lofty ideas and perfect craftsmanship.

"BLUE ROSE"

An art association of a symbolist orientation, which received its name from the exhibition of the same name. The backbone of the association was made up of participants in the exhibition "Scarlet Rose", held in 1904.

The Blue Rose exhibition, organized at the expense of the patron and publisher of the Golden Fleece, amateur artist N. Ryabushinsky, opened on March 18, 1907 in Moscow on Myasnitskaya Street in the house of the porcelain manufacturer M. Kuznetsov.

The halls, decorated with silver-gray and pale blue fabrics, housed paintings and graphic works by fourteen artists - P. Kuznetsov, P. Utkin, N. Sapunov, M. Saryan, S. Sudeikin, N. Krymov, A. Arapov, A Fonvizin, N. and V. Milioti, N. Feofilaktov, V. Drittenpreis, I. Knabe and N. Ryabushinsky. The sculptural works of A. Matveev and P. Bromirsky were also located here. The music of Russian composers was performed by the best musicians, Andrey Bely and V. Bryusov read their poems.

The name of the exhibition and association, as well as the style of the participants' works, are closely related to the aesthetics of symbolism. Blue color - the color of the sky, water, endless space - as if personified a poetic dream and reality, melancholy and hope

"Blue Rose" was a group exhibition, united by a single aesthetic program. Thanks to her appearance, the former art associations, including the World of Art, lost their former significance. Continuing the beginnings of the "World of Art", "Blue Rose", at the same time, opposed the World of Art stylism and literature and introduced a fundamentally new into the artistic consciousness of the era. It was the first step of Russian art beyond the 19th century.

The exclusivity of the "Blue Rose" consisted in the fact that its artists were able to plastically express intangible categories - emotions, moods, emotional experiences. Having made neo-primitivism its integral part, the Blue Rose was the forerunner of the Russian avant-garde. Her ideas were picked up and developed in their own way in the works of N. Goncharova, M. Larionov, K. Malevich.

The exhibition was visited by more than five thousand people.

The Blue Rose association ceased to exist in 1910. Its members gathered again in 1925 at the exhibition Masters of the Blue Rose at the Tretyakov Gallery.

In 1910, an exhibition of young artists with the outrageous title "Jack of Diamonds" became a notable phenomenon in cultural life Moscow.

A touch of scandalousness was contained in the expression "jack of diamonds", then associated with the following concepts: the so-called convicts, on whose prisoner robes an ace of diamonds was sewn; old French slang interpretation of the playing card"rascal, swindler"

Mikhail Larionov became one of the inspirers and organizers of the exhibition action. Among the participants of the event were also Natalia Goncharova, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Alexander Kuprin, Aristarkh Lentulov, Ilya Mashkov, Robert Falk, brothers David and Vladimir Burliuk. The exhibition received mixed critical responses in the press and aroused overwhelming public interest.

November 1911 was the starting point for the emergence of a new society of artists Jack of Diamonds - the largest association of the early avant-garde in Russia. The core of the group was made up of Moscow painters. The founders were Konchalovsky, Kuprin, Mashkov, Rozhdestvensky.

The Jack of Diamonds came to the forefront of Russian art at a time when conservative academism, the recently advanced trends of symbolism and modernity, were in deep crisis, and itinerant movement was experiencing serious difficulties.

The artists of the "Jack of Diamonds" denied the traditions of both academicism and realism XIX century. Their work is characterized by pictorial and plastic solutions in the style of P. Cezanne (post-impressionism), Fauvism and Cubism, as well as a return to the methods of Russian popular print and folk toys. Deformation and generalization of forms are characteristic.

The single basic platform for the members of the new union was the rejection of academic traditions, the desire for "new art", creative freedom.

However, internal contradictions led to an early split of the Jack of Diamonds: the radical part of the artists, whose works were oriented towards samples of folk and primitive art, led by Larionov, left the association and organized their own exhibition "Donkey's Tail" (1912).

The moderate core of the Jack of Diamonds continued its pictorial and plastic searches in an effort to connect the achievements of post-impressionist masters with the traditions of Russian folk art - popular prints, wood and ceramic paintings, farce signboards and trays. Worked out creative manner masters of the association was called "Russian sezanism".

In 1916 - 1917. another split occurred: Konchalovsky, Mashkov, Kuprin, Lentulov, Rozhdestvensky, Falk and other moderate artists left the group in protest against the active introduction of the Suprematist works of Malevich and his supporters into the exhibition. Following this, the Jack of Diamonds association actually ceased to exist.