Portrait of Lenin with a book of Pushkin, Kuzma Sergeyevich Petrov-Vodkin, USSR 1934 -- Daily LIFT #1489
Petrov-Vodkin was a Soviet painter and named an Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1930).
From the Great Soviet Encyclopedia 1979:
In the 1920’s, Petrov-Vodkin developed solutions to problems of perspective, composition and color. He produced a panoramic effect in his paintings and united all forms and planes by using the three primary colors—red, yellow, and blue. In the Soviet period, he strove to grasp the essence of the country’s historical turning point through a “cosmic,” “planetary” comprehension of reality. He sought for a palpable reflection of the tragic and heroic encounters in life and for the discovery, in small things, of the diversity of natural ties.
Petrov-Vodkin produced thematic compositions imbued with the fervor of revolutionary struggle and with the idea of sacrifice in the name of the future (1918 in Petrograd, 1920, Tret’iakov Gallery; After the Battle, 1923, Central Museum of the Soviet Army, Moscow; Death of a Commissar, 1928, Russian Museum). He painted analytically austere portraits (the portrait of A. A. Akhmatova, 1922, Russian Museum), poetic genre-portrait compositions reflecting the fullness of being (Girl in a Sarafan, 1928, Russian Museum), and still lifes conveying the structured nature of the objective world (Bird-Cherry Branch in Glass, 1932, Russian Museum).
In the 1920’s and 1930’s, Petrov-Vodkin worked extensively as a graphic artist and set designer. His literary works include short stories, novellas, plays, essays, and theoretical articles. Particularly noteworthy is his autobiographical My Story (part 1, Khlynovsk, 1930; part 2, Euclidean Space, 1932; republished together with the essays Samarkandia in Leningrad, 1970).
From the first years of Soviet power, Petrov-Vodkin was one of the reorganizers of art education. Between 1918 and 1933 he taught at the State Free Art Workshops and at the Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in Petrograd (Leningrad).
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He died in 1939 in Leningrad.
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