Haymaking () is a painting by Russian Soviet artist Arkady Plastov. The painting embodied the artist's hope for a better future, for the arrival of a peaceful life. An everyday episode depicted in the painting Haymaking acquires a sublime meaning thanks to the monumentality of the canvas. At the same time, the canvas is filled with lyricism and the pictures are poetry.
It was created in 1945 in the village of , Ulyanovsk Oblast. The models were fellow villagers of the artist. The canvas was first presented to a wide audience in 1946 at the I All-Union Art Exhibition. Together with Plastov's painting Harvest, it was awarded the Stalin State Prize of the I degree for 1945. The painting Haymaking is in the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery (permanent exhibition of Russian art of the 20th and 21st centuries in the New Tretyakov Gallery, Hall No. 28). Plastov's paintings of the mid-1940s are, as before, full of dynamism, but at this time, he began to turn less frequently to multi-figure compositions. According to a number of art historians, Haymaking is one of the highlights of the artist's work, his milestone.
Description From the edge of the birch forest come four mowers: "...an old man with a gray beard, a stout man with red hair, a woman who is not old but has worked hard, and a sturdy teenager, almost a boy". Art historians believe that this is a family: the old man, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his grandson. Nearby is a high wall of colorful grass, a beautiful view of the forest, and above the heads of the figures, the blue sky. In the grass, one can easily discern flowers painted in detail by the artist: repens, ivan-da-maryas, campanulas, chamomiles, dictamnus albus, lilies, forest primrose, clover, onopordum, and trollius. Bumblebees, butterflies, and flower chafers float in the air. According to art historian Tatiana Plastova, the artist has combined on one canvas plants that do not bloom at the same time and do not meet in one clearing. He does not simply depict a flowering meadow but creates an allegory of summer, as if he were laying all the flowers of the motherland at the feet of his heroes.
Galina Shubina believed that the painting depicted two old men, a woman, and a teenager, which, in her opinion, alluded to the death of adult men in the war or the fact that they had not yet been demobilized. Through the representation of their absence, the theme of death appears. The faces of the heroes of the painting are harsh and do not resemble the cheerful collective peasants of Arkady Plastov's pre-war paintings. In the center of the composition, the artist places a boy—an image that leaves hope for revival and replenishment of human losses during the war years.
Arkady Plastov himself wrote about the painting Haymaking in a letter to his wife on November 28, 1945:The subject itself, the innumerable flowers, the glitter and sparkle of the sun in the sky on the branches of the birches, on the trunks, the rustling and fluttering of the leaves and grasses, the figures of the mowers drowned in greenish-golden reflections, in the transparent crystalline atmosphere, in the barely perceptible blue of the morning air, the caressing colorfulness of the softly swaying flowers, their fragrant tenderness, brought by me to the possible limit of illusion and color—all this appears before my eyes at the first glance as a kind of fairy-tale vision. In the article Conversation about Still Life (1973), Arkady Plastov's son Nikolai, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts, wrote about the painting Haymaking as a huge still life, where flowers and leaves of birch trees are its separate elements. This still life is complicated by “crazy difficulties in conveying the play of light and shadows under the midday sun”.
Background
Haymaking was Plastov's hobby.Tatiana Plastova, for example, claimed that the proof of this could be the fact that the artist of the huge novel Anna Karenina made even two versions of the illustration for the episode Levin at the Mowing. In one of the photographs from the mid-1940s, the topless artist is mowing grass.Пластов Аркадий Александрович (1893—1972). Сайт художников Верхней Масловки и НП «Национальное художественное наследие «ИЗОФОНД». Дата обращения: 29 September 2018. Archive: 10 October 2018. Even at eighty years old, during haymaking, Arkady Plastov would set aside his easel, lock up his studio, and, taking a scythe and a sharpening bar in his hands, go to a forest clearing long before sunrise to mow the grass. This theme also repeatedly appeared in his works.
The painting Haymaking was painted in 1945 based on sketches collected long before that. Inga Filippova argued that the idea of the canvas existed even before World War II, but remained unrealized on canvas. Another point of view was expressed by contemporary Russian art historian Tatiana Plastova. The earliest sketch on this subject she dated to the 1910s, and the 1930s belong to several works created by the artist on this theme; one of these paintings was even shown in 1935 in Vsekohudozhnik. This painting (its location is unknown) Plastov evaluated quite highly and wrote: “Among the bland other things, from my ... ‘Haymaking’ (despite a lot of its shortcomings, due to my exceptional laziness and laxity) reeked of some ... surprising freshness and chastity ...” According to Tatiana Plastova, this painting marked for the artist a departure from the traditions of Russian realism of the 19th century to the light and color forms of impressionism.
“I love haymaking to the point of self-forgetfulness, having been a mower myself since I was seventeen years old. Many years ago I began to collect sketches of haymaking for a future painting. I made my first sketch on the theme of haymaking about twenty-five to twenty-seven years ago. In the fire of 1931, together with other good things, burned sketches, including the first sketches of numerous compositions. By 1935, I had gathered both materials and courage to paint and present it publicly. My clumsy brainchild, as I recall, met with the most cordial reception, and I was praised in every possible way. But, as it always happens, after the public viewing, my eyes seemed to open suddenly on the picture,” wrote Plastov himself. The artist was disappointed with the canvas, on which he tried to place so many “details dear to his heart,” because he failed to find their correct ratio. He began to collect material again, but this work was stopped by the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. The idea was abandoned, and the artist returned to it only in 1944. In the summer of that year, he worked on sketches for the painting, and in the spring of 1945, he began work on the canvas itself. Arkady Plastov described his idea in his autobiography:“... When I was painting this picture, I kept thinking: well now rejoice, brother, every leaf, rejoice—death is over, life has begun... Everything must be filled with a powerful breath of sincerity, truth, and optimism. This mood determined the content of my new painting Haymaking, which I completed for the All-Union Art Exhibition in 1946”. In the painting Haying Arkady Plastov expressed hope for the future and joy of peaceful life after the war. A moment in the painting acquires a special meaning due to its monumentality. The canvas is filled with lyricism and poetry. The war forced the artist to depict not only external events, but also the inner world of man. According to Valery Kuznetsov, Plastov portrayed people as courageous and hardworking. In turn, Kuznetsov believed that Plastov's paintings reflected the ideology of late Stalinism, which included Russian nationalism, a return to pre-revolutionary values, an emphasis on the positive qualities of the common man, and a belief in the improvement of life. This ideology resonated with the artist's personal ideas.
Models His relatives and residents of the village of Prislonikha in the Ulyanovsk region, where Plastov was born and lived, served as models for the artist: The young man in the foreground is the artist's son Nikolai. Nikolai Arkadyevich Plastov (1930-2000) graduated from the Moscow Surikov State Academic Institute of Fine Arts, in the workshop of D. K. Mochalsky, and became known as a painter, photographer, and public figure. He was an honored artist of Russia, secretary of the Union of Artists of the RSFSR, and a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts. Nikolai Plastov was the author of genre paintings, portraits, and landscapes.Пластов — сын Пластова. Музеи России (25 February 2010). Дата обращения: 29 September 2018. Archive: 6 August 2020. There is a photograph from the mid-1940s, when the painting Haymaking was created, showing Arkady Plastov together with his son Nikolai in a mowed meadow. The artist is holding a scythe, while his teenage son has a rake.
The woman in the white shawl appears to be the artist's wife, Natalia Alekseevna. Natalia Alekseevna, née von Wieck, married Plastov in 1925. She lived in Prislonikha for more than half a century, preserving the traditional way of life of the family associated with hard daily labor.Удальцова М. В. Образы русской жизни. Русская линия (27 February 2009). Дата обращения: 29 September 2018. Archive: 2 October 2018. The elderly mower is Fyodor Sergeevich Tonshin, a fellow countryman of Plastov. Fyodor Tonshin was among Plastov's favorite sitters. Tonshin's portrait studies were included in the compositions of many of the artist's paintings. Plastov was attracted by the expression of surprise and childlike vulnerability in his face. In the portrait of Fyodor Tonshin (1940s, canvas, oil, 66 × 49 cm), candidate of art history Inga Filippova notes that the artist “marks such subtle facets of character, which do not often become defining in the peasant portraits created by him”. The portrait Fyodor Tonshin (1930s, canvas, oil, 57.0 × 49.5 cm) is almost monochromatic. The artist used ochre and its shades, as well as small additions of other colors (this coloring is typical of all portraits of Tonshin created by Plastov). Another elderly mower is Pyotr Grigorievich Chernyaev. Like Tonshin, he is a fellow countryman of Plastov. He was also frequently painted by the artist. Plastov appreciated Chernyaev’s colorful appearance — he was a gray-haired old man with a thick beard and a kind, sunburned face. Plastov saw in him the qualities that, in his mind, represented the most typical features of the Russian peasant. Pyotr Chernyaev also posed for Plastov in the painting Reaper (1951-1952, canvas, oil, 128 × 70 cm). Farmers were accustomed to seeing Arkady Plastov with a notebook and a pencil in the hayfield, and they tried to assist the artist as much as they could while he worked on the canvas. Especially for him, fellow villagers were willing to stand motionless with scythes in their hands or, conversely, to walk an extra time in front of the artist while he was drawing in his notebook. Exhibition history According to art historian Natalia Alexandrova, Arkady Plastov's painting Haymaking and the canvas Harvest (canvas, oil, 166 × 219 cm, State Tretyakov Gallery, inventory number — 27650), created in 1945, formed a cohesive cycle. Both works were presented together at the I All-Union Art Exhibition in 1946. Harvest depicts a field with an old man, a girl, a grandson, and a dog, where peasants are eating from a large pot. Plastov transported the paintings to Moscow in November 1945 on the footboard of a train, as he informed his wife in a letter. Reviews of Haymaking were enthusiastic: Plastov noted that viewers called the painting a hymn, a song, or a poem.