Spring (Russian: Весна) is a painting by the Russian Soviet artist Arkady Plastov. He was assisted by his son Nikolai, who had graduated from the Moscow Surikov State Academic Institute of Fine Arts a year earlier. The painting was created during summer and fall of 1954, first in the village of Prislonikha in the Ulyanovsk region, where Arkady Plastov was born, and later in the artist's studio in Moscow.
The painting depicts a naked young woman dressing a little girl in the open hall of a village bathhouse under the rare spring snow. The painting was shown at the very beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw and made a strong impression on experts and public in general. The female nudity had long been poorly represented in Soviet painting. The unusual subject provoked contradictory opinions. In particular, the artist was accused of wanting to depict the naked female body in order to show the audience the poverty of peasant life in his contemporary kolkhoz village. Currently, the painting forms part of the New Tretyakov Gallery collection and permanent exhibition. It was presented many times at exhibitions in museums of the USSR, modern Russia, as well as abroad.
Spring is considered to be one of the best Arkady Plastov's works, and at various times it attracted the attention of important local art historians, cultural researchers, historians and writers. According to Inga Filippova, a candidate of art history, within the genre painting the artist created an image of "divine beauty". Art historian Ariadna Zhukova called the painting Spring "one of the most poetic and pure representations of a woman in our painting".
Description Plastov chose a subject where nudity seems natural to the viewer: a young woman in the open anteroom of a village bathhouse dressing a little girl. The artist combines the naked body of a young woman with "pink — nacre tones" and russet hair with the gray wooden walls, the soot-blackened door of the bathhouse, and the warm golden straw on the floor of the anteroom. The heroine's face looks like she is alive, and her body and hands move in a way that looks like they belong together. Snowflakes, white stars, are woven into the golden hair of the woman dressing the girl, melting on her heated "pearly pink" naked body. The main character of the painting is the perfect example of all that is beautiful in youth, with inner richness and outer charm. Using a simple everyday motif, the artist created, in the words of a Soviet art historian, the image of youth, full of femininity and purity.
According to the artist and art historian Igor Dolgopolov, the nosed girl with red bangs peeking out from under a woman's shawl was biting her lip. According to the artist's biographer Alexander Avdonin-Biryuchevsky, the girl "pressed her lips together and turned up her nose in pleasure". Some researchers, including Alexander Avdonin—Biryuchevsky, who knew the artist intimately, referred to the figures in the painting as mother and daughter. Evelina Polishchuk, a researcher at the State Tretyakov Gallery, perceived them as sisters.Polischuk E. A. Картина художника Аркадия Пластова «Весна». Эхо Москвы (18 July 2006). The same opinion was expressed by Arkady Plastov's contemporary art historian Alexander Kamensky.
The young woman in the painting becomes the personification of the Russian spring. The literal "interpretation" of the painting (a naked girl dressing the girl after the bath) is overlaid with the "subtext" (the beauty of youth, its energy, life — affirming pathos). The allegorical character is given to the picture by the Russian nature. The landscape in the painting is poetic: a gray shroud of clouds covers the sky, large snowflakes are falling, the earth is being cleared of snow. The household objects depicted in the painting are emphatically material: cold "heavy" water in a bucket, a brightly polished copper basin. Transferring the scene to the interior would turn the canvas into a purely genre painting, which does not lend itself to broad generalizations and associations.
History
Background
According to his sister-in-law, the artist Elena Kholodilina, Arkady Plastov treated spring with joy. During the winter he lived in Moscow, and in the spring he would come to his small home —the village of Prislonikha, Ulyanovsk region— and of necessity he himself would take out the second frames in the house and open the windows. This action was like a ritual.
In the early 1950s, Plastov became a fully-fledged artist. His style changed, and he stopped painting social topics. After the expressiveness of the 1930s paintings, which were full of "passion and fury," and after the dramatic Haymaking and Harvest paintings from the 1940s, Plastov started painting in a way that showed harmony between people and the world. His paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, in the words of one art critic, showed "an intimate, passionate whisper of the artist's soul". The artist's genre paintings of everyday life, while still having a narrative and everyday basis, took on a new quality and moved to another level that was associated with metaphorical poetic embodiment.
For a long time, there were not many naked female bodies in Soviet painting. Nude paintings in pre-revolutionary salons were often full of coarse or subtle eroticism, but they did not meet the goal set for the art of the new era. The art of the new era was supposed to carry advanced ideas of modernity. Plastov was one of the first artists to bring the image of the naked female body back to Soviet painting. His early experiments in this genre are the paintings Saturday and Tractor Drivers, which were created during the Second World War, in 1942–1943.One of the goals of the nude genre is to find the ideal of physical and spiritual beauty, and Plastov followed the anti-academic tradition in achieving this goal. Examples of this tradition include Edouard Manet's Olympia and Valentin Serov's Ida Rubinstein. Evgenia Yarkova, a researcher at the Tretyakov Gallery, said that Arkady Plastov's own understanding of beauty was different from the generally accepted idea of beauty. The artist refused to follow the ideal of antiquity or the Renaissance; he portrayed a real person — his contemporary. The object of admiration is not the heroine's appearance, but the harmony in the relationship between a woman and a child, the joy of their existence and communication.Yarkova E. S. Как интерпретировать: А. А. Пластов «Весна», 1954. Официальный блог Государственной Третьяковской галереи (9 November 2017).
Conceptualization and approach There is an opinion that the main idea of the painting Spring refers to 1944, and the beginning of the artist's work on it — in January 1945 (for most of the war, Plastov lived in his native Prislonikha). On January 5, Arkady Alexandrovich wrote to his wife from Moscow: "4 days ago I made a watercolor sketch of the painting for which I've been making sketches of you for a whole year — it's a naked woman dressing a child in the anteroom, in the summer it will be necessary to do it". The author managed to finish the painting only in 1954. According to some sources, his son Nikolai Arkadyevich helped the artist with the painting.
Tatyana Plastova, a student of philology, traced the origins of the idea for the painting Spring back to an earlier time — to the so-called bath plot in the artist's work of the 1930s. It is documented in Arkady Plastov's sketches in a variety, but everywhere at that time was conceptualized by the artist as a domestic sketch. Among these works is Sketch No. 1 (according to Plastova's classification; paper, watercolor, whitewash, pencil, 23,5×17 cm, is in the private collection of the artist's family), which the researcher correlates with the future painting Spring. It depicts a naked female figure dressing a child in the presence of a fully dressed man (he wears a coat, hat and boots). The scene is set in a bathhouse. After the sketch, which probably seemed to the artist to be successful, there were several sketches and watercolors from life with similar themes, for which Plastov's wife and son Kolya posed. According to the researcher, the "bath scene" itself, which has a purely domestic character, was postponed for a long time, but the figure of a woman dressing a child from this composition attracted his attention and remained in his creative plans.
In 1943, Arkady Plastov painted Saturday (canvas, oil, 113×160.5 cm). It depicted the "pastoral" background of a rural winter landscape with a figure of a girl running out of the bathhouse. She is naked, with only her head covered by a jacket, and a shy smile on her face. Plastova correlated this canvas with the works of French artists of the Rococo period, in particular with the paintings of Antoine Watteau and Nicolas Lancret. She believes that in the process of simultaneous work on this painting and the painting Tractor Drivers (1943—1944, canvas, oil, 129.5×175.5 cm, depicting two women undressing near a stream and a teenager watching them from a distance against the background of a field and a tractor stopped at a short distance), Platsov returned to a matured idea of the 1930s.
Sketch No. 2 (paper, watercolor, pencil, whitewash, 19×22 cm) dates from 1945, not taking place in the bathhouse, but near it, and the artist hinting at a spring landscape with snow still on the ground, and the female figure dressed like a boy of 5—6 years. Plastova suggests that the girl appeared in the painting later under the influence of Titian's painting The Three Ages of Man (c. 1512—1514, oil on canvas, 90×150.7 cm, Scottish National Gallery), with her introduction leading to a doubling of femininity. She noted that in comparison with other canvas paintings, for Spring the artist did not do much preparatory work. The main work on the canvas itself took place in the summer of 1954 in Prislonikha (there the picture was "solved and thoroughly described") and in the fall in Moscow ("Kolya stretched my Bath Hall, and here it is now on the easel, and all Prislonikha, as alive, again before my eyes", — Platsov to his wife on November 21, 1954).
Sketches in the album № 21 belong to this period, with sketches of female figures, and their head and hands. Sketch No. 5 (paper, watercolor, gouache, whitewash, 30.5×19 cm) for the painting is dated August 1954. It is intended for transfer to canvas, so it is divided into squares. It has serious differences from the previous preparatory works: an additional space is added at the top-right; the other space is removed, and the household objects arranged differently. The painting has acquired a vertical character, and the figures have become the semantic center of the composition. However, there is no landscape behind the heroes' backs, with the role of background for them is played by the boarded wall of the vestibule, above which there is only space for the sky.