Artist – Petrov -Vodkin
Depicted Petrova-Vodkin Maria Fedorovna (nee Yovanovich Margarita, 1885–1960).
The picture is a sample of the portrait characteristic of symbolism. The early of the numerous images of the artist’s wife, who, as he wrote to his friend, brought him active love and became a tigress to defend his heart. But it is precisely these active character traits that the portrait is deprived of. With a slight smile, detached from the environment, a young woman is immersed in self -contemplation, painted with light melancholy, in the “memory” of the soul. She seems to have just come off the tapestry, against which the author saw her, or, on the contrary, mentally departed into his picture environment. The state of dreams is depicted, a kind of “sleep in reality”, the nature of which the master does not try to explain so that the charm of secrets, increditedness does not disappear. The rhythm of smooth lines, the portrait is associated with the characters of the symbolist picture in the spirit of the “stuff”, hanging on the wall of the workshop, in the interior of which the model is depicted. (IN. TO.).
Russian portrait. XX century: St. Petersburg, 2001. WITH. 93.
Petrova-Vodkin (nee. Yovanovich) Maria Fedorovna (1885-1960)-artist’s wife.
Arriving in France, Petrov-Vodkin settled near Paris in the town of Fontone-o-Roz. Madame Jovanovich – the hostesses of the boarding house in which the artist lived had several daughters. In one of them-Maria-Margarit (her at home was called Mara), he fell in love and announced to her: “Mademoiselle, I will marry you!””. And he added that since her father is called Theodore, then in Russia she will become Maria Fedorovna. Mara replied that this is the most original sentence, what she had heard. And did Monsieur think well before doing it? Monsieur replied that he did not think at all. He was just illuminated, and he saw a picture: himself, Maru and their daughter Lonushka at the Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg. Speaking about this, Kuzma was so convincing that the girl agreed to marriage and immediately began to learn Russian…
Portrait of Maria Fedorovna in 1907-one of the strongest Parisian works by Petrov-Vodkin. The pose, hairstyle, tilt of the young woman sitting against the backdrop of a conditional symbolist picture, so frankly echoing with female silhouettes depicted on her, that the heroine of the portrait has just been random, incomprehensible, slipped from this immaterial art world to the real world, real, in the real, real. Having gained flesh, and individual facial features, and a unique character.
In this canvas with its exquisite color, a decorative and generalized form, the study by the artist of the art of Puvi de Shavannah, the influence of which several paintings of the Parisian period were noted.
