The artist is Efanov
The picture was written for the exhibition “XX years of the Red Army and the Navy”; It was exhibited at the 1939 World Exhibition (New York). The appeal to the group portrait of theater figures was not accidentally in the work of Efanov – for a long time the artist was passionate about the theater, he himself was an actor, his wife became the actress of the theater named after Konstantin Stanislavsky. And although in the mid-1930s Efanov moved away from the stage, the theater remained to him.
The event, which served as a plot for the picture, occurred on December 22, 1935 in the Stanislavsky Studio apartment. The artist began to work on the picture in 1937, finished a year later, when the great director was already dead. The composition depicts thirty -eight characters whose portraits of which the artist wrote from nature. In autobiography, Efanov recalls: “… artists and pilots – I was written right from nature by me. Posed for a long time, sometimes at night. All details of the picture – still life on the table, chairs, huge carpet – are also written from nature “. More than once Efanov met with Stanislavsky, studying his character, manners, poses and gestures, making numerous sketches, drawings, sketches. The multi -figure composition is successfully arranged, the figure of a standing director was its semantic center – all those present are addressed to him.
The theater under the leadership of Stanislavsky and bearing his name patronized over the Higher Air Force Academy. Zhukovsky, whose representatives are also depicted in this scene, symbolizing the relationship of different social strata of society. Completely meeting the ideological requirements of time, the picture is designed to illustrate the idea of the beauty and nobility of people of the New Age, to emphasize the possibility of such an alliance only in a socialist society.
For the happiness of the people. Catalog of the exhibition of the Russian Museum in Malaga. 2018. WITH. 91.
