The artist is self -wrapping
The most significant work of a series of images of workers created by Samokhvalov in the 1928-1930s. He met his heroines in the printing house “Printing Courtyard” in Leningrad, where his posters were printed. In them, he saw a living embodiment of the image of a new woman, capable of replacing a man even in heavy physical work: “their detachment from home life, their new, other work, other unrest, gave them a halo of romance of a completely new, unprecedented order”. The search for this new ideal of femininity was the leitmotif of the artist’s work. (L. B.).
Russian portrait. XX century: St. Petersburg, 2001. WITH. 202.
From the book of memoirs of the artist “My Creative Way”: “I am an artist living an excited emotional life, modernity. Nothing passes by my attention. Especially what has features, meaning and meaning of today’s reality. The feeling of modernity is a very complex feeling. And in the landscape, although it existed for centuries, nevertheless, in the end, those features that will take on the expression of our time. And they will fall, these features.
In addition to an objectively existing phenomenon, there are also professional features of reflection of this phenomenon in modern painting. Modern language. Attempts to ignore this side of the creative process lead to the absence of the impact of the work on the viewer.
Therefore, the search for modernity, modern rhythms, modern color reduction and color expression are required for the artist.
This does not mean alienation from traditions, from the achievements of art in the phases of the highest expression of modern era. Vice versa. Qualities obtained by art, in his best works, should and can develop, come to life under the push of our time.
That laconicism, the clarity of the color plan, the clarity of the direction of color excretion, which are characteristic of the best examples of ancient Russian painting, affected me and affected me in my works of that time with special force.
The basis was the image – that is, modernity.
In those years, my campaign posters were printed in the printed court, and I, in the workshops, met with completely new images of a Soviet woman worker.
They seemed to me so new, sometimes striking that for several years I worked on the images of women workers of the twenties. Their detachment from home life, their new, other work, other unrest gave them a halo of romance of a completely new, unprecedented order.
So I see a woman, on her face her severity and anxiety. In her hands a file. For a second she was distracted, relying on him. She got up at the vice and drives the details of the machines, she picked up the file, because her husband – the worker took the rifle in her hands and there, on the fronts of the Civil War, fights with the enemy.
Black hands from cast iron and executed eyes end this image of a woman of the first revolutionary years “.
