Relay race on the Garden Ring

In the second half of the 1940s, Relay Race on Ring B reinforced Aleksandr Deyneka's reputation as one of the leading Soviet painters and interpreters of the theme of sport.

[10][8] By depicting himself among the characters in the scene, the artist, according to Vladimir Sysoev, candidate of art history, aimed to convey that he was "in the thick of everyday reality, among his favorite heroes”.

In the foreground, the artist depicts cracks in the asphalt, a trolleybus stopped at the edge of the street, flags, and other symbols of the Dynamo Sports Club, such as the blue letter D on a white background.

In March 1945, he was appointed Director of the newly established Moscow Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts, while simultaneously managing administrative work in the faculty of mural painting.

[14] In 1947, he lived in the House of the People's Commissar of the Narkomfin building (at 25 Tchaikovsky Street), near where the traditional track and field relay race on the Garden Ring took place.

[17][4] Military pilot, journalist, and writer Ivan Rakhillo, in his book Silver Lane, described in detail Aleksandr Deyneka's impressions of the track and field relay on the Garden Ring.

The friends began a conversation about how Moscow was changing: asphalted highways replacing shady boulevards lined with century-old oaks and lindens, where the hooves of horses, the wheels of wagons, and bogies once clattered on the uneven cobblestones, and where drunken craftsmen, indifferent and bored, loitered.

Rakhillo recounted that during the race, a blonde-haired girl in a blue T-shirt was the first to reach the set point and passed the baton to a young man “with strangely short legs for a runner”.

The artist built the composition his own way.” However, Deyneka succeeded in retaining the vivid images of the competition’s participants in his memory, including the boy with short legs, ahead of his rivals in the race.

[27] In his dissertation for the degree of candidate of art history, V. P. Sysoev wrote that, alongside nature sketches, Deyneka drew from the possibilities of cinematography and photography in creating Relay Race on Ring B.

Dozens of photographs, capturing various episodes of the competition, were used by the artist to study the technique and plastic construction of running, which allowed him to fix the poses, gestures, and movements of the runners, lasting only seconds.

[1] Anatoly Zykov, People’s Artist of the RSFSR and full member of the Russian Academy of Arts, who visited the Tretyakov Gallery as a student in 1948, recalled that he was particularly impressed by Mikhail Vrubel’s Spain and Deyneka’s Relay Race on Ring B.

[33][34] Lev Mochalov, a candidate of art history and leading researcher at the Russian Museum's Department of Newer Currents, wrote that Deyneka tried to convey movement in the painting Relay Race in such a way "that it did not create the impression of a stopped photographic frame, a random moment of life", and managed to masterfully solve this problem.

In order for the viewer to perceive these separate actions as a single movement, Aleksandr Deyneka did not endow the characters of the painting with individual features but gave "variations of the same type."

Deyneka was interested "not in characters in the sense of the inner state of mind, the psychology of the heroes, but in the characteristic, manifested primarily in movement, posture, behaviour, that is, qualities, again, perceived immediately.

The art historian wrote that it is not necessary to extract individual fragments from the canvas, as Aleksandr Deyneka's painting is based on the decorative juxtaposition of large colour surfaces.

Therefore, the author, for the purpose of a clear compositional construction, somewhat modified the real image of the urban environment: moved the space of the street, introduced in the architecture of individual buildings ‘solemn representativeness’, which is better consistent with the atmosphere of the sports festival.

[11] The researcher noted that the shortcomings that art critics drew attention to after acquaintance with the painting (among them were traditionalism and narrative, associated with detailed drawing of the elements of the plot and the environment), with the passage of time recede into the background in comparison with the vitality and artistic value of the picture.

Nevertheless, the picture convincingly conveys "the beat of light, healthy forces of life", depicting a harmonious man, with aesthetic and moral principles embedded in his spiritual and physical appearance.

[40] Following Relay Race on the Ring B, Deyneka's paintings, according to Sysoev, lose genre definitiveness, carrying "a contradictory combination of signs of monumental-decorative stylistics and frankly easel specificity".

The movement of the sportswomen begins at the bottom, continues from the river up to the high bank, initially the girls run directly towards the viewer, and then parallel to the picture plane.

The colours of the earlier painting are poor, the people in the composition are “closed into a monolith,” the artist's attention is focused on creating a unified rhythm and embossed forms.

From the point of view of the author of the book, Deyneka tried to approach the stylistics of Ivan Pyryev's film Cossacks of the Kuban, which dominated the Soviet art of the late 1940s–1950s.

Following Vladimir Sysoev, he noted that many art critics found a number of shortcomings in the film Relay Race, including: traditionalism, narrative, excessive detailing of certain elements of both the plot and the environment.

The British art historian explains the fact that the artist depicted himself in the painting Relay on the B-ring as a transfer of a symbolic baton from the older to the younger generation.

The young athletes, according to O'Mahony, are “projected onto the buildings” depicted on the canvas — the remoteness of each of them corresponds exactly to the place of this or that runner in the relay, that is, “sporting successes and architectural achievements merge into one”.

[49] A British art historian wrote that Relay on the Ring ‘B’ strengthened Aleksandr Deyneka's reputation as one of the leading Soviet painters —interpreters of the theme of sport in the second half of the 1940s.

[3] Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences Svetlana Aranova offers junior schoolchildren a work on Aleksandr Deyneka's painting Relay Race in the textbook Fine Arts for 1st grade.

[50] Doctor of Philology Vladimir Lopatin and his wife Lyudmila Lopatina used a black-and-white reproduction of the painting in the Illustrated Explanatory Dictionary of the Modern Russian Language published in 2007 to explain the meaning of the word Peregat.

The authors of the annotation in the Internet catalog of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation emphasize that the painting and, accordingly, the postcard depict the transmission of a mixed relay race (men and women running together).