Spring (Plastov painting)
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.
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.
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.
[1][2] 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.
[1] Snowflakes, white stars, are woven into the golden hair of the woman dressing the girl, melting on her heated "pearly pink" naked body.
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.
[1] 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.
[11] 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.
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.
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).
[8]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.
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.
[21] 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.
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.
The contemporary researcher Tatiana Plastova pointed out that the plasticity of the figure goes back to the type of sculptural composition Crouching Aphrodite (2nd century BC, Doidalsas), examples of which are Lely Venus (British Museum).
In it, she argues that the heroines of most of the artist's lyrical paintings — the list of which, quoted by the researcher in the book, includes Spring — reflect a special type of Russian woman, "the plastic prototype of which was the image of Natalia Alekseevna, his wife".
If the girl had a prototype in the person of Nina Sharymova, the woman can be recognized as the painter's wife in her youth, and his fellow villager Anna Kondratyeva, who posed for one of the preparatory sketches.
Defenders of the painting said that, even though the theme of the naked female body was not a main focus in Soviet art, it should be considered based on ethical and aesthetic standards.
Kostin believed that the bathhouse theme made the painting okay, and its heroine is a normal woman in a natural pose, charming in her youth, simplicity, and health.
From the art historian's point of view, the master was able to express the "chaste purity of the naked female body, with its healthy sensuality, devoid of eroticism", as few artists had succeeded in doing.
[43] The poverty of peasant life in the painting (the bathhouse is black, no electricity, minimal amenities) was of secondary importance to the author, but its depiction in the 1950s was also met with disapproval.
[17] The Soviet art historian Ariadna Zhukova considered the painting to be one of the most interesting works of the artist (including the First Snow, Tractor Drivers' Dinner, When Peace is on Earth).
[44] Speaking about the painting Spring, Zhukova noted that anyone who has been to a Russian bathhouse knows that a woman does not feel cold in the snow after a hot bath, which is why she is not in a hurry to get out from under the falling snowflakes.
The coldly detached, touching image of a child and the simplicity of the plot place the painting on a pedestal of pure joy and chaste love, and the title Spring emphasizes its metaphorical nature.
[46] Later, in a 2018 book, Plastova called Spring the embodiment of Titian's Heavenly Love, contrasting it with the earthly beginnings personified by Aristide Maillol's sculptures and Plastov's earlier works, such as Tractor Woman (1943—1944).
Photographic studies helped to choose the optimal horizon and point of view, transforming a domestic subject into a metaphorical work close to the "eventless genre".
[56] The Russian-speaking Dutch writer of Jewish origin Marina Paley mentions Arkady Plastov's painting in her novel Tribute to the Salamander: A St. Petersburg Romance (2012).
[57] Soviet and Russian art historian, member of the Union of Artists of Russia, director of the State Literary and Memorial Museum — Reserve of Anton Chekhov Melikhovo Yuri Bychkov in the book of memoirs In life, what does not happen (2013) one of the chapters called Bathing grace.
The gray winter light from the street fell on the painting, showing the pink body of a naked young woman crouching in a roofless entryway to dress her washed daughter.
