One of the first state artists of the new country, the founder of the official style and the canonical image of the leaders was Isaak Brodsky. Favorite pupil of Ilya Repin, a painter with a light touch of salon, after the Revolution, he devoted his work to the communist theme.
The first portrait of Vladimir Ilyich “Lenin and the manifestation” Brodsky wrote in 1919. A slightly tired person with a kind and intelligent face looks at the viewer from the canvas. The hand of Lenin lies on a white, unremarkable, at first glance, paper – manifestations. Parade and some “Soviet” pathos of the portrait gives a background – purple, dynamically developing drapery.
Above the sheet the artist marks a symbolic action, the result of the manifestation and the Revolution – a gray alarming area, along which there is a crowd of proletarians carrying banners. The canvas “Lenin and Manifestation” marked the beginning of a huge series of portraits of the Leader executed by Brodsky, the most famous of which was the work “Lenin in Smolny.”
