The desire to truly reproduce the nature, characteristic of most landscape painters of the second half of the XIX century, Vrubel gives way to the perception of the natural motive as decorative.
Vrubel, one of the masters of Russian Art Nouveau, worked extensively in the field of monumental, decorative and theatrical art. The richness of the natural motive for him was often only an excuse. His imagination was able to transform a simple flower or bush into a fantastic extravaganza of color and lines.
The artist’s favorite color scheme, which includes all shades of blue, from blue to violet, combined with pink and green, creates a sensation of a flickering, changeable surface. Against the backdrop of a bright, flowering bush “composed” of smears of different textures – the dark silhouette of a female figure. Her features resemble the favorite model and the artist’s wife, the opera singer NI Zabel, while simultaneously recalling the majolica sculptures that Vrubel did based on the opera “Snow Maiden” by NA Rimsky-Korsakov. A kind of fairy lilac is a female figure in the painting “Lilac”, which appears as if from a cluster of shadows under a huge bush, as if radiating a flame.
Vrubel saw in her Pushkin Tatiana. But at the heart of this work are not so much literary or operatic impressions, as living observations on nature. This is indicated by the nature of the ethereal lilacs. But they are also far from open-air etudes of impressionists interested in the transmission of light, air, space. They are notoriously ornamentalized. The artist is looking for decorative beauty in nature.
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