No matter how much I look at this picture, a glance each time, having slipped past the “culprit”, passes on to the lines of the walls, the windows, the trees and the houses looking at it. What happened to them? Why did they suddenly deviate from their horizontals and verticals, set in motion and rush somewhere up and to the left?
So the peasant hut swung around like a cradle and swam, joining someone’s unknown dance, so strange for those used to the fixed, static background of the eye… It’s clear that the artist’s quirk with the funny name Kuzma and the ridiculous last name Petrov-Vodkin hinting at the accustomed to “clarity” of the mind that you will not find the depths here? And then the eye attracts, attracts with its blue rectangle of the window… The window in the picture always “played a role” – it beckoned the horizon, the scarecrow with the enormity of the world and called to remain protected by the house, but invariably opposed, endowed with opposite characteristics planetary
Petrov-Vodkin window – connects, unites. As a boy, he made an amazing “cosmic discovery” – lying on his back on a hill above the Volga, he saw the earth as a planet. “Having seen the entire horizon with my eyes, perceiving it entirely, I found myself on a segment of a ball, and the ball was hollow, with inverse concavity – I found myself in a bowl covered with a three-quarter bowl of the sky. The unexpected, completely new sphericity hugged me on this Zatonovsky hill. the dizzying seizure was that the ground was not horizontal and the Volga kept on the sheer roundness of its massif, and I did not lie, but, as it were, hung on the earth’s wall. “
Years later, this discovery was transformed into his theory of spherical perspective. So this is why the lines of the picture rush up and to the left – in fact, as if in a bowl, as if in the careful palms of the house and the planet are mother and child! But the Earth – remember? – wanderer. It does not stop for a second, making every moment a dizzying movement – around its axis, around the Sun, around the center of the Galaxy, together with the Solar System, together with the Galaxy around some other unknown center… inhabitant, makes the same dizzying movement, participates in the common life of planets and stars, life where everything is interdependent, where invisible connecting threads are stretched from everything to everything… Only a man has long forgotten about it. Limited his living space – and limited himself.
He divided the whole into pieces, appropriating one of them, and lost its own integrity. And the artist, who felt it, like many at the turn of two centuries – two epochs, was most important to restore the lost integrity. “To be human collectors on the ground” – in this Petrov-Vodkin saw the role, the task of the people of art… That is why the simple peasant hut, rocking like a cradle, involves its inhabitants and the spectator in its movement, the general movement of the whole diverse life! To return a person to the planet, and to a person – a planet… But is this enough to “unite together all the beauty of the world outlook divided by nations and countries” in order to restore integrity to a person? For this, he needs a support, his own axis, around which he could build his life – all that is important and valuable to him is needed,
The semantic center of the picture is the figure of the mother. There seems to be nothing remarkable in it – a young pretty peasant woman, carefully hugging, feeding her child… But something in her elusively reminds Madonna of the Italian Renaissance and Russian Mother of God – position of a figure, posture, glance is not “literally quoted,” but draw to that eternal image, which inspired both Renaissance artists and our icon painters, to the image of Motherhood. And that means care, protection, Love, which embraces, warms, gives and protects the life of not only the child, but everything that surrounds her, what she touches – Love, which protects Life. Mother is also the Home, the earthly homeland and the Heavenly Homeland, the origins of man on earth and the Origins in Heaven…
The figure of the woman in the picture is the only vertical, the only axis. It as if gathers around itself all that without which it is difficult for a person to be realized, to find support, it is difficult to be. Can he, not remembering his origins, escape from loneliness and fear? to resist the winds of despair and disbelief? Can you really love and sympathize, respond to the pain of others, tear to another for help? Will learn how to create? Will you understand why you came to Earth? ..
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