In the early 50’s. The joyful perception of the world is replaced by Fedotov’s desperate tragedy. The artist begins to doubt the possibility of moral improvement of society through art, and his characters immediately become passive, and the compositions – static, there is no trace of the coziness and warmth of the early paintings. From things that have lost touch with man, it blows cold.
One of the last paintings, reflecting this attitude of the author, was the picture “Players”. The whole scene depicted on it seems to be a product of a nightmare, which Fedotov is no longer able to fight, he himself is inside this nightmare. Players here kill time, and time kills them. People are divided, alienated from each other. The whole situation of the room in which the players are located seems something unnecessary, lifeless: empty frames hanging on the walls, an old, uncovered table, dimness in the room – everything is a reflection of the gloomy state of people depicted on the canvas.
The poses of the people themselves, their wriggling bodies resembling flames, testify to the resourcefulness of the human mind. In this picture Fedotov portrayed a terrible world, ghostly, with broken ties, a world in which the meaning of existence is lost.
The creative life of the artist was short-lived, but during this time Fedotov was able to become a landmark in the evolution of Russian art from romanticism to realism.
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