The art historian Tatyana Nechaeva is to blame for the exhibition. Once upon a time, it was she who found the painting “Harvest of Grapes” on the Internet and became interested in the artist. Photo provided by the agency “Bedush and Marennikova”
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin was strange not only because of his last name. I dreamed of looking into the mouth of a volcano. He traveled by bicycle to Europe. Delighted with the Crimean earthquake … And once he fell and, as he fell, he noticed how much better the world is becoming. This is how the famous theory of spherical perspective was created.
He taught this vision to his students. He writes a landscape of a falling man, a running street, a flying building…
– For some reason, it was believed that the grandfather did not leave school and had no students. But he was a professor at the Academy of Arts! – the granddaughter of the artist Zinaida Barzilovich is offended. (The gray-haired, gray-eyed granddaughter is like two drops of water similar to Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s self-portrait, but for some reason she denies the similarity with all her might: “No, what are you, I’m like my mother, my mother”).
The artist’s granddaughter Zinaida Brazilovich is glad that for the first time at the exhibition they talked about Petrov-Vodkin as a teacher. For some reason, it was not customary to talk about this before. Photo provided by the agency “Bedush and Marennikova”
Thanks to the Moscow Museum and art critic Tatiana Nechaeva, we now know that Petrov-Vodkin had students. Very calm.
Her name was Maria Lomakina. She lived in the Crimea, on the red mountain, which is now bordered by the Komsomolskaya metro station. After studying with Petrov-Vodkin in St. Petersburg, the artist moved to the Moscow region and worked all her life with her husband at the Zagorsk toy factory. Courtyard with leaking barrels, mountain ash – one of the landscapes of Maria Lomakina. From the window of this house, she painted a lot of terrible, touching and ordinary things, such as a military provincial landscape in which a woman with a sleigh and a coffin on a sleigh got lost.
Marina Alekseevna Lomakina, the artist’s daughter, collected her mother’s inheritance all her life. Photo provided by the agency “Bedush and Marennikova”
In the forties, in order to keep warm, Andrey Petrov’s husband’s toys were burned on the stove in this house. In the sixties, the house itself collapsed, burying part of his canvases under it.
His early work is similar to that of a teacher. They were hung like this: mixed, without dividing the aisles.
– Find where from whom – offers the guide.
If you don’t look at the picture, then it’s easy to understand. Petrov-Vodkin has good, solid frames. Student canvases are framed with ordinary boards. There was no money for frames at all, so before this exhibition opened, most of the canvases were rolled up, so that even his own daughter didn’t recognize them unfolded.
Self-portrait of Marina Lomakina
Photo: Evgenia KOROBKOVA
One of the curious paintings is a reverse, displayed on a special partition with a hole. You look from the side – a portrait of a woman. You look from the other – an inverted still life.
Working on his paintings, Petrov-Vodkin relied on icon painting images. But contemporaries did not take this innovation lightly. They scolded her for the “unpleasant” use of pink and blue, for the strange texture of the faces.
Once, while in the Crimea, Petrov-Vodkin painted a portrait of Maximilian Voloshin, and instead of thanking him, he called the work his worst image.
Modern viewers, accustomed to Instagram filters, sympathize with the artist’s wife. After all, a French woman and her husband wrote so little praise that even a Russian would have been offended long ago.
“First they look at the photos, and then they ask: why did your grandfather dislike your grandmother so much?” says Petrov-Vodkin’s granddaughter. – I answer that not every person can withstand such a study.
landscape from the window
Photo: Evgenia KOROBKOVA
Maria Lomakina was not ashamed. The artist’s self-portrait was painted as if by the merciless hand of a master. The same relief of her face with accentuated attention to each wrinkle. The same “Petrov-Vodkin” color scheme and even a pink scarf, in which Maria was not afraid to pose.
– With potato eyes. Mom told herself “pop-eyed,” a white-haired woman in a wheelchair says fondly.
This is Marina Alekseevna Lomakina, the artist’s daughter. A woman pulls a yellow rectangle covered in gray ink out of an old-fashioned bag. Petrov-Vodkin’s letter to her mother. The letters are almost invisible, but Marina Alekseevna confidently reads the lines in which the teacher complains about her poor health and sends greetings to the Lomakina family.
This display might not have happened if it weren’t for the chain of events. First, art critic Tatyana Nechaeva first found the painting “Harvest of Grapes” on the Internet. Interested in a new name. The search for heirs gave an unexpected result.
“Vintage” painting
Photo: Evgenia KOROBKOVA
When the doorbell rang in the apartment of 86-year-old Marina Alekseevna, she began to cry. She dedicated her entire life to seeing the light of her mother’s legacy.
– Tell me something? – asks a journalist with a microphone.
– I’ll tell you, – Marina Alekseevna smiles. – I was very afraid of not living. But today I am the happiest person in the world.
KP REFERENCE
#PetrovVodkinLomakin exhibition. The Crimean Element”, brought together 150 works by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and his student Maria Lomakina. The exhibition, which opens a new name, was correctly linked to the year of the teacher and mentor announced this year. The project was prepared by the Gallery of Russian State Art, the new federal museum of fine arts, which is being built in Sevastopol.The works were provided by 28 museums.The exhibition is open until June 13. Ticket price – from two hundred rubles.
