Study of a Laundress
unknown
Basic information
- ID
- Ivanova-38
- Author
- unknown
- Name
- Study of a Laundress
- Date of creation
- 1935
- Technique
- photocopy (printed on paper)
Additionally
- Genre
- portrait
- Provenance
- Antonina Ivanova's archive
- Place
- Moscow (?) (USSR)
Information about author
Object description
The photo print shows a study of a laundress – an antique figure of a woman with a laundry basket (on the back, there is a simple pencil inscription in russian: "Ivanova A.M. Sketch of a laundress, 1935"). Despite the declared domesticity of the scene, the influence of Raphael Santi's compositional explorations is noticeable, in particular his fresco "The Fire in the Borgo" (Apostolic Palace in the Vatican, 1514), where the extreme figure on the right with two jugs resonates with Antonina Ivanova's work (it is likely that the artist was familiar with Aby Warburg's concepts, especially his attention to the nature of "wandering images"). In addition to this compositional aspect, the work shows modernist tendencies of the 1910s and 1920s, especially those of Latin American painters (such as Jose Orozco), with a particular approach to form and stylisation that makes the work seem monumental and massive, almost sculptural in its tonal solution. This approach to combining everyday life and visual expressiveness may be partly related to the pathos of the new heroics within the aesthetics of "Soviet antiquity", which implied that in themes related to agricultural work or the labour of proletarians, there was room for a rethinking of the ordinary people of the 1920s and 1940s, the "titanic images" of the art of Ancient Greece and Rome and, of course, the Italian Renaissance. This was not something unique at the time and had echoes, for example, of the comprehension of the traditions of the grand and majestic in a modern context, as was the case in the official aesthetics of the Novocento or the films of Leni Riefenstahl ("Olympia", 1938).
Legal regulation
Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery
