Alexander Alexandrovich Deineka

Moscow, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Vsesoyuznaya khudozhestvennaya vystavka 1949 goda, 1949
Moscow, Leningrad, USSR Academy of the Arts, Vystavka proizvedenii: A.A.Deineka, 1957
Moscow, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Aleksandr Deineka:  'Rabotat’, Stroit’ i ne nyt'!' Zhivopis’, Grafika. Skulptura, 2010, No.223

Exhibition catalogue Vystavka proizvedenii: A.A.Deineka, Moscow, 1957, p.21 listed under works from 1949
N.Aleksandrova, E.Voronovich, Aleksandr Deineka : Zhivopis’, Grafika, Skul’ptura, Moscow: Interrosa, 2010, p.128, no.223 listed under works from 1949

Structural Condition The canvas is unlined and is securely attached to a newly-made keyed wooden stretcher. The turnover and tacking edges have been strengthened with a strip-lining. There is an inscription in the extreme upper right as viewed from the reverse. Paint Surface The paint surface has an even varnish layer. There are a few very tiny losses just above the centre of the lower edge. There are some very fine lines of craquelure, mainly concentrated within the sky and within the paler pigments in the upper part of the composition. These appear stable and are not visually distracting. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows scattered retouchings, most notably along the edges of the composition and in the upper right corner, within the roof of the building in the upper left, an area within the sky just above the right side of the trees in the centre of the composition, an area to the left of the standing tree on the right of the composition and an area within the water to the left of the rightmost figure. There are also scattered retouchings within and around the figures and decking in the foreground of the composition. There are other scattered areas of fluorescence which may possibly be retouchings or may be reworkings by the artist. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in reasonably good and stable condition having been restored in the past and would benefit from infilling and retouching the minor paint losses mentioned above.
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Executed in 1949 and exhibited the same year at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Evening at the Kolkhoz was painted during a period of intense collectivisation and presents the ideal Soviet ‘brigade’ at rest.  Athletic, healthy and rosy-cheeked, this group is the product of a perfectly functioning state. Despite the rural setting, we are notified that the workers are informed and literate: at the very centre of the composition a young man holds a book and an edition of Pravda newspaper is prominent in the lower left corner. The central trio represent an ideal family unit. As we find often even in Deineka’s early work, the strong female representation is noticeable – women are in the majority here and very obviously presented as equals to their male counterparts, whether in their capacity to work (the dairy-workers in the background) or converse – both the young (far right) and old (far left). The girl seated on the balustrade recalls the cyclist Kolkhoznitsa on a Bicycle (fig.1), another tanned figure in red set against a green background.

The parallels between Soviet and American realist art of this period have often been remarked on and the comparisons seem particularly apt here. The homogeneity and sense of contentment in the present work recall Norman Rockwell’s famous Freedom from Want (1942) in which a meal is presented to a similarly crowded table, loaded with a wholesome array of fruit and vegetables. Rockwell’s picture was one of four works created in response to each of the ‘four freedoms’ in President Franklin D. Roosevelt annual speech to Congress in 1941, eleven months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. When they were published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943 the popular reaction was overwhelming, with over 25,000 readers requesting full-colour reproductions.  On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. The disconnect presented by both artists, American and Soviet, between the domestic idyll and the reality of war or escalating international tensions are hard for the modern day viewer to ignore.

From the 1920s onwards a number of Deineka’s contemporaries were involved in the design of clothes and developing geometric fabric patterns. Deineka was a particularly gifted textile designer and studied under Varvara Stepanova at the textile department of VKhUTEMAS, an interest of his which is most famously represented in Textile Workers (1927) at the State Russian Museum and which extends to his later works. The brightly patterned carpet in the present work is found in Flowers on a Carpet (1948), and his famous Self Portrait (1948) shows a similar array of traditional and fabricated materials, from thick-wove almost Uzbek rugs and blankets to finely embroidered Ukrainian detailing and printed cloths.

In terms of composition, the lone conifer to the right of the present work is characteristic of Deineka’s sweeping landscapes, recalling earlier works such as Evening (fig.2, The State Tretyakov Gallery). The frieze-like qualities evoke his work from the 1930s, in particular his mosaic designs for the Mayakovskaya station of the Moscow metro.

The reference to the state newspaper and the idealized treatment of the theme are not incidental: in the late 1940s, Deineka was accused of 'formalism' and dismissed from his position as the head of the Moscow Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts in Moscow, which was soon shut down altogether. As a form of social commentary by one of Russia’s leading 20^th century artists, Evening at the Kolkhoz is an important historical record of a pivotal period of Soviet history.  The present lot is also thought to have been included in Deineka’s 1969 solo exhibition in Budapest and his 1972 solo exhibition in Warsaw; neither catalogue is available for reference.