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Original oil painting by master painter Nikolai Bogdonov-Belski.
The piece measures 64" x 50" overall.
Signed and dated on the back.
Closed corner, gilded frame handcrafted by Richard Tobey.
This painting comes from our collection of original Soviet-era oil paintings.
The history of Russian Impressionist painting is the tale of an extraordinary movement in the art of the twentieth century. The concept of "Soviet Social Realism," a.k.a. Russian impressionism, emphasized the social role of art; it insisted on the superiority of content over form and required a wholesale return to traditional skills, regarding history and European art from the Renaissance as a living source of inspiration.
In the ensuing years, artists struggled between their duty to reflect the ideals of the State and developing their own stylistic repertoire as party leaders demanded that art should be "understood" by the average person. Somehow, Russian artists managed to perform a delicate balancing act between the requirements of "accepted" working class art by painting poetic scenes in which the worker, farmer, or monumental Russian industry are the primary subjects.
With the death of Stalin in 1953, the darker academic pallet began to lighten and the need to conform to rigid subjects eased. This was the beginning of what is known as the "Severe Style" of Social Realism. The fall of the Soviet Empire took with it the last of the social realist art form. By 1990, all that was left of Russian Impressionism was a body of work created in the five previous decades by a few masters and their progeny.
About Nikolai Bogdonov-Belski:
Nikolai Petrovich Bogdanov-Belski was born in the Shitiki, Smolensk province of Russia in December of 1868. He studied art at the Semyon Rachinsky fine art school, icon-painting at the Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra in 1883, modern painting at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1884 - 1889, and at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg from 1894 - 1895. He worked and studied in private studios in Paris in the late 1890s. Bogdanov-Belsky painted mostly genre paintings, especially of the education of peasant children, portraits, and impressionistic landscapes studies. Realist art was strongly disfavored by the Soviet Union, compelling the artist to flea to Latvia in 1921. He would eventually relocate to Berlin as a result of the Soviet Occupation of the Baltic States. Bogdanov-Belsky was killed in February of 1945 as a result of allied bombing.
