Original oil painting by Evgeni Krylov.
The piece measures 55" x 42" 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 Evgeni Ignatevich Krylov:
Evgeni Ignatevich Krylov was born in Moscow in 1926. He later studied at the Kalinin Artistic-Industrial College in Moscow. Unfortunately, like many of these great painters, there is not a lot of available information regarding his life.
