"Portrait of war in three dimensions" Automatic translate

The exhibition is dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War and shows little-known and first presented graphic works of Alexander Deineka and Leonid Soifertis, sculptures of Boris Orlov, as well as documentary photographs of war correspondent Boris Fishman-Borisov and front-line pilot Alexander Zenin.

The theme of the Great Patriotic War can be unconditionally considered one of the most inexhaustible in the domestic art of the twentieth century and the present due to the fact that such a large-scale tragedy initially became the bare nerve of our history. Within the framework of this exhibition, the many-sided portrait of the war was captured by means of graphics, sculptures and photographs performed by authors, different in style dimensions, but united in their piercing indifference to this War.

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Deineka (1899–1969) identified a military theme as one of the most significant sections of his art, in which the graphic part remains relatively little known today. For Leonid Vladimirovich Soifertis (1911–1996), war became one of the key and best pages of his creative activity. It is important to remember here that Deineka was sent only twice for a short time to the war zone, while Soifertis went through almost the entire war as an artist in front-line newspapers.

But Deineka’s relatively short front-line impressions were abundantly compensated sometimes by eerie “portrait” sketches of the War, which strangely did not fit into the more usual epic interpretation of the military theme in Russian art. A similar expressionist perspective on Deineka’s military graphics, sometimes populated with fantasy, almost surrealistic images, is often seen in depicting scenes related to the rear.

Unlike Deineka, who, in almost every military sketch and sketch, seeks to create a symbol of military tragedy that is extremely naked in his sharpness, Soifertis carefully and unhurriedly, although no less expressively and accurately captures everyday moments that are funny and often romantically painted. It is they who contrastly fill the phase of soldier life, which is especially vulnerable in the war, with a mood of warm humor, soft grotesque and lyrical experience.

Along with military eyewitness Deyneka and war participant Soifertis, one of the most prominent contemporary artists Boris Konstantinovich Orlov (born 1941), as a peer of the beginning of World War II and the son of a front-line soldier, objectively did not remain aloof from this topic, although he implemented it in the spirit of his existential creative "metaposition" and ironic "imperial" style. The sculptures he created, paradoxical in developing the form and content - as if anti-portrait, but hyper-ceremonial busts or pseudo-historical portraits - carry a polar synthesis of sublime and anecdotal, real and grotesque, pathos and tragedy.

Finally, an unforgettable “portrait of the war” was left to us by photography, the convincing art of which can be traced to the example of the works of the military photojournalist of the newspapers Krasnaya Zvezda and Komsomolskaya Pravda Boris Yakovlevich Fishman-Borisov (1910-1981). His natural and artistic photographs depict a whole chronicle of the Great Patriotic War from the ominously harsh parade of troops leaving for the front in November 1941 on Red Square to the terrible scenes of liberated Auschwitz and the piercing views of ruined cities, and especially Berlin after street fighting in 1945. At the same time, Fishman-Borisov, present in valuable photo documents, and a lyrical-everyday line are organically supplemented by unpretentious, but courageously moving live scenes of military everyday life in amateur hiking photographs of pilot Alexander Ivanovich Zenin (1921–1999), who fought as part of an attack air division.

Thus, through graphics, sculptures and photographs, so different, at first glance, the artists were able to create a capacious and impressive portrait of the Great Patriotic War, characterized by amazing integrity and weighty completeness.