Kuzma Petrov Vodkin

• Russian and Soviet painter and writer.
• Born into family of a local shoemaker in a small town on the River Volga.
• His first works were icons and landscapes produced in oil paint. He was inspired by the works of local icon and sign painters who let him observe them at work.
• Having failed his college entrance exams he turned to art classes by Fedor Burov, founder of the first art school in Samara.
• Following the death of Burov he studied at the Baron Stieglitz School in St. Petersburg, later switching to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.
• In the late 19th/early 20th century symbolism was the current trend, however Petrov was dissatisfied with this form of expression. 
• After finishing 7 years at the Moscow school Vodkin was encouraged to go abroad. In Munich he took classes at the Anton Aschbe. He also visited Italy, France and Northern Africa. 
• In 1906 he met Maria Iovanovic, they married and in 1908 returned to Russia, St. Petersburg where they had one daughter.
• His early works were heavily inspired by French and German symbolism, however he broke away from symbolism turning instead to recognise and display the beauty of his homeland's landscape, culture and people.

 

Bathing of the Red Horse,1912 - Kuzma Petrov Vodkin.

• The work that made him famous.
• simple plot.
• colours bright, red dominating
• scene appears static however tension is evident.
• based on contrasts

• At the beginning of the 1900s his works were an attempt to synthesize Western and Eastern painting.
• He developed the theory of "spherical perspective", this used the incline of the vertical axis to turn planes towards the viewer, helped to cover large spaces, convey motion and could be viewed from different perspectives.
• Through the 1920s he continued to explore perspective and composition in his work.
• He experimented with colour, with red, blue and yellow as the basis for uniting forms and grounds.

Portrait of Lenin (1934) - Kuzma Petrov Vodkin

• Petrov Vodkin  tried to display a humanistic view of life, creating many portraits such as the one above.
• He placed the individual traits of the sitter in the background, the sitter is shown as a thoughtful observer, blending with their surroundings.
• The artist had to give up painting for several years after contracting tuberculosis, the smell of oil paints aggravated his lungs.
• He died on the 15th February 1939, he was swiftly fogotten by the Soviet era, only to be rediscovered in the last 2 decades.