Ural Pictures by Roman Semashkevich: The Principle of Narration

Abstract

This article analyses the Ural period in the creative work of R. M. Semashkevich and the master’s previously unknown works. Contemporaries perceived the artist as a person of natural talent, who abstained from disputes about the ways of development of Soviet art. However, Semashkevich’s correspondence testifies to his critical view of the decision of the authorities to limit creative freedom, he wanted to demonstrate a different approach to socialist realism. It was important for him to build a method by which a painter, even staying within the framework of the ideological order, would be able to cultivate objective artistic values. Semashkevich’s artistic method of the early 1930s is characterised by the significant role of the pace of drawing; in his sketches, created in rapid succession, in one breath, the viewer is captured not only by their external accuracy, but also by the author’s passion, his mastery of the “narrator”. The directness of the “narrative” with all the possible angularities and conventions gives the viewer a sense of complicity, and it is on this that the artist builds his principle of narrative. It was important for the master not only to fix nature, but also to find a composition move, and build a figurative scene in a figurative way. The artist went on a trip across Northern Urals (1933) and then worked in Zlatoust (1934–1935), trying to find his “direction in the present”. His creative business trip became an opportunity for him to realise his individual artistic programme: he borrowed his plots from stories by old Bolsheviks — participants of the Revolution and the Civil war, and developed a special system of narration, combining elements of primitivism, popular print, and references to Barbizon painters and Cezanne. At a personal exhibition in Zlatoust, he presented historical and revolutionary paintings in which he demonstrated his understanding of the new realistic art. Using “graphic paradoxes” and colour dissonances, he created a sense of internally contradictory historical action in which casual episodes were characterised by the power of a heroic legend, and the artistic system verging on the primitivism or theatrical decorativeness gave rise to a sense of authenticity.