Arkady Plastov

Biography

Snow is falling. By a bathhouse a young woman, completely undressed, is dressing a little girl; behind them lie snow-covered pastures. This painting by Arkady Plastov, “Spring”, was nicknamed the “Northern Venus” and is regarded as a turning point for Soviet painting: for the first time since socialist realism was introduced, an ordinary village scene with no political meaning at all had made it onto canvas.

Its date is given variously, as 1951 or 1954. By then its author was already a Stalin Prize laureate and had been painting the collective-farm village for over a decade.

He was born on 19 (31) January 1893 in Prislonikha, in Simbirsk Province, into a family of icon painters. In 1903 he was sent to the Simbirsk church school, from 1908 he studied at the Simbirsk Theological Seminary, and then he left for Moscow. He drew under Dmitry Arkhangelsky, briefly attended Ilya Mashkov’s studio, studied at the Stroganov School in 1912–1914, where Fyodor Fedorovsky was among his teachers, and then entered the sculpture department of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. There he was taught by the painters Alexei Korin, Apollinary Vasnetsov, Abram Arkhipov, Alexei Stepanov and Leonid Pasternak and by the sculptor Sergei Volnukhin.

In 1917 he returned to Prislonikha and began painting from nature. A story is attached to the same year: at a Moscow railway station a patrol nearly shot him, because his greatcoat had buttons with eagles on them and the young man was taken for a spy; an elderly patrolman saved him. From 1917 to 1922 Plastov was secretary of the village council and of the committee of the poor in his native village, and in 1927–1930 he worked for publishing houses in Moscow.

Another story is also told without documents, and I give it with that caveat. In 1929 agitators came to the village and began urging the peasants to collect money for a tractor. Plastov asked what they would do with the tractor if it broke down and suggested buying horses instead. The next day he was arrested and accused of opposing the Party line, and he spent almost four months in custody while his fellow villagers wrote letters to various authorities.

From 1935 his genre paintings began to appear at exhibitions. “Bathing the Horses” was painted for the exhibition “Twenty Years of the Red Army”, “Collective Farm Festival” (1937) for “The Industry of Socialism”, followed by “Collective Farm Herd” (1938). His fellow villagers sat for him. With him a scene hardly ever exists apart from the landscape, and often there is no event at all: people mow, eat, ride along, rest, and that is enough for a picture. I think this is where he kept the most freedom. The war years brought “A Fascist Plane Has Flown Over” (1942), “Women Tractor Drivers” (1943–1944), “Harvest” and “Haymaking” (1945), in which women, old men and children work the collective-farm fields; for the last two he received the Stalin Prize, first class, in 1946. After the war came “The First Snow” (1946), “Going to the Elections” (1947), “Collective Farm Threshing Floor” (1949), “Tractor Drivers’ Supper” (1951), “Rodnik” (“The Spring”, 1952) and “In Summer” (1954). In 1973 “Tractor Drivers’ Supper” was printed on a Soviet postage stamp.

He did a great deal of illustration: Nekrasov’s “Red-Nosed Frost” (1948), Pushkin’s “The Captain’s Daughter” (1948–1949), Tolstoy (two colour temperas for “The Cossacks”, 1952–1953, now in the State Tolstoy Museum), a story by Chekhov (1954). For children’s books he made watercolours of village life and nature; he also drew agricultural posters and wrote literary texts himself.

Official recognition came steadily. In 1937 he was admitted to the Union of Artists, in 1945 he became Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR, in 1947 a member of the USSR Academy of Arts, in 1956 People’s Artist of the RSFSR, and in 1962 People’s Artist of the USSR. In 1947–1950 he was a deputy of the Ulyanovsk regional council; in 1958 he received an honorary diploma at the World’s Fair in Brussels, in 1966 the Lenin Prize for the cycle “People of the Collective-Farm Village” (1951–1965), and in 1968 he became secretary of the board of the Union of Artists of the USSR. These years produced “Portrait of the Artist Kiselyov” (1961), “March in the Village” (1965) and “The Letter” (1971).

Plastov died on 12 May 1972 in Prislonikha. That same year he was posthumously awarded the Repin State Prize of the RSFSR for the paintings “Bonfire in a Field” and “Out of the Past” and for portraits of his contemporaries. Since 1988 his house museum has been open in Prislonikha, which in 2017 became the museum reserve “Prislonikha, Birthplace of A. A. Plastov”; in 2010 another Plastov museum opened in Ulyanovsk.