The anguish and joy of Boris Kustodiev - the artist who wrote life-affirming canvases chained to the bed

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Almost every artist leaves behind his own unique world, frozen in colors. Some create a reality that reflects the era in which the master lived, others - an imaginary reality. One of these artists at the beginning of the 20th century was Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, who created a vivid dream world about provincial Russia. But few people know that for fifteen years of his life the painter suffered from a serious illness and was unable to move.

By nature, Boris Mikhailovich inherited a sensitive, soft and shy nature. And at the same time he had a firm, purposeful character and extraordinary capacity for work. Once an exhibition of the works of the Itinerants was held in their city, and this made a huge impression on 9-year-old Boris - he firmly decided to become an artist. At the age of 15, he began taking painting lessons from the Astrakhan artist Vlasov. And three years later he became a student of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, a student of Repin himself.

Kustodiev graduated from the Academy with a gold medal and was sent abroad for an internship. And after returning from there, the artist quickly gained recognition in Russia. A unique world appeared on his canvases - completely original and inimitable.

The search for an individual creative role led the artist to the idea of creating an unusual world of the Russian province in its ceremonial, festive hypostasis. The purity and brightness of the colors, the decorativeness of the clothes and interiors, the "tasty" still lifes painted and the thorough detailing of Kustodiev's paintings were consonant with the popular print, an art form close to popular perception. The plot orientation of the artist's canvases carried in itself an unattainable folk dream of satiety and prosperity, of an endless celebration of life, where there is no rough reality.

The artist's family in picturesque images

At the age of two, left without a father, Boris had a heightened "sense of family." He, like no other Russian contemporary artist, very often painted pictures reflecting the people closest to him. In paints and graphics, in sculpture and engraving, the master showed love for his family, depicting his relatives in various life situations.

Boris Mikhailovich's love for his wife Yulia Proshinskaya, with whom he fell in love at first sight, was unusually touching. She was the complete opposite of the puffy heroines of his paintings. But from his wife Yulia Kustodiev painted the image of the Mother of God on his icons. In family life, he considered himself the owner of a lucky ticket.

In the Kustodiev family, a son, Cyril, will be born, and a couple of years later, a blue-eyed daughter, Irina. They will be the heroes of the artist's numerous paintings dedicated to the family.

And when the first signs of illness began to appear in Kustodiev, he, overcoming the pain, continued to teach and work hard on the paintings. In 1909, Boris Mikhailovich was diagnosed with a spinal cord tumor. The illness that confined the artist to a wheelchair progressed, and he had to undergo several surgical interventions.

Julia was always there - a friend, and a wife, and a nurse, and a doctor at the same time. And somehow, during another operation, a surgeon came out of the operating room to his wife and said: "We can save one thing: either hands or feet." "He is an artist, leave your hands", - answered Julia. She also invented a wheelchair with a small easel, trying to keep her husband's thirst for life and creativity until the last hour.

Paintings painted in the last years of his life

Despite the hellish pain, Boris painted his canvases lying in bed almost until his last days. And it was during this difficult period that the artist writes the most vivid, temperamental, cheerful works.

The canvases, written in the last fifteen years of his life, he created from memory, thanks to his unique talent. He wrote about Russia, which had already disappeared, but he did not have time to recognize the new one, since his whole world was enclosed by the view from the windows of his apartment.

Throughout his life, in his soul, he remained a big child who idealized everything that happened in reality, piously believing that beauty would save the world.

Remarkably, many paintings date back to 1920 - the hungry year in the Land of the Soviets. When famine mowed down all of Russia, and in Petrograd it raged especially, Boris Kustodiev wrote on his canvases an amazing abundance of food.

Kustodiev died of pneumonia when he was a little over 49 years old in a cold and dark Petrograd apartment, working on a sketch of the triptych "The Joy of Work and Rest." He was buried in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, and in 1948 the ashes and the tombstone were transferred to the Tikhvin cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.

His faithful wife Julia passed away during the siege during the Patriotic War. In the history of art, there were not so many harmonious couples who realized what was given from above in their union: together in sorrow and in joy.

But the ideal of Russian folk beauty for Kustodiev has always been voluptuous russian beauties, which have found a picturesque reflection in his work.