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Lwnurdo. Vol I I, pp. 140- 144. Pergamon t’resh IY78. Printed in Great Britain EXTRACTS FROM EUCLIDEAN SPACE, THE BOOK BY K. S. PETROV-VODKIN (1878-1939)* Kirill Sokolov** 1. INTRODUCTION Kuz’ma Sergeyevich Petrov-Vodkin. Russian painter and thinker. was born in 1878in the town of Khvalynsk on the Volga in the family of a cobbler. At an early age he showed an aptitude for drawing and worked for some time as an icon painter. At the age of 17he entered Baron Stiglitz’sCentral School for Technical Drawing and later transferred to the Moscow School of Sculpture and Architecture. from which he graduated in 1904. After this. he travelled for several years about Europe and North Africa studying the methods of early Italian artists, and Gothic and Byzantine art. In 1908he settled in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) and took part in a number of exhibitions arranged by the World of Art (MirI.sku.s.stw) group. Throughout this time he was working out his own method. On the basis of 13th-century Italian painting, icon painting and Gothic art, Petrov-Vodkin elaborated his own system of spherical perspective and his theoretical basis for using colour. Spherical or slanting perspective included the complex system of reversed perspective worked out during the 12th to the 15th centuries but was distinguished by ;I particular ‘planetary’ feeling for space (to use the artist’s own description). In the system of spherical perspective. the line of the horizon was usually placed very high and fell away towards the sides of the picture, giving the impression of an extremely lofty point of view over the curving surface of the Earth, whereas, at the same time. the horizontal areas swelled up as though to set boundaries around extended depths and the verticals were transformed intoa fanlikespread of sloping lines. An integral part of Petrov-Vodkin’s approach to painting was his basis for the use of colour. Having analysed Italian painting, the Novgorod icon-painting school and the works of the Fauvists, he concluded that it was necessary to work on a basis of red, yellow and blue colours taken in a defined tonality. In 1912 he exhibited his ‘TheBathing of the Red Horse’, a tragic and prophetic picture that summed up his theoretical studies and practical experience. There are grounds for the assumption that this picture was influenced by Kandinsky’s lecture ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ delivered for Kandinsky by Kulbin in St. Petersburg at the All-Russian Convention of Artists in 1911. Conversely. it was this picture by Petrov-Vodkin that Kandinsky took as an example to support his thesis that *Euc./ic/cwri Spuw was published by Izd-vo Pisataley v Leningrade in 1933. Extracts translated from the Russian by Avril Pynian are from the republication in the book K . PctrovVodkin . K/t/Iwo,sk. Prostrunst,o Evkliclti. Sur~iurkundiu (Leningrad: Izd-vo Iskusstva, 1970). **Russian artist. c I o Liwnurtio, Pergamon Press. Journals Division. Headington Hill Hall. Oxford OX3 OBW. England. the degree of formalism in any one part of a picture dictates the degreeof formalism in its other parts. The two artists also had much in common in their attitude on the use of colour. After the October Revolution of 1918. which PetrovVodkin acceptcd as the expression of the will of the people, he devoted much time to teaching. at the same time working on a series of ascetic still-lifes. In 1920. he painted his ‘1918in Petrograd’ (often called the Petrograd Madonna). The result of an expedition to Central Asia in 1921 was the Samarkand cycle. carried out in 21 scale of colour ranging from ochre to pale blue, and a book of his impressions entitled Suninrkandiu. During the 10 years that followed, he painted a series of very large portraits and, in 1934. the picture ’The Air-Raid Warning, 1919’. painted with sharply contrastedjuxtaposition of pink and blue. In 1937. two years before he died. a one-man retrospective exhibition was organized for PetrovVodkin . Apart from painting. he worked as a stagedesigner and illustrator of his own books. His techniquesand theoretical ideas offer an interesting basis for further development, for they represent one of the few successful, non...

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