Leonid Kudryavtzev introduced by Pat Simpson*

The artist works in the media of drawing, oil and watercolour; his oeuvre covers a wide range of genres and subject matter: historical and narrative painting, industrial and rural landscapes, still lifes of flowers, portraits and studio nudes. His art education allowed him to develop considerable skill at making accurate resemblances of people, places and objects. This was of course a necessary part of Socialist Realist practice, particularly in the dark days of the ‘Zhdanovshchina' (1946-50), when artists were increasingly persecuted for tendencies towards Impressionistic representation, and emphatically encouraged to imitate models of Russian Realist Art approved by the Communist Party. Yet even before Khruschev's ‘Thaw', Kudryavtzev was deviating from the official models of painting practice to make impressionistic, sensitive portraits of local people and sketches of industrial riversides that used simplified colour and form, reminiscent of Martyros Saryan and Grygoriy Shyshko.

From 1960s onwards, the gradual relaxation of the rules governing the style and content of Socialist Realist painting allowed Kudryavtzev more scope to explore different styles of composition, brushwork and colour use. Some of his portraits from the 1960s and 1970s use the sparse and confrontational ‘Severe Style' of Socialist Realism, others begin to show a division of interest between depicting the character of the sitter and rendering the coloured pattern of their clothing. Also during this period, Kudryavtzev's narrative painting began to become more stylised in ways that were often reminiscent of Fedir Krychevsky (1879-1947), a Ukrainian artist and Professor of the Kyiv Academy of Art. This relationship became stronger in the 1980s as Kudryavtzev's narrative and industrial painting took on more frieze-like compositions and even bolder colour. The landscapes in particular evoke a sense of specific times, places and seasons through the presentation of particular qualities of the light, keenly observed.

* Dr. Pat Simpson is Senior Lecturer in History and Visual Culture at the University of Hertfordshire, England.

Portrait of Young Man 1970 o/b 40x40