Msta River
Tkachev, Sergei Petrovich
1922 -
Msta River
Oil on canvas
70 x 100cm
1980
Signed and dated on reverse
PROVENANCE:
Private collection Nizhny Novgorod
LITERATURE:
Authenticated by Elena Petrovna, Director of the Tkachev brothers Museum, and identified as a study for the 1980's work, Folk Memory(150 x 214cm), in that museum.
Msta River is a fresh and colourful painting by Sergei Tkachev from 1980. The wind whistles through the beach trees catching the leaves and branches. A couple of children are playing in the forground and enjoying the warm Russian summer's day. There is a village the far side of the blue river. The Tkachevs were particlularly good at capturing such simple scenes of the Russian countryside.
The brothers around 1980
The Tkachev brothers, who mainly worked in collaboration, and sometimes individually, are considered amongst the most important of the Moscow School of painters that dominated Russian painting after the Second World War. This golden period of Russian painting sometimes known as the second generation of Russian Impressionism developed in the more relaxed atmosphere in the Soviet Union that arrived after the death of Stalin in 1953.
Sergei Tkackev in uniform in WWII (1943)
There is a realism and honesty that pervades their work that speaks to viewers in a universal language that transcends language and culture. As the brothers themselves have said, “Our paintings tell our life stories. The subjects are not fantasies, they all spring from real people, real events, and from stories told to us by our elders. Part of our souls are in each one.”
There was a retrospective of the brothers work at the Tretyakov Gallery in 2011. For some of those works see:-
http://englishrussia.com/2011/04/20/two-brothers-one-passion/
