{"id":934,"date":"2020-04-03T03:10:37","date_gmt":"2020-04-03T03:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/?p=934"},"modified":"2020-04-03T03:10:37","modified_gmt":"2020-04-03T03:10:37","slug":"the-pain-of-zinaida-serebriakova","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/nkhumalo\/the-pain-of-zinaida-serebriakova\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pain of Zinaida Serebriakova"},"content":{"rendered":"

Russian artists during this transitive moment in history strove to create paintings, sets, costumes, and literature that sparked all levels of the sensory system and represented society and emotion using evocative methods that classical techniques were not capable of. In a small, emerging sect of the Russian art psyche, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, and Zinaida Serebriakova occupy an even smaller group of women that were part of the symbolist and avant-garde movements. While Goncharova and Popova deserve all of the attention in the world, I\u2019d like to focus on one of Serebriakova\u2019s works since I am least familiar with her.<\/span><\/p>\n

All of her pieces on the class website are wonderful. I have a soft spot for portraits completed by female artists, so I could not resist doing an analysis of a Serebriakova self-portrait completed in 1956. Serebriakova\u2019s use of color and gaze work to reveal the duality of her reactions to her estranged children and residence in Paris: joy at being able to create her art and despair at being away from her eldest kids. Though the background contains green, blue, and red hints that are also present on her body, black permeates throughout. The black demonstrates the lack of control Serebriakova feels over her current situation in France and the oppression she feels from the Soviet government. Even though she is not in the country, they are able to prevent her from seeing her children, two of the people she treasures most in the world. On her blue dress, the left side is a vibrant blue while the right side is such a dark navy that it seems almost black. This explicit color contrast demonstrates the duality of her current state of mind. The blue color of the dress works to show that in bright parts of her life there is still sadness. Her left hand is almost completely covered by the easel to add to the idea that drowning herself in her artwork serves as her only solace from her suffering. The darkness on the right side continues up to her face and draws the viewer\u2019s attention to the face, specifically the eyes. In her portrait, Serebriakova is gazing directly at the viewer. Since Serebriakova painted this image, she is also gazing directly at herself. Gaze allows artists to view an object subjectively. In this case, Zinaida is able to look into her own eyes and peer into her own soul. This creative choice amplifies the dual nature of her mental state and demonstrates just how helpless she is to change her own reality. All she can do is watch.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Russian artists during this transitive moment in history strove to create paintings, sets, costumes, and literature that sparked all levels of the sensory system and represented society and emotion using evocative methods that classical techniques were not capable of. In a small, emerging sect of the Russian art psyche, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, and Zinaida […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1023,"featured_media":935,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-unit-9-the-silver-age-and-revolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1023"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}