Soviet artist Arkady Rylov

In Blue Vastness. Soviet artist Arkady Rylov (17 January 1870 – June 22, 1939, Leningrad, the USSR)

One of the first landscape paintings of great ideological content is a picture of a prominent Soviet artist Arkady Rylov “In Blue vastness”, created in 1918. This picture is part of a number of those works, from which starts the history of Soviet art. And this is absolutely correct, because “In Blue Vastness” – one of the first significant ideologically and artistically works created in the first years of Soviet power, though those that have retained not only its historical value, but also today give us a living aesthetic pleasure. The painting was as if the result of many searches and achievements of the artist for all his previous artistic life … Arkady Rylov – wonderful landscape painter, the successor of the great traditions of the Russian school of painting, who created one of the first impressive images of Lenin (“Lenin in Razliv”) – leader, fighter, builder of the new life, which entered the treasury of Soviet art.

Soviet artist Arkady Rylov. Hot day. 1922 Oil on canvas

Soviet artist Arkady Rylov (17 January 1870 – June 22, 1939, Leningrad, the USSR) was landscape painter, graphic artist and teacher. Member of the “World of Art”, “Union of Russian Artists” AHRR, a founding member of the Leningrad Union of Artists, the Leningrad Institute Professor of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture of the Russian Academy of Arts, Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1935).

A. Rylov. Squirrels. Pencil

Throughout all his creative life, the theme of landscapes closely intertwined with his other topic – the theme of the joy of struggle and overcoming obstacles. Swans and seagulls, to which he dedicated a series of paintings, were for him the embodiment, the symbol of a free life and freedom. The originality of this symbolism lays in the fact that it was based on his observations of life as an expert of animal and bird life.

Through his painting Rylov expresses the sentiments of many of his contemporaries, for whom the revolution was a long-awaited cleansing storm, opening the door to the kingdom of justice, of goodness and light for all common people.