Peasant Family

The photograph (no author's or later inscriptions) shows the final version of the composition "Peasant Family" by Antonina Ivanova as part of an interior painting project organised and curated in collaboration with Mykhailo Boichuk and his other students (according to another photograph from the artist's archive, which is kept in the Gallery, the participants included Yevhen Kholostenko, Onufrii Biziukov, Kyrylo Hvozdyk, Mykola Rokytskyi, Manuil Shekhtman, Mykola Pavliuk, and Oleksandr Myzin). Numerous sketches of both the final version of the composition and its intermediate versions (polychrome and graphic, on plywood and paper from the Gallery's collection, on tracing paper from the Central Department of Art and Materials Management) show how the artist sought formal solutions that reflect the influence of the Orthodox monumental art of the Middle Ages and ideas consistent with the practices of the Italian Renaissance. At the same time, the photograph of the final version differs significantly from the earlier versions precisely because of the style, in which the flatness of the sketches receives an entirely different solution to spatial problems. The images in the finished mural are more material and stable, which can be clearly seen in the interpretation of the bodies and emotions of the figures – father, mother, and son. At the same time, the idea of the father as the embodiment of scientific and technological progress is most evident here since he is not simply a labourer in the field but an educated person of a new type who, thanks to the educational programme, can read (a newspaper in his hand) and work as quickly and efficiently as possible in connection with the processes of radical change in the organisation of labour, which is expressed by means of a stylised wheel from what is probably a Farmall Regular tractor manufactured by International Harvester. The woman standing next to him is talking to her husband, perhaps explaining how mechanisation will soon radically change the entire process of agricultural work, including harvesting (the woman is holding a simple hand sickle and a bundle of wheat or rye). The child standing between them is the central figure and the hope of the new era, in which education and science, peace and progress were to become the central themes, which corresponded to the tasks of visual agitation of the time, is present in posters and paintings of a monumental and easel character. For unknown reasons, the photograph has been mechanically damaged in the centre, with a fragment of the newspaper and the elbow of the woman's right hand missing. In addition, the sheet to which the photograph is glued is burnt along the bottom, probably during the fire. As a result of the fire, Antonina Ivanova, who had limited mobility, died.

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery