The Visual Content in Representative Paintings of Andrei Pozdeev

During many decades of his fruitful life, the great Russian artist of the 20th century, Andrei Gennadyevich Pozdeev (1926-1998) created many remarkable compositions, including hundreds of illustrations, engravings, watercolours and pictorial paintings. The master’s creative heritage is amazingly cohesive. Nevertheless, it is quite freely differentiated into several independent spheres, volumes or groups, within the boundaries of which, the compositions community is not dependant on chronology or factors of genre, but on attributively crucial characteristics. The first of such groups unites the paintings in which the image predominates over expression, and the singular dominates over the integral. Andrei Pozdeev preferred to work in several pictorial genres: portrait, landscape, domestic scene, still-life, and nude. In each of them, he created compositions which can be included in the relative borders of the given group, as far as they are aimed at a sensuous display of this or that rather specific, essential fragment of reality, and to the presentation of a transient moment in reality. For example, in the painting Old Krasnoyarsk (1973) shows the artist’s mood is obvious as he shows the remnants of old city streets being busily filled with new constructions, and in the landscape By the Great Wall of China (1970), the artist was eager to capture a merry exuberance of a certain autumn moment in the taiga near the Stolby nature reserve (picture 1). The portrait Actress Avgusta Klenchina (1976), which also belongs to the first group of paintings renders the instant of the actress’s triumph in a splendidly-performed part. The stilllife China and Faience (1973) which depicts porcelain still hot from the kiln, and just newly and colorfully painted (picture 2).