Forgotten Village, Arkhip Kuindzhi – description of the painting

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Description of the picture:

The forgotten village – Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi. 1874. Oil on canvas, 81.7 x 165

   The usual “Peredvizhnik” landscape “Forgotten Village” was painted by Arkhip Kuindzhi in one thousand eight hundred and seventy-four years.

   The idea of ​​the plot appeared in the painter during a trip to the south of Russia. Arkhip Ivanovich met many poor people, as if God had forgotten villages, and this had an unchanging memory on him. Being himself from the ordinary, the master expressed in the landscape genre picture only a civilian position – even the nature surrounding a handful of dark houses appears before the viewer through the prism of compassion for a devastated village. Everything here “breathes” hopelessness and poverty.

   Even at the preliminary step, Kuindzhi shared the plan of the upcoming work with Kramskoy, who, in turn, told Repin about it. There is evidence that Ilya Efimovich spoke out that the idea is simply incomparable, exclaiming: “What a thing I dug up!”.

   Indeed, the plot of the picture was very in tune with the socially revealing policy of the Wanderers, and Kuindzhi consciously sought to join an independent art society. The painter officially became a full member of the Friendship in eight thousand 705, and the Forgotten Village, along with the Chumatsky Trakt and the Autumn Road, contributed to this.

   The painting draws us an uneven road that leads to the village, represented by the silhouettes of houses with triangular roofs. The creator deliberately refused to detail – the undestructed appearance of the houses should convey the abandonment of the village. This is a mind-blowing and innovative technique.

   Brown-green earth, naked branches of a tree in the distance, a ruined fence and a “heavy” sky in curls of low gray-brown clouds hanging over the village – late bleak autumn is designed to highlight the loneliness of this place. How do people live here on this naked land, ragged by the rain? Hard and sad!

   The painter managed to make a very moody picture, but very soon Kuindzhi would move away from social motives, choosing another goal for himself – to sing the natural beauty!"