"A piece of paper is innocent, a thousand heart marks." Writers and painters are similar, they all have a lot of emotions and a strong desire to express, and sometimes even create works with very complex meanings, the great Russian painter Ilyich Levitan has a painting "Summer Evening", which is originally a beautiful picture, but the more you look at it, the more frightening people are, why is this? Let me reveal the secrets to you.
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Isaac Ilyich Levitán was a prominent Russian sketch painter, a master of realist landscape painting and a member of the touring exhibition school. In the autumn of 1860, Leviathan was born in a small town in present-day Lithuania, his parents were intellectuals, but his father was the lowest-ranking worker on the railway, his mother had no job, forced to make a living, and his parents moved to Moscow with Leviathan, who was a few months old.
But their family came to Moscow Leviathan was still ostracized, which made the little Leviathan hate human beings, have more time to "get along" with nature, but the school teachers are hostile to him, and eventually he did not get the title of painter, in 1900, due to poverty and exclusion everywhere, leviathan, who was only 39 years old, could not resist the depression in his heart and died for a long time, levitan, who had a rough life, left a large number of excellent paintings for the world, Chekhov said: " He was a great and unique genius, and his work was so sober and powerful that it should have caused a change, but unfortunately he died too early. ”
Leviathan created many excellent paintings in his lifetime, whether it was the early Volga Group Paintings, After the Rain and the Birch Forest, or the later Vladimirka, The Cemetery Sky and The Evening Bells, they are all very good landscape paintings, but unlike the original complete praise of nature, Leviathan's later works have more thinking and repression, which is the result of his exploration of the use of paintings to express the era, and it is also a microcosm of his own experience, even his last painting "Lake". You can still see him constantly thinking, using light, clear colors to show nature in a highly general way, which is the result of a painter's continuous exploration.
In 1892, Leviathan was 32 years old, and it was prime for a man, but Leviathan had entered the last part of his life. "Summer Evening" is the painting he completed in this year, and the whole work abruptly shows orange-yellow colors: orange-yellow sky, orange-yellow grass, orange-yellow water waves, and even the surface of the tree is printed with orange-yellow color. Orange-yellow is almost dreamy, orange-yellow as a warm color, should have shown warmth and tranquility, but the widespread use makes the atmosphere of the painting strange.
What is even more incomprehensible is that the lake water in this painting is black and green and bottomless, the lush water grass and the pieces of duckweed on the surface of the water, plus a few pieces of decaying wood, a dangerous bridge, they constitute a large part of the landscape of this painting, and the warm color is mixed with this "pool of stagnant water", as if sweet candy is matched with bitter pills, which looks very beautiful at first glance, but it is all bitter to taste.
Why create this atmosphere with beautiful landscape paintings? In fact, "Summer Evening" is only one of its names, it also has a name for "The Abyss", Levitan created this painting inspired by a story, which is a poignant love story about the abyss: once upon a time there was a daughter of a miller, in love with a young peasant, due to the disparity in family conditions, the father resolutely opposed, he even managed to buy the conscription bureau, the result was that the youth was arrested as a soldier, the girl was desperate, jumped into the abyss to seek death, the young man also died on the battlefield, two poor young people, Lost everything because of wrong love.
"The peacock flies southeast, hovering for five miles." Although the national culture is different, the expression is also different, but human beings for the poignant love will always be full of emotion, should be a good story in the world, but now it has become a tragedy of two lives, I don't know how Leviathan felt after listening to it, but from his paintings, it can be seen that "The Abyss" is the girl's helplessness to life, but also Levitan's sigh of his own life.
The dark forest represents the end of the road. The black waterhole represents the bottomless abyss, the narrow wooden bridge makes people shudder, and the tranquility is a kind of death calm. At sunset and dusk, heaven and earth are about to enter the boundless darkness, and our tomorrow is not an abyss full of traps? But the sunset is so soft and beautiful, it is so inclusive, it appears in this world every day without stinginess, in the face of all this, is Levitan pessimistic and disappointed, or is he sincerely helpless? No one can say for sure, just as no one knows whether it's called Summer Evening or The Abyss.
Wenlan Hairun Studio Editor-in-Chief Wen Xiucai, this article is written by: Special History Writer: Jin Xiaozhou
Source: 1. "Think Like an Artist" [Beauty] published by Edward Northern Literature and Art Publishing House