Sofia Ludvigovna Zaklikovskaya

St Petersburg, The State Russian Museum; Moscow, Manezh, A Time to Gather, February - July 2008, no.175

Y.Petrova, A Time to Gather: Russian Art from Foreign Private Collections, St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2007, p.240, cat.no.175(illustrated)
Russian Art 1920s-1930s, Kit Art Publishing, Moscow, 2006, p.241
K.Suvorova, Russian Paintings 1920-30

Both these works were produced under the influence of Pavel Filonov and can therefore be dated to the second half of the 1920's, since Sofia Zaklikovskaya worked under his guidance from 1926. She produced multi-layered compositions with spatial and temporal shifts, complex rhythm of alternations and concurrences of differences in the scale of representation. Stages of Life is perhaps conceptually closer to the ideas of Petrov-Vodkin, another of her teachers. In the theme of the passing generations as a symbol of the life movement is a connection with an earlier work of Petrov Vodkin, Midday. Summer (1917, Russian Museum). But Filonov's oeuvre exerted influence on the visual language of the work. In Scene, general human reflections on the meaning of life give way to urgent social problems - hunger, break up and execution. The small piece of bread in the upper foreground offers a key to the interpretation as a whole. The bread is priceless, the artist suggests, since its value is life itself. Like many of Filonov's students, Zaklikovskaya made use of quotations from his work. On the left side, the stage appears as a crucifix, as in Filonov's Execution (1913). Zaklikovskaya was at the heart of Filonov's collective of analytic artists. She took part in all their exhibitions - in the Moskovsko-Narvsky House of Culture and in the Printing House - and in the work on the 'Kalevala' book.